Our apologies for a second dispatch on the same day, but given the number of people who have been asking about the news out of the Circle City, we thought it was worth an after-business-hours edition. Here’s our rapid-fire Q&A on the headline "Scripps Selling WRTV Indianapolis To Circle City For $83M” from TVNewsCheck.com

Are we surprised that Scripps is selling another TV station? Not really. We think the company is trying to raise cash by selling whatever stations it can, outside of what you might call its legacy holdings. Those were the 10 TV properties the company had before the purchase of the former McGraw-Hill television stations back in 2011.

Why sell WRTV, the ABC affiliate in Indianapolis? Well, the better question might be, why not? WRTV was one of the McGraw-Hill stations acquired in 2011 as part of a $212 million deal. But, as gently as we can put this, “RTV 6,” as it was once branded, has almost always been the number-four station in the 25th market. Not much has moved the needle for the station’s local news ratings over the years.

Why sell to the in-market competitor, Circle City Broadcasting, owner of WISH-TV and WNDY? Probably because Circle City’s head, DuJuan McCoy, was willing to pay what strikes us as a premium price to add WRTV to his holdings there. The reported price of $83 million seems like more than a 10X multiple of earnings, and even factoring in what the accountants like to call the “accretive value” meaning that WRTV will bring added dollars to Circle City, which in turn will be able to operate the station more efficiently (read that to mean cheaper) than Scripps was able to as a standalone single TV property. This deal also puts the recent staff cuts at WISH-TV into a different light.

Was this deal a reaction to the previously announced Nexstar acquisition of TEGNA? Only if you think that deal--which will combine the market’s existing FOX and CBS duopoly (WXIN/WTTV) that Nexstar currently owns with TEGNA’s NBC station (WTHR), which had been the top-rated station in terms of ratings, but now trails WXIN in key demos, would be a competitive threat to both WRTV and WISH-TV/WNDY? (Spoiler alert—it most certainly would.) Should both the Nexstar-TEGNA marriage and now the WRTV acquisition be approved by the FCC (assuming, of course, that the currently closed federal government ever reopens for business), the fact is that sometime in 2026, Indianapolis will go from having four local TV news operations down to just two serving some six stations.

Is this a one-off deal or the beginning of the long-anticipated flood of deals for local TV stations? We’d guess the latter, though that pesky government shutdown seems to have slowed everything down, at least a bit. We keep hearing about so many conversations going on behind closed doors, and the number of presentations being created to show potential investors should keep Microsoft’s PowerPoint team smiling.

What’s Probably Next? If we knew that, we’d be much happier with the inflated balances we would likely have in our retirement accounts. There is a lot of speculating about who might be ready to make the next moves. The sale of one station in Indianapolis is noteworthy, but not a transaction that will fundamentally change the landscape for either party beyond the I-465 loop circling the Circle City. Even if Scripps CEO Adam Symson says that this “strategic transaction” will allow his company to "reduce debt and improve the durability of its local station portfolio over the long term.”

Hang on, friends, the really fun part of the ride is definitely still ahead of us.

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