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Isn't KIFI itself kinda lousy?

If I were a Comcast shareholder and the company decided to withhold all the valuables from SpinCo I would be furious with them. They would be, knowingly, sticking shareholders with a lemon. They need to give USA and its siblings a fighting chance for the company to have any value as anything more than a collection of withering assets waiting to be stripped for parts.

They tried to sell WVIT at the same time but found no buyers for it.

I don't know if it was ABC being wary of Scripps or more that Scripps doesn't feel like forking over more reverse comp for another ABC affiliation.

I get the impression that all ABC cares about is WSVN's ability and willingness to pay the reverse compensation.

Hell, if you want to get technical, those are the only stations that ABC or its corporate parent at the time has ever bought. CapCities did make an equity investment into Young Broadcasting, but Disney sold that interest in 1998. I feel like not enough is being said about what a bad, bad sign it is that WPLG is losing ABC because they literally can't afford to be an affiliate anymore. The fact that WPLG doesn't have scale to fall back on (anymore) is part of it, but still. If a station owned by Berkshire Hathaway cannot or will not cough up increasingly-onerous reverse compensation fees, how long will it be before the time bomb goes off for the big chains?

Didn't Nexstar have a habit of getting rid of choppers after it bought stations anyway? They are/were at the forefront but I feel like station groups have been increasingly getting rid of the choppers...

Scripps has had some presence or another in Denver for more than a century (barring 2009 to 2011). KMGH wasn't just some random clunker they ended up being stuck with. They seemed to think Ion was another Food Network... I feel like the company that had the ingenuity to put HGTV on the air and fleece Belo out of the Food Network is basically gone. The current Scripps Networks is not particularly inventive like the previous iteration was.

Absolutely. History has shown that you can't necessarily count on the free market to always serve the public good.

Per the Lexington Herald-Leader, they firing all six of their news directors and replacing them with "local news content managers" who will receive guidance from a new "news operations manager" based at WTVQ, Russ Geller. It sounds like a more top-down, corporate-driven structure than what they're doing now.

KGWN is owned by Marquee, not Allen!

I think people forget that Graham isn't exactly some mom-and-pop shop. Graham Holdings is a diversified conglomerate and their TV stations are just one of their many businesses. And Graham Holdings is still headquartered in Washington.

LIN hasn't even existed in a fucking decade! Heartland must've been cheapasses too.

WSIL's market seems to have the Big Three affiliates all with their own turf. WSIL being Southern Illinois, WPSD being Kentucky, and KFVS being not only Missouri but the general "Five States" area. If that's the case then it's wild seeing WPSD aggressively pursuing those laid off from the "Illinois" station.

They were barely using it even when I grew up, which would've been the 2000s. Considering that a lot of the American flag iconography Gannett once drenched its stations in now seems to be the exclusive province of outfits like Fox News, I sadly don't blame them for ditching those trappings.

It sounds like it's akin to the CBS/Viacom split, where Sumner Redstone still controlled both - although he clearly favored Viacom, which kept the "sexier" Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks and BET, over CBS.

It's more than nothing!

They went international in the joint venture days and they still used the name! And look at Marvel parading Captain America throughout the world! I'm not keen on scrapping Syfy for a subordinate brand of USA.

USA is basically the general entertainment cable network, something that is considered a liability nowadays because streamers have eaten up much of their value proposition. But it's still one of the biggest cable networks and knowing that "USA Networks" has a history as a corporate moniker, I think using that for this company would be a good idea.

Why did they let Gray keep WYOW anyway? And isn't their application for a new Eagle River station going to complicate things? WKOW and its spawn seem to essentially be the sick men of their markets, although WXOW and WQOW at least cover both La Crosse and Eau Claire. I'm under the impression that WEAU and WKBT have long focused on Eau Claire and La Crosse near-exclusively.

Isn't West Lafayette also a place where they can scoop up lots of fresh-out-of-college kids to work at WLFI? Heartland seems to have been run on the cheap even before Allen absorbed it...

It's so wild to me to see USA described as a "smaller" network when it was one of the pillars of cable for decades and it wasn't even a decade ago that they still had big hits like Mr. Robot, to say nothing of the Netflix-fueled resurgence of Suits.

It's also a valuable domain name they wouldn't want to fall into the hands of a competitor. Especially since it's still a homophone!

Doesn't Gray own the "First Alert" brand? Can't they just revoke the licenses to competing stations when it's up?

Isn't WIBW the traditional powerhouse in Topeka? It'd be pretty sad if they just turned it into an extension of KCTV...