Rusty Muck

A call sign change (which won't happen to begin with) won't change the fact they're stuck with a standalone AM they can't sell, with demos older than dirt.

Absolutely no sane person, no person with a shred of mental competence, would willingly allow themselves to be made a target like David Smith has. This is worse than your typical delusions of grandeur that the likes of Elon Musk have. This has a good chance of not just killing the Sun outright, but coupled with the $500M in legal fees from Diamond's bankruptcy case, could damn well be the death penalty for hundreds of television newsrooms across the country, if not a financial death penalty for David Smith and Sinclair as a whole. I'm going to say it. Something is very, very wrong with David Smith and his mental state.

I'm saying that Fox News is using a business model that is totally broken and incompatible with a newspaper's business model. If the Sun were to lose a decent amount of subscribers and/or advertising, they'd be fucked. This is entirely out of David Smith's own money and is not a part of Sinclair proper, if he were to drain money from Sinclair to keep the Sun alive... well, aide from being borderline embezzlement, that would basically be dropping a nuclear bomb on the budget for those stations.

Subscriptions in a bundled environment where you have to take all the channels regardless if you want them or not. Which is 100% not what the newspaper industry is. If you don't want to subscribe to a newspaper, you can cancel at ease.

Bad comparison. Fox News is subsidized by retransmission fees. A newspaper is wholly reliant on subscriptions and advertising revenue, and most right-wingers are distrustful of newspapers to begin with.

He's flying too close to the sun and will collapse under his own hubris. Just watch.

Here's the thing: David Smith's inability to understand how a newspaper works will make this a disaster from the start. A newspaper is not insulated by retransmission revenue like his Sinclair stations and cannot withstand any loss of subscribers or advertising. The Sun also has competition from the Banner, which has clearly found footing as a digital enterprise and would benefit if there was an actual "cancel the Sun" campaign. If David Smith wants to literally blow hundreds of millions of dollars with a good chance of no return on investment, that's bad for him, bad for his other commercial enterprises, and ultimately good for the rest of us.

David Smith wasting over nine figures to buy a newspaper easily, easily trumps the Diamond Sports disaster he committed in 2019. The three words that will make this vanity project a personal hell for him: "Cancel my subscription".

Nexstar may have been willing to sacrifice their existing CW affiliations in Phoenix and Tucson if it meant signing with WMYD (and re-signing with WSFL?). Scripps controlled each and every aspect of these talks.

This indeed is the case, WKBD will simulcast CBS News Detroit at 7am starting Labor Day. I could see more simulcasts in the weeks to come as the fall season gets underway.

Not to be pedantic, but 11pm (after SportsCentral) or 7pm (before the news block) could be considered “prime time”.

Or reair the 8pm hour at 10pm.

They have a dynamic open with the date, time and temp inserted in? Can't say I've seen that before!

I’ll believe THAT when I see it. The story is largely sourced from a staffer present at a meeting in which the McKimmons didn’t even say a word. This feels like spin to hide a massive bloodletting at KUSI and merger at the KSWB building. Nexstar’s purely a bottom line company and there’s no reason for them to maintain two distinct news departments like this. At the same time, they can’t have everyone at KUSI quit in protest over the actual plans.

KSWB is already a U so the “Discount” sham is equally applied to KUSI, so Nexstar is not really affected cap-wise here. It IS very possible that Nexstar paid the McKinnons $35 million to take out a competitor to KSWB.

As @Samanthapointed out to me, this outright eliminates KSWB's main competitor, there are no newscasts on KUSI that don't overlap with KSWB. Because of that, the chances KUSI maintains any sort of separate operations is very, very small; in the case of Indianapolis, WTTV and WXIN have to have separate news ops because of the nature of their affiliations. Of note, KFMB-DT2's contract with the CW (reupped in 2021) runs through September 2026. So either Nexstar said what they said under the impression Tegna is planning to opt-out of their CW contracts, or they are forcing the issue for Tegna. Otherwise I cannot understand why Nexstar just turned KFMB-DT2 into a lame-duck CW affiliate for three years.

CBS and Gray (WPCH) will no doubt be bidding aggressively for all of those teams. Plus there’s nothing stopping CBS from moving an indie WUPA to a .2 (and buy WTBS-LD to put it on a ceremonial 6.1) if they do choose to take the network affiliation in-house. The possibilities of in-market realignments are endless tbh. If Gray winds up securing one or two teams, then they become a sports heavyweight and may want to make WANF (for lack of a better description) the WHDH for the South. CBS gets an O&O and possibly a sports-leaning indie that’ll be having Paramount’s content library opened up. This could be really fun to watch unfold.

CBS would want something in return for selling a station in a top 10 market. The only thing Cox can offer is KIRO (which at least pairs up with KSTW).

CBS getting WSB in an asset swap would be the most insane thing ever and I can totally see it happening.

They’d probably be penalized tax-wise for selling them and in the case of KSTW, there’s no one to sell it to. Ditto with WUPA.

This is also a situation that is highly in flux. Long term, I just can’t exactly see Paramount operating stand-alone indies in markets like Tampa and Seattle. It IS possible that Paramount conducts an asset swap or two to better align things… say, giving WTOG and WBXI-LD to Tegna, Tegna gives CBS KHOU/KTBU and gives WFAA and KVUE to Cox, while Cox gives CBS KIRO-TV… or some level of horse trading to that effect. Simply selling them feels like a non-starter because taxes, plus Atlanta and Seattle are not easy to find a buyer for. Even if they run out this fall, for the short term, plugging in movies in primetime and reruns of Paramount Network and Paramount+ shows seems like a good enough concept. Supplement it with sports play-by-play, the CBS News Now hybrid and local renditions of KMAX’s Good Day. This can include Atlanta, even if CBS takes the affiliation in-house at channel 69. Nothing stopping them from buying a WTBS-LD and moving the new indie format to 6.1 and 69.2

TND merely exists as a cheap ploy to get additional political ad revenue with ham-fisted political overtones to boot. Of course WXLV would drop the KABB-done "local" news to carry it. WNWO will run it as a cheap way to get advertising from both Michigan and Ohio. (It's also why KDNL doesn't even carry it, because Illinois and Missouri are nowhere close to being political swing states.) But why stop with TND? They could outsource everything to NewsNet and not have to pay anyone. As @Weeterspointed out in the Discord, it'd be a 1:1 replacement anyway.

Who said that would be permanent? Plus the “WCCO News” branding is still fairly prevalent at the opening and most reporter lock-outs. WBZ does the same and I’d be surprised if WJZ didn’t do the same as well.

It's possible that whatever plans existed for WBBM got heavily revised or altered as soon as Jennifer Lyons came in? Plus supply chain issues are still a thing...