dman748

One thing I do hope is that both Kim and Lougee can move forward from this by ending the proxy fight and that means resolving the legal issues too and eventually moving towards a sale in some form. I think that especially toward the last month of this it turned pretty nasty between the two and not in a good way. Here are two examples of how this proxy fight turned nasty: Tegna: https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/tegna-standard-generals-stock-sales-are-troubling Standard General: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/standard-general-responds-to-tegnas-attempt-to-deflect-attention-from-sustained-underperformance-301038482.html

I think its a combination of both, I think the board's leadership has failed over the last say year they've had an opportunity to sell the company whole pretty much up until as recently as this month and instead they just simply refuse to do so and before anyone cites COVID as the reason, Tegna had an opportunity to engage with Apollo last year (pre-COVID) but they refused to come to the table with Apollo to sell. All of that combined with Standard's prior knowledge and experience being in the industry (e.g. Media General, Belo and Fisher)

And on top of everything else they're spending millions of dollars ensuring that their precious board of directors maintain their seats at the expense of furloughing their own employees oh and btw they're facing possible legal trouble as it's been posted in the speculation thread. I think today is a make or break day for Tegna, Soo Kim, Deb McDermott and others from Standard General get elected and real change can take place at Tegna however, the same Board of Directors that's resisting anything and everything that's good and they risk eventually going under. It's up to the shareholders whether they want real change or see Tegna go under.

Do you guys think that perhaps Sinclair and Meredith both might go under? Sinclair is not a surprise here but its Meredith that's the bigger of the surprise here

This is why I can't foresee Nexstar buying Tegna whole I can see them with a few of the Tegna stations but not the whole thing. 32 conflicts would be way too much for one company like Nexstar to handle.

Plus Nexstar would run into a lot of cap issues too even with the discount. If anything Nexstar may only want stations such as WFAA, KHOU, KENS and WUSA (technically Nexstar would have a triopoly but since WDVM doesn't cover the entire D.C. market that makes WUSA/WDCW permissible) I seriously doubt Nexstar wants all of Tegna even if SCOTUS overrules the Third Circuit ruling on Pai's dereg moves.

Somehow we missed this one but the Tegna sale is still a possibility. And not only that but Gray might actually come back to the table at a later date with an offer to acquire Tegna plus: Nexstar may want part of Tegna (the only question is which ones does Nexstar actually want out of Tegna should they do that) And don't rule out Standard Media acquiring Tegna either (yes, Standard Media) https://www.broadcastingcable.com/blog/the-last-belle-at-the-ball-tegna-broadcastings-investment-appeal I don't think the shareholder meeting will be the end of this stuff for Tegna

As much as some are skeptical of Kim (not saying I am skeptical of him) honestly I think that if he gets an opportunity he should make a tender offer of taking over Tegna because now that I think about it I have to question their first quarter performance here how in the world can you have a "strong" 1st quarter results when: 1. Tegna is trading at just above $10 a share 2. Tegna has rebuffed at every buyout offer available over the last year and 3+ months 3. Furlough your own employees in the middle of the crisis Clearly worthy of being called out by people and I can't imagine Kim being the only one questioning the first quarter results and if he is something is clearly wrong with that picture. I'm starting to wonder too if the goal of the board at Tegna is to drive the company into bankruptcy? With this virus I think so. Without the virus I would seriously doubt that Tegna would go bankrupt but the furloughs coupled with this certain virus is leading me to believe that Tegna, unless they get taken over will go bankrupt.

Wouldn't both Apollo and Allen have to sell most if not all of it's own stations in order to get ABC?

That's the problem right there, Tegna is focused on getting through the pandemic before thinking about selling but yet Kim is over here saying "Tegna should sell now." It's becoming clear that the pathway to getting all 4 of the board seats is going to be very difficult for Standard General and if they're lucky they may get one of them on there. The question becomes can there be a compromise that would finally put an end to this proxy war and is getting maybe one or two of Kim's nominees on the board in exchange for Kim himself, along with his other 2 nominees not getting a board seat feasible? I know that's not what Tegna wants to do but as much as this proxy fight is interesting to watch and follow, however there's got to be an ending to this and knowing Kim he's not going to be satified until he gets what he wants so I think the only way how this is going to end is a compromise, the problem is neither side is showing any interest in making concessions here.

Somebody didn't check with their editior or somebody didn't know that the W/K originates along the Mississippi River

The only sport I can maybe see moving over to ABC from Turner is MLB, everything else will probably stay on Turner (as far as sports rights is concerned)

Another alternative Idea would involve 2 scenarios: 1. Disney has it's non-broadcasting assets as well as ESPN, Inc. while ABC takes everything (including the FX, NatGeo, A&E as well as the TV production units) 2. Disney keeps everything including ABC, while ESPN and A&E is spun off to form a new company. Somehow I think scenario #1 looks more likely than scenario #2

Here's my thinking if Disney were to sell ABC: I can only think of a few companies that would have of any interest in buying ABC Discovery Liberty Media AT&T (Warner Media) The only other option I can see is the split of Disney where some of the former 21CF assets (i.e. 20th Century Pictures, Cable Channels (including ESPN) all make up Disney while ABC, Freeform, O&Os, Some of the TV studio productions (such as DADT) it's news and sports divisions all make up whatever it'd become under ABC The bigger wild card in all of this is going to be sports under any scenario ABC is going to have to rebuild its sports division from scratch which would mean continuing the partnership with ESPN until a Sports Department can be reestablished.

My educated guess on that one is that Scripps likely left it up to the stations to decide on the V/Os and it was likely in the case of WTXL that it was management of WTXL opted to not have a voiceover artist and that it wasn't forced upon by Cincinnati

And KIVI/KSAW has the graphics here's the open:

Exactly, to me Tegna at minimum is farming out money almost to the point of hemoraging money for example, Tegna bought the KFMB stations (Radio/TV) for $325 million, I'm not exactly sure how much the KFMB stations was actually worth but in my eyes I think Tegna overpaid for the KFMB stations and on top of that they only sold the KFMB radio stations for only $5 million dollars. My question is how can anyone justify paying over $300 million to acquire a large piece of property (TV and Radio stations) yet turn around and only sell the radio stations for $5 million? I don't think you can justify that in my opinion.

So basically Nexstar is just transferring the Marshall stations to Mission.

So let me ask this, did Mission try to buy the stations from ComCorp the first time but the DOJ told them no? If so then I have to wonder what Nexstar is thinking because if the DOJ did in fact tell Nexstar they couldn't use Mission to acquire KPEJ/KMSS and they're trying that again that might raise a red flag in the DOJ's eyes

It was part of it but not the entire reason why Gray and Apollo walked out. They could've provided the financing for themselves but there were so many hoops to jump through just to reach Tegna itself it just wasn't worth their time. I'm sure both are waiting on Kim to takeover or at least get a more friendlier board that would allow them to make a deal even under COVID conditions but, most of all under better conditions within Tegna's board. Tegna gave us an example of how deals do not materialize. And besides even without COVID, I think any deal involving Tegna wouldn't have happened until the proxy fight with Standard was resolved and quite frankly Kim further cemented it by this proxy war. In other words there would've been no sale for Tegna at least for awhile anyway (not until the proxy war gets resolved)

Couple things. First, we don't know if Kim had actually engaged in activities that were illegal, Tegna is just looking intro it is all they're doing right now. Second, you do have a point about Tegna not having to sell if they don't want to but my issue is I haven't seen any legitimate reasons for why Tegna shouldn't sell other than the obvious ones. In fact looking at the PDF file, Apollo had actually approached Tegna as early as in early 2019 around the time Apollo had announced acquisition of Cox, somehow not only was it not reported on until last August. So for Tegna to go just over a year of reports and somehow for them to just brush it by is not very good business for anybody. Any good business (Media and otherwise) would've gone to the table and talked about the bids and if things work out towards a deal can be made, great. If not, fine. But instead of coming to the table to talk to Apollo about the bids like what Tegna should have done, Tegna and their board decided to not only brush it off any of those talks but then acquired the rejects from Nexstar and Tribune that the combined company had to sell at a price that just isn't reasonable. That's like them paying a TV station company to acquire the WXXX stations for $300 million yet only sell for only say $85 million. Those are figures similar to that example that Tegna has came up with that (other than the WTOL/KWES acquisition and maybe the Dispatch acquisition) just doesn't add up. Also whoever said I was "clamoring" for sale that is completely fabricated and music and the graphics should be left out of the conversation and besides I don't even think the problem is those things anymore I think the problem is the people running Tegna they have become nothing more but obstructionists to any and all deals that makes good sense and should be done with a fair and due process. Unfortunately we're not seeing that on the part of Tegna or its board and quite frankly I can't blame Gray and Apollo from walking away the way they did. No company should ever have to jump through hoops just to talk to them about a deal and that's what were seeing on the part of Tegna, especially at a time when were dealing with a challenging time that were in. I think @channel2 was spot on when he asked about Tegna not wanting to sell and that I think was spot on. However, it wasn't COVID that doomed Tegna's sale talks it was Tegna itself that doomed the sale talks and they did it to themselves.

Exactly my thoughts, I think Gray pulled out of the bid for Tegna for reasons other than COVID-19 yes I know they said COVID was the reason but as the weeks gone on, the more I think about the reasons Gray pulled out of the running for Tegna, the more I think it wasn't neccessarily to do with COVID it had more to do with the Tegna board's arrogance and resistance for not selling, as Standard General pointed out in their presentation

And now it looks like an investigation into the stock sell swapping involving Tegna and Standard General may be forthcoming and it's being looked into at this time. @Myron Falwell brought up a good point on Discord at how the media industry if this virus persists well into July and August and it never fully goes away enough to where its deemed safe to reopen everything may have to be bailled out by the government. I hope it doesn't come down to it, but it's certainly a possibility here that what Tegna did today may spread to other media companies down the road