Rusty Muck

Better Gray buys them than Coastal, who is the only other plausible buyer. Not even Marquee would waste money on these clunkers.

It absolutely has. Those stations are permabroken and destined to be rumps of their former Gray competition. No one else is going to waste their money on properties Byron Allen squandered.

Why would Hearst—or any group not named Gray—waste money like that? Allen destroyed those stations to the point where any buyer is going to have to burn money just to get them back up to par. Talk about a money pit. The only obvious outcome is Gray buying the OW stations (along with the rest of the Allen stations) and they become shells of WSAW and WMTV. They all qualify for failed station waivers.

So they can all run MeTV off the bird? Why would Hearst waste their time with the beyond-broken OW stations? They don't need full-power satellites for WISN, which is all they would be.

Not only is CBS unwilling to buy anything (they haven't since ... what, when they merged into the first Viacom?? in 2000??) they're also stuck with three stations they can't sell: WUPA, KSTW and WTOG. I betcha if no regulations existed anymore, Nexstar would have grabbed WUPA and KSTW as CW-owned stations. But since the 39% cap still exists, CBS can't get rid of them. Putting CBS on WUPA is the path of least resistance, plus it gives this miasma soon to be known as ParamountSkydance another local digital platform to have once viewership totally dries up and CBS becomes nothing more than a brand name for P+ and Pluto.

Yeah, it was WCIX that was irrelevant because of a poor signal and limited resources for their news department. Once Steve Maudlin came in as GM by 1998, they became competitive.

It's not like Gray has a regional sports channel in their cluster that could be accessed for programming...

I don't see CBS buying KIRO (they couldn't for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with Brendan Carr). At the very least it heavily influences Apollo's attempt to sell off Cox Media and makes it very very hard to sell a station that might be stripped of a network affiliation. Especially if CBS extorts the buyer to make massive reverse compensation payments in order to keep the affiliation, that would make KIRO radioactive to anyone not a competing network. And since Nexstar can't legally buy into Seattle at this time...

Just move the CW to 46 and put sports PBP on 17. Simple enough and it would make WANF a news-intensive CW station just like WPIX, KRON, KTLA and WGN.

The least surprised person has to be @Weeters, he suggested to me privately that WUPA easily could become CBS-owned after WWJ-TV finally got a news service. Or that they'd be used as a bargaining tool with the other groups. Now it's a matter of when WTOG and KSTW become CBS-owned, not if. As KIRO is already for sale; things could get spicy...

Tegna is a non-factor in Tucson as KMSB-KTTU are fully shelled out to Gray. They wouldn't waste money on an unfixable station like KVOA. Think about it. Who else would want KVOA or any of the other Allen stations? Coastal? Marquee? NP&G? Gray is IMO the prohibitive favorite and the only buyer who would continue to operate the stations with any semblance of locality.

They're all Gray's to lose. KVOA can be a subchannel of KOLD, WJRT can be a subchannel of WNEM and the OW stations can be rumps of WSAW and WMTV. It's a perfect test case for the NAB begging for full dereg, especially with how much Byron completely destroyed the viability of each and every one of those stations.

He was hired as damaged goods on the cheap. There is no way he's being paid what he made at CNN. Come on.

I don't see Apollo being anywhere close to that smart, they'd rather take Cox off the market entirely than concede the bloody obvious that no one wants the whole group as-is. And even Connoisseur's purchase of Alpha is fraught with a lot of problems; Jeff Warshaw is either going to have to shut down a lot of small-market stations (many of which Alpha destroyed entirely) or sell them for a pittance just to make it work.

Let me know when you find this mythical buyer for the radio stations. Radio is even more of a declining asset than television and the only people buying up stations are Godcasters like K-Love or Relevant Radio. Let's be real: Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, Sinclair and Sinclair know they can't find a third party for the radio stations and they aren't going to bother with Cox. NewsNation is cheap and they hire cheap talent. They make good money on retransmission revenue from cable companies and don't have to pay for acquired programming like movies. That's the only reason why it's around. I hope you are aware that younger demos and more and more of the 25–54 "money demo" are abandoning linear television for streaming. The audience for local television is getting smaller and grayer and the industry is on an unsustainable course with pushing endless local news to markets that can't support it. Nexstar, Gray, Tegna, Sinclair and Scripps are all destined to be too big to fail. As for Apollo, they are only guilty of being 10 years too late buying Cox and four years too late trying to sell it.

Allbritton wanted to sell the company as a whole from day one. Sinclair was the only logical buyer.

Good luck with that. None of the suspected companies (Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, Scripps, etc, &c.) want radio stations and with Apollo wanting to sell the company as a complete unit, there are no available buyers, cap or no cap. And the industry dies outright with two or three companies too big to fail that are crippled when the networks abandon OTA for streaming, taking the last of the younger audiences with them.

I’m going to be very blunt and say that, given what Apollo has to offer—a slightly above average group of television stations with an over-performer in WSB-TV and an unappealing laggard in WFXT, coupled with a whole bunch of radio stations—they’ll be lucky to find any buyers to speak of. Who’d want that hodgepodge of stuff? it would not be surprising to see Apollo take Cox off the market because no one wants it. They waited four years too late to sell and aren’t going to get another novice like INSP that is willing to burn $400M just for the ego boost of owning TV stations. Gray, Scripps and Nexstar don’t need them at all (and they ESPECIALLY do not want the radio stations) and Hearst doesn’t buy stations, period.

What in the hell possessed INSP to incinerate $393M like that in less than three years? That's Enron levels of fraud. Did Marc Rowan (Apollo's CEO) have incriminating evidence against INSP CEO David Cerullo and threatened to release it if INSP didn't blow all that money on KOKI, WHBQ and a bunch of spare parts and scrap? Cause there's no other way to explain why they would engage in such a horrible transaction.

Outside of KPVI (which is itself in a small market) those stations are super small and borderline afterthoughts. Does WICZ/WSYT have any local output to speak of? The funny thing is I bet INSP didn't get anything close to a return on their investment a few years ago.

I cannot think of anything more value destructive. Just because Ed Ansin got away with it twice doesn't mean it can work when the product is diluted this much. In a billingual market, no less. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see Warren Buffett take the L after a year or two and unload WPLG to Mission so Nexstar can have a CW O&O for Miami. He's had some bad business moves re: media (buying the Media General newspaper chain, helping Scripps buy Ion) but this might be the biggest oopsie.

If WSVN had to choose between Fox and the CW, what would they pick? There's a reason why WHDH never took the CW when they lost NBC as a Family Feud x 2 strip at 8pm clearly rates better than the CW ever has, even when they put out high-quality direct-to-Netflix fare.

That's going to be because the CW primetime lineup is a giant blackhole of cheap, forgettable programming and Canadian imports, not out of anything on WSVN's part. It's the Ollie's Bargain Outlet of broadcast networks.

It's not even a question! Nexstar was acting out of utter desperation and paid through the nose in the process with those CBS renewals. Paramount held all the cards and if they walked away, then Nexstar would kiss NASCAR's junior circuit and WWE NXT goodbye because the affiliate map would be missing two top 20 markets! To whom? It's no longer a buyer's market for TV stations and dumps like WUPA, KSTW and WTOG are unsalable. Paramount and that Ellison kid is stuck with them. And Paramount Global got a hefty payday from a desperate Nexstar. It's a big slice of humble pie from Perry Sook and the other morons at Nexstar corporate that thought they could play pretend media moguls when in reality they couldn't back up their bravado.

It always never fails to see certain people in this fandom bleat the age old cry that mOaR lOcAl nEwS is what the marketplace needs. Sure, let's divvy up a shrinking pie of TV viewers even further while overstretching existing personnel to do more work for less pay and merely rehashing the same content with the same McStation graphics and same unimaginative cuts from another generic Stephen Arnold music package. YAWN. Here's a news flash: if either big three network pulls out of programming the 10pm hour, that's nothing but a devastingly dire outlook for the entire industry. It means that local television is in trouble and in an unsustainable path to insolvency unless you implement the Scrippscast model (or even the Rogers CityNews model) across-the-board or utilize AI to do everything for less. But then again, it's not the first time the TV fandom has been so utterly detached from reality.