And we have some thoughts about this year’s edition.

Right off the bat, as if to underline the inevitable conclusion of the drawn-out drama of Nexstar’s battle to fully acquire rival group owner Tegna, TVNewsCheck has gone ahead and combined the two companies in its compilation of this year’s Top 25 Station Groups list. While it would be easy to critique this decision, rather than keeping the two separate, since that is how they are still considered by the U.S. District Court that is hearing the lawsuits against the merger—which, after all, was approved by both the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory bodies that needed to sign off on the transaction.

In last year’s version of this list, Tegna ranked as the 4th-largest station group; now, combined with Nexstar, the pair dominate the list from the top spot with $7.6 billion in revenue. For reference, that’s more than twice the just under $3 billion in revenue earned by the number 2 company on the list, Atlanta-based Gray Television. (Any wonder why there are forces that want to force the uncoupling of Nexstar and Tegna, and, in turn, its control of local stations in 132 markets, reaching 80% of the nation’s television households?)

The only potential challenger to Nexstar-Tegna in size would be the proposed, but rejected, union of the #3 and #8 companies on the TVNewsCheck list, that being Sinclair and E.W. Scripps. With a presence in 82 and 73 local markets, respectively, our rough calculations put their combined reach at about 115 markets total, with about 65% of the nation’s TVHH reached.

It is important to remember that Sinclair still holds nearly a 10% stake in Scripps’ stock, which is currently worth north of $25 million, but the Scripps board rejected Sinclair’s offer last November to buy the rest of the company at $7 a share. (That’s more than double the $3.32 price that SSP shares closed at on August 24th, 2026.) The Scripps board also adopted so-called “poison pill” measures that would make Sinclair's offer to merge the companies far less financially attractive—let alone their privately stated distaste for the practices of the Smith-family-led Sinclair.

Whatever one may think of Sinclair, they are still amongst the top three entrants on the TVNewsCheck list, even without adding Scripps. Though doing so would firmly vault the combination into the number two spot behind Nexstar-Tegna in local markets and television households reached. But in terms of revenue, a combined Sinclair-Scripps would only generate a projected $4 billion annually, about 55% of what Nexstar-Tegna is looking at taking in.

Should Scripps find a more palatable potential partner in #2 group owner Gray, it would likely be only slightly better off on the balance sheet. A merger of Scripps and Gray would likely net a footprint across some 160 local markets, with coverage of 60 to 63% of the nation’s television households. The combined entity would have an annual revenue projected at just over $4 billion, because Gray generates just $238 million more than Sinclair did in the 2025 estimates.

The next four positions on TV NewsCheck’s list are occupied by the network-owned and operated groups, with FOX leading the way in the #4 position. The Rupert Murdoch and family-controlled group of stations lands in that position because it covers the largest percentage of the country (39.2%) among the O&O groups and it had the highest total revenue in 2025 (roughly $2.36 billion). It’s followed by NBC/Universal at #5, with 31 NBC and Telemundo O&Os bringing in total revenues of nearly $2.15 billion.

Paramount’s CBS-owned stations group puts the David Ellison-led company at #6 on the list with 18 stations reeling in just over $2 billion in revenue, while covering some 37.7% of the nation’s TV households. Bringing up the rear in the O&O groups is Disney’s 8 ABC stations, which reach only 22% of the nation’s TVHH, but throw off an outsized $1.64 billion in revenue. That’s not surprising given the long-standing audience strength of those 8 stations in each of their local markets.

Following previously mentioned Scripps at the #8 spot is Hispanic broadcaster TelevisaUnivision, which comes in with 25 local stations reaching 45% of the nation’s households with television sets, generating just over $1 billion in annual revenue for 2025.

Rounding out the top ten at the #10 position is privately held Hearst Television, part of the Hearst publishing empire. Hearst is in some 27 local markets, covering just under 20% of the TVHH in the country and generating an estimated $945 million in annual revenue. (We should acknowledge that TVNewsCheck’s list cites revenue figures provided by BIA Advisory Services, which is the gold standard source for financial data on television stations and local markets nationally. They do the work to know all the financial metrics in the local television business.)

The rest of the TVNewsCheck list of the Top 25 Station Groups ranges from groups as large as Chicago-based Weigel (#16), with 33 stations, but in total, it generated only $121 million in 2025 revenue. Compare that to #15 Sunbeam Television, with just 2 stations, which throw off $168 million in revenue from the Boston and Miami markets. (That number should rise now that, in Miami, Sunbeam has both the FOX and ABC affiliations on its WSVN there.)

Speaking of Miami, there is the odd group of “just one station” (with apologies to WSVN, which often uses that tagline in its newscasts). That “group” consists only of WPLG, the single station owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The former ABC affiliate, now a local news-focused outlet, generated just over $100 million in revenue during 2025. That was while it still had ABC on the air for about eight months. It will be interesting to see what the final revenue figure will be for a full year without a network in 2026.

All in, the top 25 TV station groups brought in approximately $27.2 billion in total revenue for 2025. Interestingly enough, that amount is almost equally split between advertising dollars ($14.1 billion) and retransmission fees (collected from cable, satellite, and streaming platforms at $13.1 billion)

We thought it was worth noting that back in 2019, the list of what was “The Top 30 TV Station Groups” from TVNewsCheck cited that the groups generated a total of $25.6 billion in annual revenue (less in total than 2025), but that was made up of more advertising dollars ($15.6 billion) and less retransmission fees ($10 billion).

Obviously, the groups have been challenged by ad dollars continuing to be siphoned off by digital outlets. In contrast, they continue to squeeze for more retransmission dollars from the various platforms that carry their signals. Witness the current move by DuJuan McCoy’s Circle City Broadcasting to push DirecTV to pay once again to carry its WISH-TV and WNDY in Indianapolis, in exchange for a deal to keep carrying WRTV, the ABC affiliate there. As we publish this, DirecTV has taken WRTV off its platform over the move.

As the industry consolidates, leverage against cable, satellite, and streaming platforms to pay higher retransmission fees grows. As will the number of disputes over renewing these agreements, which will continue to temporarily interrupt carriage of these local TV stations while these negotiations likely become more contentious.

One more final note from 2019: TVNewsCheck’s list that year of the largest TV Station Groups was topped by Nexstar, which had arrived at that position through its acquisition of the stations previously owned by Tribune Broadcasting. That acquisition gave Nexstar stations in the nation’s four largest markets (New York-WPIX, Los Angeles-KTLA, Chicago-WGN and Philadelphia-WPHL) for the first time. Nexstar has led the list ever since.

All of this leads us to wonder if in six more years, will TV NewsCheck’s annual list be down to just the Top 20 TV Station Groups?

Maybe even fewer?

Because it sure seems like—if nothing else changes—the biggest players will keep getting bigger.

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On transformation, Welch is often cited as saying, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

We came across the quote while thinking about transformation, specifically in the case of another broadcasting company, The E.W. Scripps Company of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Scripps, as it is typically referred to in shorthand, recently announced its quarterly earnings. In what can be best described as a “pay no attention to the disappointing results but look over here at what we are doing” move, Scripps CEO Adam Symson took the opportunity to dazzle investors with his plan for “refounding” the 148-year-old company.

This “refounding” is the latest version of whatever strategy the company has been trying to execute for the last few years. Along the way, it has been active in the buying, selling, and trading of local television stations, while at the same time ramping up and then all but shuttering its aspirations to have a national news network in Scripps News. It also forged a new path in the television sports arena with the creation of Scripps Sports, which was an early home for the WNBA and local NHL teams in several markets, built on the back of its portfolio of the former ION station group (itself the former network of Home Shopping Network stations from back in the day)

Along the way, Scripps shed hundreds of employees across its local stations in a series of staff reductions, even as it touted a “reinvention” of local TV news production that it called “the Scrippscast.” This plan, which began under then Senior VP of Local News, Sean McLaughlin, sought to replace the traditional model under which most local stations produced their daily newscasts with a more streamlined and efficient system that would do away with anchors in favor of a linear stream of local news, produced by a staff of camera-toting-reporters who would shoot and edit their own stories. The Scrippscast could play in a 24/7 “loop” via a streaming service and then fill traditional news hours on a broadcast signal, so viewers could catch up at an hour of their own choosing—on whatever platform they might prefer.

It’s now a few years later, and the Scrippscast plan (now apparently tweaked a bit and part of the new “refounding”) has been unfolding across the company’s smaller markets. It is now debuting on larger Scripps stations, such as its perennial underperformer in Baltimore, WMAR-TV, the ABC affiliate in “The Charm City.”

Our research team recently had a chance to watch an 11 pm newscast, or rather “a Scrippscast,” on WMAR 2 News after it debuted last Wednesday. They sent back their terse note on what they watched:

“Uninspired. Unimaginative. Unwatchable.”

We immediately recognized that they were making a sarcastic play on the old local news branding of “Dedicated, Determined, Dependable,” which first debuted on Atlanta’s WAGA-TV back in the late 1980s. Yes, some forty years ago, we somehow expected a whole lot more from the nightly news on our local TV outlets.

We then saw that Scott Jones of FTVLive.com got a look at a WMAR newscast, and he had this to say about what he saw:

“…Viewers were treated to an “anchorless” newscast. The show starts with a live weather hit and then immediately shifts into an automated roll of pre-recorded packages, topped off with centralized national filler fed in from Scripps hubs.”

While we acknowledge that Mr. Jones can often be a bit reactionary in his hot takes on the local TV business, he isn’t wrong about what is happening at WMAR and, in turn, across the Scripps stations. He continued with this truth bomb:

“This isn’t an “investment” in local news. It’s an exercise in doing local TV news as cheaply as humanly possible, with the absolute bare-minimum number of warm bodies inside the building.”

The “new” template for WMAR 2 News also got some coverage from The Baltimore Banner. (That’s the scrappy local newsroom that has risen to challenge the local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, which was sold to Sinclair’s Executive Chairman David Smith back in 2024.) The Banner’s Shayla Colon framed the debut of “the Scrippscast” on WMAR-TV this way:

“For WMAR, which has been broadcasting in Maryland since 1947, the switch not only changes how people in the Baltimore region will get their information, but signals a shift in how technology is changing the economics of the news industry.”

Of course, for those of us who have worked in the local TV news business for decades, that is putting it mildly. The tidal wave of change breaking over the industry is unprecedented.

And it doesn’t show any signs of relenting any time soon.

While it is far too easy to criticize a company like Scripps for doing whatever it can to keep its head above the floodwaters, especially given that the company still has its name on an annual awards competition for journalism. The simple fact is that Jack Welch’s previously mentioned quote might be way more accurate than we first thought.

If Adam Symson’s “refounding” of Scripps doesn’t produce the desired results—and to be honest, we frankly can’t imagine what those desired results might actually be, other than just losing a lot less money—then what happens next?

Scripps was the target of an unsolicited bid last November from David Smith’s Sinclair to combine into a single company. Sinclair spent just over $15 million for an 8% stake in Scripps, which it still appears to hold. For its part, the Scripps board of directors rejected Sinclair’s offer to acquire all outstanding shares of SSP for $7 a share and instead adopted a so-called “poison pill” measure to block Sinclair from moving forward.

In February of this year, that same board decided to extend CEO Symson’s five-year contract, originally set to expire at the end of 2027. His new deal now runs through the end of 2029, and includes a one-time $10 million bonus if he can hit “a target of boosting adjusted earnings by $125–150 million over the next three years,” according to Variety.com

His “refounding” plan got a pretty positive write-up earlier this week from Tom Sly in TVNewsCheck.com. We’ll note that Mr. Sly is acknowledged at the end of his piece as most recently being the “VP of Enterprise Strategy” for Scripps. So make of his take on their “strategy” what you will.

Our take is this—we wonder how long it might be for the probably Artificial Intelligence-powered business analysis tools being used inside the Scripps corporate HQ to come up with the same answer that the WOPR computer arrives at in the climactic scene of John Badham’s 1983 movie, “WarGames.”

“What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Back in a previous career stop, in what seems like a lifetime ago now, we made the offhand prediction that at some point in the future, we wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one, or maybe more, local TV stations get out of the local news business altogether. In markets with a relatively fixed “pie” of advertising dollars, the stations with the smallest share of both the news audience and those same ad dollars would likely realize that their futures were brighter without the expense—and the declining returns—of producing daily local newscasts.

We’re not sure how many “reinventions,” “refoundings,” or “reorganizations” happen before that now seemingly flippant prediction unfortunately becomes reality. Still, you’ll forgive us for thinking the clock is running out of time before it does.

For more stations than anyone might expect.

And to us, that will be nothing but a damn shame.

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(To our regular readers, we’re taking a short but overdue vacation over the next couple of weeks. Thus, we will be on a reduced publishing schedule until Labor Day. Signing up for a free subscription below will ensure that you don’t miss our return or any emergency updates between now and then.)

This particular episode was recorded in the hours just after last week’s major decision by the Federal Communications Commission that we detailed here in yesterday’s edition of “The Topline.”

The conversation was focused on the reality of where the business of local television, and specifically local TV news, is headed. It runs just under 45 minutes, and there are none of the usually annoying pitches for those various internet advertisers that you may love or loathe.

The “In The Vicinity” podcast is available on all the major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Below is a direct clickable link to the episode for your listening:

In The Vicinity: What Happens When The Ownership Cap Disappears?

It might be a nice break from your marathon of true crime podcasts. We’ll be back here with another text-based dispatch later this week.

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Not only did the FCC Chairman (and the nation’s would-be “censor in chief”) Brendan Carr and his fellow Republican, the aptly-named Olivia Trusty, pair their votes to overrule lone Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez’s objections in a 2-1 vote to “lift the cap” as it were, they tried to blunt any fears of a free-for-all in the ownership marketplace by adding that it wasn’t “abolishing” the rule, but rather “replacing” it with a new system where the FCC would replace “the cap” with “a granular case-by-case review of television ownership deals.”

Whooo bubba, as we used to exclaim occasionally back during our southern years.

This move, the FCC’s press release proclaims: “will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard.”

Here’s the thing—this is exactly what the Commission is supposed to do with any transaction regarding a broadcast license since its creation. What Thursday’s vote actually did was retroactively give the FCC the power to “modify” its own rule that it has blatantly ignored since it approved the acquisition of TEGNA by Nexstar Media just back on March 19th of this year. It also removed the “blissful ignorance” the agency has shown for years about the so-called “sidecar” deals that allowed large broadcasting companies to get around the now-abolished…er…sorry, the now-replaced limit on television station ownership.

Not surprisingly, those same companies were quick to applaud the FCC’s decision, as was their industry lobbying arm, the National Association of Broadcasters. All sang from the same hymnal that gave us this long-repeated reason for the decision. Again, citing the FCC’s carefully crafted PR wallpaper:

“The video marketplace has changed dramatically with the proliferation of digital platforms—all of which enjoy unrestricted national reach. Streaming services now reach over 80% of U.S. adults, and this scale provides them with a competitive edge in terms of attracting investment capital and increased advertising revenue. Eliminating the national cap will allow broadcasters to better compete with these unregulated digital giants. The market also reflects a growing imbalance of power in the network-affiliate relationship, which the national cap intended, but failed to curb, as evidenced by network control over online video carriage, preemption rights and revenue sharing requirements.”

In response, we’ll quote Colonel Sherman T. Potter from the classic television series M*A*S*H (as brilliantly portrayed by the late actor Harry Morgan): Horse Hockey!

There are two giant pieces of equine dung in that paragraph, the first being anything about the decision allowing broadcasters to better compete with “the unregulated digital giants.” In the case of the digital streamers called Hulu, Paramount+ and Peacock, those giants would be named Disney, Paramount-Skydance, and NBCUniversal—and all three of them also happen to be broadcasters.

Sure, sure, there are purely digital tech giants like Google, Meta, Apple and others that dominate the streaming space. Still, we have yet to hear one person explain how Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, et al., will be better able to battle for eyeballs because they can own 200 or more local television stations, including two, three or even more over-the-air signals in any given local market.

Then there is the second thing we need to scrape off our boots now: this thinly veiled threat from Commissioner Carr to the national television networks. The FCC says it needs to address “a growing imbalance of power in the network-affiliate relationship.” The Commission wraps itself in the very real business of TV issues of “online video carriage” (the major networks negotiate the deals for services like YouTubeTV, Hulu Live TV, Fubo TV, etc. to carry local affiliates) “preemption rights” (how many times a local station can preempt or replace a network-scheduled program) and “revenue sharing requirements” (how much each local station has to kickback of the revenue it receives from Cable and Satellite carriers who pay a per subscriber fee each month to carry a local station) All to obfuscate from the very unreal problem of the current administration’s distaste for network newscasts and the currently still-employed hosts of late night shows.

At least those not named Byron Allen.

This argument reminded us of the move the FCC made back in the early 1970’s when it created something called the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR). The PTAR required local stations in the Top 50-sized markets to have access to one hour of evening programming on their schedule to present local programming, rather than having the network control four hours on each weeknight’s schedule. The PTAR made stations responsible for filling the 7 PM hour, and network primetime would be held to three hours, 8:00 to 11:00 PM each night in the Eastern and Pacific time zones (7:00 to 10:00 PM in the Central and Mountain time zones)

And what locally created and focused programming did stations put in that precious hour? Mostly syndicated fare like “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy”. Some were a little more creative and tried efforts like “Evening/PM Magazine” or other truly local productions, but most of those have gone away now. What’s left is either the few program offerings still in syndication or another hour of local evening news that nobody ever asked for.

The Prime Time Access Rule was eventually repealed by the FCC in 1995. The programming it inspired local stations to air—instead of more network fare—is largely still in place, though now with different faces hosting each program.

Except for Wheel’s Vanna White, who will keep turning those letters seemingly forever.

Still attractive distractions aside, if we might return now to the FCC’s latest gem of a “rulemaking decision,” the reactions to their move have been pretty much “along party lines,” as they often say in Washington, DC. The wait now is to see what happens as a result of the ownership cap going away as a straight mathematical exercise and instead becoming reviewable as “transactions that would have exceeded the cap that do promote the public interest and could gain Commission approval.”

Put more simply, the regulatory role of the FCC just moved firmly into political gatekeeping of who can and can’t own as much as they want of the local media landscape.

Lest anyone think this is the final word on the subject, it of course certainly is anything but.

Lawsuits are already being threatened, and many billable hours of lawyers will likely follow. The previously approved Nexstar-Tegna deal is now stuck in the Federal courts after both a coalition of states’ attorneys general and DirecTV sued to block it. That case won’t head to trial until likely sometime next year.

We imagine the first true test of the “no-cap-unless-we-say-so” rule will be the full assimilation of the stations owned by third parties, but fully operated by the industry giants. For example, WPIX in New York City, which is technically owned by “Mission Broadcasting” but really operated as if it were owned by Nexstar (because it all but is, except on paper), will surely be assimilated back into “the mothership” at some point. Same for the stations owned by Cunningham and Howard Stirk Holdings being absorbed into Sinclair Broadcast Group (that had already started happening in anticipation of the FCC’s vote). It is what Gray Television is in the midst of doing with the American Spirit Media-owned stations that it would have previously not been allowed to own outright.

After those moves play out, we can only assume that the station brokers who midwife the buying and selling of local TV properties will assemble deals of all sizes and shapes to consolidate ownership of stations further. It will be as if they were fast-food franchises being gobbled up by a handful of well-funded corporate players.

On the other hand, those mid-sized and smaller ownership groups that are publicly traded and who have been trying hard to convince Wall Street that their profitability margins are coming back “very soon” may be forced into selling stations to mollify their stockholders. After the quarterly earnings report from Scripps last week, we wonder if they could be first in line to do some wheelin’ and dealin’ along with the workforce cuts and cost savings it has announced.

We keep thinking of the pivotal scene in the movie “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy and Dan Akroyd, who corner the market on frozen orange juice futures on the floor of the commodities exchange. Don Ameche implores his beleagured traders to return to the growing scrum of frantic trading by shouting “Get back in there and Sell, Sell, SELL!”

Finally, should anyone think that we are cheering for or against more consolidation in the ownership of television stations, let us be clear once again in our position. Above all else, we want local broadcasting to not only survive but actually thrive—in a very challenging media business landscape.

If last Thursday’s vote somehow delivers that — if fewer, bigger station groups actually translate into more local journalists covering more city councils and school boards instead of fewer — we’ll happily tip more than our cap to that.

We might even tip a glass of whatever everyone else is drinking.

Alas, we just don’t see the math working that way. Scale has never been the thing standing between a station and a well-staffed newsroom; the checkbook has. And a 2-1 party-line vote in DC doesn’t change who’s writing those checks, or what they’ve historically chosen to spend them on.

That’s the real world where the lifting of “the cap” actually gets tested. Everything else is just wishful thinking.

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That tune buried itself in our subconscious, and it has been there ever since. It comes out almost every time there is mail in our mailbox. And we found ourselves humming it yesterday when our column (“What if losing the network was the best thing to happen to your station?”) drew a handful of reader comments.

So in the fine tradition of late-night legend David Letterman, we thought we would “open up the old TVND mailbag” to respond to those in our readership who took the time to write us.

Our former colleague Betsy M Ross got the ball rolling with her comment that our column seemed to fall short for her because, as she put it, “we never really got an answer” to the question that our headline asked.

Well, that’s true, Betsy, because we don’t think anyone knows the answer yet. Least of all, we who don’t have the financials for these stations that are going through this transition. The question was meant to be a rhetorical supposition because we wanted to explore the idea that there could be a scenario where a local station losing its affiliation with a major network was not necessarily a one-way ticket to going out of business.

Since Betsy did give us credit for “a lot of history on small markets,” we will point out that the track record on stations making this transition is still relatively small itself. One of the oldest and most successful would be Graham Media’s WJXT in Jacksonville, which lost its CBS affiliation back in 2002. In that case, the station ownership (Graham’s predecessor, Post-Newsweek Stations) decided to leave CBS when the network demanded that the station start paying a hefty amount for the right to carry the network’s programming. It was an early test of the arrival of “reverse compensation,” which changed the previous business relationship in which networks paid their affiliates to carry their programming.

WJXT decided in April of 2002 that it would leave CBS and pursue a course as an independent station with a heavy focus on local news. Starting in July of that same year and branding itself as “the local station”, WJXT has been, by all accounts, successful in charting its own course over the last 24 years. And that’s in the face of two strong duopolies in the market, with Tegna operating both the market’s NBC and ABC affiliates and Cox Media Group operating the FOX and CBS outlets.

On the other side of the coin, commenter Herb Carson pointed out that losing a network affiliation “hasn’t worked out too well for Charlotte’s WCCB.” That’s a fair point, Herb, but WCCB’s situation is a bit different in that the Bahakel Broadcasting station has gone through multiple affiliation switches over the years, rather than being with one network pretty much since signing on, as our examples in WJXT and WSPA-TV had been.

Charlotte’s WCCB originally signed on the air as WAYS-TV on channel 36 back in 1954. Since we have already been called out for perhaps delving into too much broadcast history here, we won’t go too much into the disadvantages that UHF stations (those above channel 14) had in the early years of television, versus VHF stations (on channels 2-13). The current incarnation of WCCB dates back to 1964, when broadcaster Cy Bahakel purchased the station. He moved it to channel 18 two years later. It was primarily an ABC network affiliate over its history, until ABC moved to Cox’s WSOC-TV in 1977. During that period, several longtime NBC affiliates dropped that network in favor of the surging ABC, riding hits like “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley” in primetime, along with “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight.”

WCCB would be an independent station for nearly a decade before becoming a charter affiliate with the upstart FOX network in 1986. It would enjoy nearly 27 years as one of the network’s strongest affiliates. In 2013, Fox would buy another station in Charlotte, WJZY, and move the FOX affiliation over to it. That would leave WCCB to move to the smaller CW network that same year, which it would carry until the CW’s new owner, Nexstar, moved that network’s affiliation over to its own WMYT in 2025. WCCB returned again to being a truly independent station with a local news operation on the air for 30 hours each week, which it continues today.

The fact is that WCCB has been a bit of an underdog in Charlotte’s television viewing throughout its history, trailing market leaders WBTV (a longtime CBS affiliate now owned by Gray) and WSOC-TV (ABC and still owned by Cox) — as well as WJZY (still a FOX affiliate, but now owned by Nexstar and branded as “Queen City News”) and WCNC (the market’s NBC affiliate, owned by Tegna—which is still operating while its acquisition by Nexstar is the subject of pending lawsuits.)

(OK, so we are definitely guilty as charged on always getting into a lot of broadcast history here. But we think it is helpful to know the backstory on these markets and the stations that serve them.)

And speaking of markets, faithful reader Randall King commented yesterday that the market situation in Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson is “not like a typical top 50 market” because it doesn’t have one centralized metro. That’s true, and we thought we had acknowledged the unique, decentralized nature of market number 36 in our original column. But there are a fair number of bifurcated or trifurcated television markets, both large and small in size. (We have worked in a few of them over the years.) While they do present unique challenges in attempting to cover and represent each part of the market, the reality is that the great stations find ways to broaden their audience to all parts of any given DMA.

Randall went on to postulate that “the local, local, local miracle may not work here,” which we take to mean that he is skeptical of WSPA-TV’s ability to be successful without a CBS affiliation and being a local news-focused CW station, such as WISH-TV has done in Indianapolis. That could certainly be the case, though again this change in Greenville-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson happened with very little warning, and it will definitely take some time for the situation to settle down and define itself.

Finally, commenter Sue Wilson noted that it is Forum Communications that has taken on the CBS affiliations on the digital subchannels of its stations in Bismarck-Minot, North Dakota (as well as in Rapid City, South Dakota). She is correct on that point. Frankly, we just haven’t followed the situation developing in those markets as closely as the others across the country.

To wrap this up, we agree that there is no single answer to the question we originally raised about whether it might ultimately be a good thing for a local TV station to lose its affiliation with one of the big four networks in ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC and to go out on its own. One thing we do know is that so far, of the handful of stations that have done it since 2002, all of them are doing well enough to still be in business.

So there has to be a model that works to some degree.

And because we are still supporters of having as competitive a media landscape as possible in each local market across the country, we will be watching and hoping for all to be successful in their continuing operations because having a diverse marketplace for local news and information is still a good thing for consumers.

And democracy.

In the meantime, do keep those cards and letters coming—well, at least the modern-day electronic equivalents of them. We truly appreciate the feedback.

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Well, it is the new normal at least.

In Greenville-Spartanburg (SC), Birmingham (AL), Albuquerque (NM), Jackson (MS), Bismarck-Minot (ND), and Rapid City (SD), the former Nexstar Media stations that used to be affiliated with the CBS television network are adjusting to life without that network and what the future holds.

In all of those markets, save for Albuquerque, the future is one without the half of each day filled with network programming now being the responsibility of those local stations to fill with…something. In Albuquerque, Nexstar’s KRQE has shifted the FOX network from its previous digital subchannel home known as “FOX 505” to the main channel 13.1 signal to accompany KRQE’s local “News Reporting You Can Trust” programming. Curiously, the station has dropped the channel number 13 from its branding to be just “KRQE”, likely because the station was displaced on cable and satellite lineups from that spot “on the dial.”

In the other markets mentioned, life after CBS ranges from a quickly assembled schedule of maintaining the local news programming that existed before August 1st, alongside whatever syndicated programming the station had access to. There is something of a mini renaissance going on for those pseudo-courtroom shows, with Judge Judy and her fellow robe wearers getting more airtime on many of these stations.

These changes happened so quickly that each station is still cleaning up its websites to scrub the last vestiges of the CBS “eye” from them. When we checked, WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi, was still showing CBS programming listed on the TitanTV schedule for the station. (In fairness, TitanTV can be slow in updating its listings in any market. We know this from our own experiences with that service.)

Because of our own history of working in the market, we have spent the most time analyzing the aftermath of “the great affiliation moves of 2026” in the largest market where Nexstar lost the CBS affiliation, and that is market number 36, the sprawling four-way hyphenated Greenvile-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson DMA that covers the “Upstate” area, being the Northwestern portion of South Carolina, along with much of the Western third of North Carolina, and a few counties in Northeastern Georgia. It is a sprawling 28-county area that surrounds those four cities.

That is where WSPA-TV 7, which had carried the CBS television network since the station flickered to life for the first time back in 1956, found itself without that network on August 1st, 2026. Rival station WYFF 4, owned by Hearst Television, acquired the CBS affiliation to be broadcast on a digital subchannel of 4.3, alongside the station’s long-standing NBC affiliation airing on channel 4.1.

There is an interesting historical footnote about this rivalry: WSPA-TV’s original owner, Walter Brown and his Spartan Radiocasting Company, fought a nearly decade-long battle to get on the air beginning back in the late 1940s. The station wanted to place its transmitter atop Paris Mountain, a peak within Greenville County, where the City of Greenville was located, rather than in WSPA’s official “city of license” in Spartanburg. (The “SPA” in the station’s call letters.) Their opponent in this fight was one WFBC-TV, owned at the time by the local newspaper, The Greenville News.

WFBC-TV got on the air first in 1953, in the flood of new television stations that took to the air following the lifting of the World War II-era freeze on station start-ups. The owners fought the launch of the new WSPA-TV, forcing the station to ultimately locate its transmitter atop Hogback Mountain, a higher peak further away from the City of Greenville. It was finally able to sign on three years later.

WFBC-TV became WYFF in 1983 with an ownership change. The rivalry between the two stations, and the two cities they call home, has continued ever since.

Now, WSPA-TV is adjusting to life with the much more limited programming offered by the CW network, and a heavy local schedule of the station’s “7 News,” which now covers over half of each broadcast weekday. And while we are sympathetic to the extra workload for our former colleagues at the station, we believe this forced change may be a unique opportunity for owner Nexstar to run an important experiment not only for itself, but also for the future of local television station operators everywhere.

You see, affiliation shifts in local television aren’t new. They have happened here and there in past years. In locations like Indianapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Jacksonville, and more recently in both Atlanta and Miami. The Miami shift was notable because it set the stage for this most recent round at the beginning of August. In Miami, the ABC affiliation moved from its longtime home of WPLG 10 to the 7.2 digital subchannel of crosstown rival WSVN, which is the market’s FOX affiliate on 7.1. WSVN has also run a very news-heavy schedule as “South Florida’s News Station” since it lost the NBC affiliation while known as WCKT back in the late 1980s.

This move marked the first time in a major market that one of the big four networks had agreed to leave a primary station’s channel as its home and move to a subchannel of another station. That’s now exactly what has happened to Nexstar in the six markets listed earlier.

But of those stations now without CBS, only WSPA-TV has followed the model that WSVN pioneered of loading up the program schedule with more local newscasts. The station now carries a morning local news block that runs eight hours from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM, interrupted only for a single hour at 9:00 AM to air the local “infotainment” focused “Your Carolina” broadcast, which is done live each day. The station returns to local news at 4:00 PM each afternoon after a three-hour block of courtroom shows (The People’s Court/Judy Justice/Judge Judy) for four hours of news until 8:00 PM.

Then there are two hours of CW network in primetime, followed by late news from 10:00 PM to 11:35 PM. (We do wonder why the station isn’t taking its 11 PM newscast all the way to the full hour, when it would have the second half hour to itself as the only hour of local news at 11.) All totaled, it’s an impressive twelve and a half hours of local news being produced each weekday.

It is now even more hours of local news than WSVN produces in Miami, which was once known as the station that produced more local news than anyone in the Eastern Time Zone.

And what we first thought seemed like a forced move to fill WSPA-TV’s broadcast day now seems like a crucial experiment by the station’s owner, Nexstar, to see just how a station in a top 50 market can operate and possibly even be successful as a “local TV news machine,” if you will.

Exploring the challenges of how much it will cost in terms of resources, both human and other, to sustain this level of news production? What will the audience appetite be for a station with over half of its day delivering local news? Will advertisers buy time or other sponsorship opportunities from the station? These and many other questions will be answered in the months ahead, especially as WSPA-TV deals with the second half of an election year which now features not only a Governor’s race but also an unexpected U.S. Senate seat open, following the sudden passing of Senator Lindsey Graham.

We were disappointed to see that at present, the station only has job openings for one new multimedia journalist and one newscast producer. We’d hope that adding multiple hours of news might lead to adding more staff to WSPA’s news department, but we won’t be surprised if Nexstar keeps a tight hand on the purse strings and doesn't spend a lot more at the station until it knows what the future financial picture holds.

And finally, given what Paramount is doing at CBS, especially in the network’s news division under the leadership of Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who is remaking the network’s franchises like “60 Minutes”, “The CBS Evening News”, and “CBS Mornings” with a less-than-stellar record of success — who is to say that somewhere down the road that being without a CBS network affiliation and not paying for the privilege of carrying its programming, might not be the better business plan after all?

We suspect that is exactly what Perry Sook and company will be looking to find out from what happens at WSPA-TV. And perhaps from other stations, now affiliated with other networks, that might be facing the same situation in the not-too-distant future.

It might just turn out that what are considered the stations that lost something major on August 1st, 2026 could turn out to be winners come August 1st in a year to come.

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Alas, for the folks working at Nexstar’s stations in Greenville-Spartanburg (SC), Birmingham (AL), Albuquerque (NM), Jackson (MS), Bismarck-Minot (ND), and Rapid City (SD), the “hits” are indeed keeping on coming. Late word into the TVND “Satellite News Center” from each of these markets is that not only will the CBS “eye” trademark disappear from these stations beginning this Saturday, but on cable and satellite providers their channels will disappear from where they have been on the dial.

The explanation behind this is that for some so-called “Multichannel Video Programming Distributors” (also known as “MVPDs”), they will be keeping CBS programming at the same spot in their channel lineup, so viewers won’t have to go looking for Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” in late night (if they ever had in the first place)

In the 36th largest television market, which contains Greenville & Spartanburg, South Carolina, as well as Asheville, North Carolina, subscribers to Charter/Spectrum cable and satellite services from both DirecTV and Dish will continue to see CBS programming on Channel 7. They won’t see it from Spartanburg’s WSPA-TV, which had delivered it since the station went on the air some 70 years ago.

Starting Saturday, the Channel 7 slot on Spectrum and DirecTV will be the home of Channel 4.3, the digital subchannel of cross-market rival WYFF. That’s the Hearst Television-owned station that will be carrying the CBS network as of August 1st, right along with the NBC network that the station has aired since it went on the air, some 73 years ago (and will still be on channel 4.1).

At least that is what the WYFF website is currently reporting. Meanwhile, over on WSPA’s website, there is no mention of where the station will be seen on those cable and satellite providers beginning on August 1st. In fact, we couldn’t find any mention of CBS or any changes as to what will be on the air on the station this weekend.

We were able to find a large banner linking to a website explaining what’s up with station owner Nexstar’s battle to complete its stalled acquisition of rival group broadcaster TEGNA. We are quite certain a lot of viewers in the market are more interested in that topic than where Tony Dokoupil and Gayle King can be seen next Monday.

This situation appears to be similar in other markets we checked on. In Albuquerque, CBS may be moving to the over-the-air channel 7.4 of Hearst’s KOAT there, but it will still be at Channel 13 on cable and satellite providers, where Nexstar’s KRQE used to be seen. Same in Birmingham, where WVTM’s channel 13.4 carrying CBS will appear where Nexstar’s WIAT 42 used to be on DirecTV, Dish, plus cable operators Charter/Spectrum and Comcast/Xfinity. Also true in Jackson, Mississippi, where Hearst’s WAPT will deliver CBS over the air on channel 16.4, which in turn will boot Nexstar’s WJTV from channel 12 on cable and satellite services.

That last one is a bit sad, because WJTV 12 still has the CBS eye in their logo that adorns the top of their website. At least it did when we published this column. By this point, we were too depressed to check in on the stations in the Dakotas—though CBS on those Nexstar stations is moving to subchannels of stations owned by Forum Communications. (Keep in mind that all of this is in flux and could certainly not be final when the switches are actually made in each market.)

To use the favorite word of one of our former colleagues, this kerfuffle is about more than which station is on which spot of each market’s cable and satellite lineup.

That’s because if this forced relocation from the cable and satellite providers in these markets wasn’t bad enough, we suspect that the next item in the hitparade to come will be that the cable and satellite providers will inform the Nexstar stations and the company’s corporate people in charge of the retransmission consent contracts that because the loss of CBS programming constitutes what the lawyers will call “a material change” in the station that they are paying a monthly amount to deliver to each of their subscribers.

And that will likely mean that those cable and satellite providers will want to pay far less to carry the Nexstar stations that don’t have the CBS network on their air any longer. That’s if they even want to continue carrying those stations at all.

To be clear, we don’t know that this has happened. But knowing how things go when these retransmission consent deals between stations and cable/satellite providers are being renegotiated every few years, we wouldn’t be shocked if it is exactly what is happening behind the scenes.

Since we started here talking about radio, let’s close here with the famous words of the late, great Casey Kasem, who would tell us:

“Now, back to the countdown!”

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In the roughly 18 months we have been publishing this online column, we have never gotten as much response as we did to last Friday’s edition about Nexstar’s loss of its CBS affiliations in six markets that will surprisingly happen later this very week.

For those of you who have newly joined us, thanks for finding this little corner of the internet. We hope you will enjoy what we deliver here enough to become a subscriber, if you haven’t already. (If you have, please accept our thanks for doing so).

To restate it, our ongoing goal here is to analyze and report on what is happening in the television business, especially on the local station level. We approach this from the perspective of answering the questions we had as members of local station newsrooms in markets big and small across this great nation.

As the new week begins on this Monday morning, we imagine that those working in the stations serving the six markets where they will either be without a CBS network affiliation come this weekend — or those who will suddenly have two network-affiliated channels originating from their stations — are in both cases facing a very busy week of what might best be described as “shuffling.”

Frankly, everybody will be dealing with a lot. And we respect that the old Broadway saying has never been more appropriate: “The show must go on.” But in this case, it will be for 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future.

In the case of a half-dozen Nexstar stations that are quickly removing the CBS logo from their branding on everything from their news opens to the front of their buildings, their biggest concern is what will be on the air for all the hours they used to carry CBS programming, however good or bad that might have been.

In primetime and on weekends, that appears to be Nexstar’s own CW network in at least a few of these markets, save for Albuquerque, New Mexico, where KRQE will switch from primarily being a CBS affiliate to a FOX affiliate. Frankly, that is not a terrible deal. The station will still have NFL and College Football games on the air come this fall. Their biggest challenge will be extending their morning news from a couple of hours to the five or six hours that most FOX stations now seem to routinely produce.

(We should acknowledge the error in last Friday’s initial dispatch, in which we listed the FOX affiliation for sister station KASA 2. That hasn’t been true for the last decade, since Nexstar was forced to sell KASA when it acquired the former LIN Television group. FOX has been on a digital subchannel of KRQE as “FOX New Mexico” since 2016, and KASA 2 has been the market’s Telemundo station, owned by NBC Universal, with local news coming from Hubbard Television’s KOB 4 there, which is the NBC affiliate. Our apologies for being stuck in the past on that one.)

So KRQE will likely become “FOX 13” or some variation of that branding. Hearst-owned KOAT 7, the longtime ABC station in the market, will be spinning up some version of a “CBS New Mexico” channel on a digital subchannel. The website Rabbitears.com currently shows it planned as channel 7.4. Over on KOAT.com, they are telling cable and satellite subscribers, “We will let you know exactly where to find it as soon as those channel positions are finalized.” Meaning that they are likely scrambling to get that CBS digital subchannel carried on all those providers.

What will be interesting to watch is how Hearst ultimately decides to operate its news department at each of the four stations picking up a CBS affiliation: KOAT in Albuquerque, WVTM in Birmingham, WYFF in Greenville-Spartanburg, and WAPT in Jackson. Initially, we suspect there will be extensive simulcasting of local newscasts, especially given the short lead-up to these affiliation switches. Long-term, the question will be whether the new CBS channels get their own dedicated newscasts and whether new hires will be made to support the separate operation.

Hearst has recently gained some real-world experience with this scenario. When it bought the former Waterman Broadcasting operation in Fort Myers, Florida, back in June of 2023, it gained a two-station operation from a single facility. Both NBC affiliate WBBH 2 and ABC affiliate WZVN 7 had separate branding and their own local newscasts. Since the acquisition, Hearst has adopted a common “Gulf Coast News” brand across the two stations, which share reporters and newsgathering resources but still have separate newscasts, under General Manager Darrel Lieze-Adams. It will be interesting to see if Hearst implements that same model at KOAT, WVTM, WYFF, and WAPT.

Meanwhile, back at Nexstar, for those stations losing CBS come this weekend, the situation is not quite as simple. For example, WSPA-TV 7 in Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville is expected to pick up the CW programming that has been airing for years on sister station WYCW 62, which has existed as a digital subchannel of WSPA since Nexstar sold off the actual WYCW spectrum in 2018. Even with that CW programming, the “new” WSPA broadcast schedule will have some holes to fill. Nexstar is putting the best face on this “opportunity” by stating that it will provide “additional local news and regional programming.” We’ll see exactly what that additional programming might be and whether any additional people will be brought on to help create it.

(Full disclosure here, your editor worked as WSPA-TV’s news director from 2015 to 2019.)

We find some room for optimism here. The most directly relevant precedent we can point to is Indianapolis, where WISH-TV 8 became a CW affiliate back in 2014 after owner LIN Television merged with Media General and lost the CBS affiliation to a market rival. Media General — later acquired by Nexstar — kept investing in local news at WISH-TV rather than retreating from it, and the station has changed hands twice more since. Today, under Circle City Broadcasting, WISH-TV produces some 85 hours of local news each week, the second-most of any station in the country behind Nexstar’s own KTLA in Los Angeles at roughly 94 hours.

The lesson: there is life for a station after losing a “big four” affiliation, but it requires real investment in a news-centric model — a strategy that’s admittedly a lot more viable in bigger markets than in smaller ones.

Not that anyone asked us, but we do hope that local TV stations experimenting with the “podcast” model for their streaming “plus” channels might consider taking some of that content to their broadcast outlets as potential programs — rather than just automatically adding news hours that repeat the same few stories and weather forecasts already being delivered over and over throughout the day.

Whichever way those hours get filled, it is the viewers who are going to have to cope with finding where on the dial they can watch what they want, and whether they’ll bother searching for the local anchors they used to watch alongside CBS network shows.

In at least six places in the United States, that is about to become the biggest challenge each of these stations faces, and it will continue to be “job one” for some time to come. We do wish all the folks doing that work the greatest success possible. In the face of the recent viewing trends for broadcast television, it wasn’t like the job was all that easy before.

To which we’ll offer the musical inspiration of a tune you’ve likely heard in every sports arena, from the ironically named group LMFAO, titled “Party Rock Anthem.” The 2011 song puts it best when it calls out: “Everyday I’m Shuffling.”

Godspeed to you all.

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A brief bit of history: Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher who became a key advisor to the Emperor Nero during the Roman Empire’s “go-go” years around 50 AD. He delivered the famous quote above with irony, because even though he was a Stoic who was supposed to be detached from the trappings of wealth, he was one of the richest men in ancient Rome.

We think today that in our more modern current times, Perry Sook, Chairman and CEO of Nexstar Media, could have used an advisor like Seneca to remind him of the key weakness of loyalty that is purchased. That being in simpler terms, somebody can always come along and pay more for it.

Because that sure seems like what went down this past week when it was announced that Nexstar had renewed its affiliation agreement with CBS for its local stations that carry the Paramount-owned broadcast network. That would be for most of those stations, at least.

Because as FTVLive.com began reporting earlier this week that the famous CBS “Eye” logo was being quietly scrubbed off of Nexstar’s KRQE in Albuquerque, our friends over at TheDesk.Net broke the larger story yesterday that as of this August 1st, the CBS trademark will be coming off of no less than six different Nexstar-owned stations in the following markets:

WSPA-TV 7 in Greenville/Spartanburg, SC (Market #36)

WIAT 42 in Birmingham, AL (Market #45)

KRQE 13 in Albuquerque-Santa Fe, NM (Market #48)

WJTV 12 in Jackson, MS (Market #99)

KXMA 2 in Minot, ND and KXMB 12 in Bismarck, ND (plus satellite stations KXMA & KXMC, all located in Market #147)

Where is CBS headed in these five markets? More on that in a moment.

First, let’s consider the impact of this announcement. The largest owner of local television stations in the nation just lost six of its affiliations with one of the biggest broadcast television networks. How could this happen? Well, as that rich Roman Seneca would have said, had he ever heard the music stylings of Puff Daddy:

“It’s all about the benjamins.”

Rumblings in the industry suggest that Nexstar’s Sook has told the networks his group has been negotiating with that Nexstar will hold the line on “reverse compensation.” That’s the money that local stations pay to the network for the privilege of carrying that network’s programming. It is called “reverse compensation” because for the first four decades of the network-affiliate business model, the networks paid the affiliates to carry their programming and the national advertising contained within those programs.

But when local stations began collecting income from cable and satellite television providers for carrying their signals (alongside other cable networks to which they paid a “per subscriber” rate to carry), the networks wanted a piece of that action and “reversed” the affiliation model. As you might imagine, the amounts involved have increased over the years, and each time an affiliated station renews its agreement with the network, negotiations become increasingly difficult.

For Sook and Nexstar, the whole network relationship issue has become more complicated because of Nexstar’s acquisition of rival group owner TEGNA and its local stations. Industry sources suggest that TEGNA had network agreements that were sending more money back to the networks than Nexstar has been doing. Thus Nexstar has been letting the networks know that it will seek to have all renewal agreements set at the current, lower amounts of “reverse compensation” that Nexstar enjoys.

That might have been fine before the situation in Miami unfolded last year.

When longtime ABC affiliate WPLG-TV, the sole television station owned by Berkshire-Hathaway, tried to play hardball with that network during its affiliation renewal, ABC basically said: “Fine, we’ll take our network programming somewhere else.” Now, this threat didn’t mean much at the time because there were only a few full-power television channels available in each local market across the country. For networks to have coverage across an entire market, they had to be on one of these channels. While there have been a few moves over the years (Indianapolis comes to mind, when CBS left its home of 58 years on WISH-TV 8 in 2015 to move to crosstown rival WTTV 4), most networks have stayed put because there just weren’t any real alternatives to move to.

But the situation in Miami changed all that. ABC moved from its home on WPLG’s Channel 10 to a new location, the digital 7.2 “subchannel” of Miami’s WSVN, the Sunbeam Television-owned station that carries the FOX network on its 7.1 signal. The surprise move put two networks on a single full-power digital television station and left WPLG to forge a future as what Greek lifers in College would know as a “GDI.” (The last initial standing for “independent”; the first two can represent varying emphatic adjectives.)

Apparently, while Nexstar was negotiating “down to the wire” on its CBS affiliation agreement, the good folks at Hearst Television let it be known that they would be just fine with following the Miami example and taking on the CBS network on the so-called “dot-two” digital subchannels of their stations—and just like that, CBS will be moving to those new homes in the following four markets:

WYFF 4.2 in Greenville/Spartanburg, SC (Market #36)

WVTM 13.2 in Birmingham, AL (Market #45)

KOAT 7.2 in Albuquerque-Santa Fe, NM (Market #48)

WAPT 16.2 in Jackson, MS (Market #99)

In North Dakota, CBS will move to the digital subchannels of two stations owned by Fargo-based Forum Communications, along with another station in that smaller group based in Rapid City, South Dakota, which will also pick up CBS on its digital subchannel.

This wasn’t a single market seeing a network affiliation move. Still, one group owner in Hearst made a major play for a group of markets where it will now program two of the “big four” broadcast networks over a single station. Before this, large-group owners had acquired second stations (either outright or through what were known as “sidecar” companies) to operate two major networks.

To simplify this idea: instead of two houses on two parcels, you build one multi-family unit on a single piece of land—one kitchen serving both families instead of two. You can charge each family less rent and still come out ahead, because your costs dropped more than your revenue did.

Given the current ever-declining economics of the local television station business, this “higher density usage” of the over-the-air “real estate” makes a lot of business sense, and there may well be more of it to come.

In fact, late last night, TheDesk.net reported that the ABC affiliation in St. Louis may be heading from its present home on Sinclair-owned KDNL 30 to the 4.2 digital subchannel of KMOV, owned by Gray Television.

All of this will mean that viewers may have to do a little more work to find their favorite network programs at their new home addresses. And that the previous addresses will have to find new tenants, or rather, networks to occupy them. In Nexstar’s case, it will move the FOX network in Albuquerque from co-owned KASA 2 to KRQE to replace the CBS fare. In the other markets, it will elevate the CW—which Nexstar itself holds a controlling stake in—to replace CBS. Worth noting: these stations aren’t changing hands. Nexstar keeps the real estate; it’s just swapping out “the tenant”. It says it will use the opportunity to add more hours of local news programming to those stations’ schedules, which these days is seemingly the default option for filling whatever holes exist in a local station’s broadcast day.

The problem with that plan is that very few resources are typically added to the news department at said local stations to produce all the additional hours of news content. In turn, the overall quality tends to suffer, and there is a lot of repetition in hour after hour of more local news.

But that’s a topic for another column, on another day.

Today, the Roman Seneca might put it this way:

Loyalty is worth exactly what you are willing to pay for it.

Never has that been more true in the broadcast television business than right now.

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The huge television audiences the matches drew to Fox, the English rights holder domestically, and Telemundo/Peacock, the Spanish rights holder, dominated TV viewing for the weeks of matches from June through the final match this past Sunday. (A belated congratulations to Spain and their 19-year-old phenom Lamine Yamal on winning the tournament.)

The final results of the ratings performance for this World Cup will likely be impressive enough to drive negotiations for the television rights for the 2030 tournament up by some eight times from the $485 million that Fox paid for the privilege of airing the 2026 matches. That will put the price tag in the $4 billion range, with the proceeds headed to FIFA's coffers.

We believe it’s safe to say the World Cup has now arrived as a major sports television event, right up there with the various championships, save for the pinnacle of America’s take on football, the NFL’s Super Bowl. For comparison, the World Cup final this past Sunday drew a domestic TV audience of about 36 million across both Fox and Telemundo, compared to the 125 million who watched the Super Bowl on NBC back in February.

All the impressive numbers aside, the other breakthrough of this World Cup was not only the matches but also the countless stories of players and fans from around the globe who came to North America to celebrate what legendary footballer Pele dubbed “the most beautiful game.”

Put another way, football made a huge dent in the news cycle for the past six weeks.

Which leads us back to considering the role that sports play in our daily diet of news and information. From the tongue-in-cheek drama of Scotland’s “Tartan Army” descending on greater Boston and unapologetically drinking it dry to the real-life global drama of the apparent interference by the US President to get a red-carded player of the US Men’s National Team reinstated before their crucial match with Belgium. The World Cup made headlines in the news sections of virtually all news media—and not just the sports sections.

Even on local television newscasts, the World Cup made its way into the rundown of the “A Block” regularly. (Even those insipid live shots from empty venues where watch parties were long over before the late newscasts began…)

The examination of the role Soccer has come to play in the US across all levels of play, from the rec leagues of young children to the fast-growing professional level of Major League Soccer, was on full display. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anyone paying attention. From the climbing audiences for those MLS matches, not to mention the nascent but impressive women’s league, the NWSL, to the delivery of the Premier League for NBC Universal or the “Golazo” portfolio of coverage on Paramount’s CBS and CBS Sports networks, soccer/football is now all over American television.

Let us not forget the contribution that AppleTV+ has made to the spread of football into the American consciousness. Its deal to carry MLS games was brilliantly paired to the arrival of its hit comedy series “Ted Lasso,” which happens to be returning next month with a new season. And for our money, AppleTV’s podcast “After The Whistle” with Rebecca Lowe and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard on “Ted Lasso” and one of the show’s Executive Producers) was nothing less than “must-watch or listen” to every episode.

Their combined joy and agony over the performances of their respective national teams (England for Lowe and USA for Hunt) is the stuff that we think all local TV sportscasters should study. The idea is to capture what ABC’s Jim McKay once announced as “the human drama of athletic competition,” which encompasses not only those who play the games, but also those who witness and support them.

The scores, the stats, and the strategies of every sport matter far less than the storytelling about them does. This is how sports coverage earns its place in the local newscast rather than be the first thing to be cut when stations look to save a few bucks, supported by the old thinking that half the audience doesn’t care about sports—or they already get everything they want from the various platforms of ESPN or any of its countless competitors “on the dial.”

(Though admittedly we haven’t had dials on televisions since the days of “The Honeymooners” and Lucy.)

Nobody understood this better than Roone Arledge, who built ABC Sports and later ABC News on the same idea: coverage that was “up close and personal.” It’s why Jim McKay’s Wide World of Sports open didn’t stop at “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”—it landed on “the human drama of athletic competition.” The drama was always the point, not the scoreboard.

Our former colleague Todd Summers, the weekend sports anchor at WSPA-TV in Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville, has built a multiple-EMMY®-winning tradition out of covering the Super Bowl every year without using a second of the game’s actual highlights. It’s Arledge’s philosophy, still working, six decades later, within a local newscast.

That’s what the World Cup did for six weeks, and what soccer has been doing here in the United States in recent years—catching up to a truth the rest of the world already knew. It made you care about a sport you might not have known much about. It focused on the stories beyond the final scores.

As we said off the top, this is why after the past six weeks, we’re all footballers now.

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The coalition includes Arizona, California (whose AG, Rob Bonta, is leading the charge on this action), Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

OK, maybe the fact that all of this “baker’s dozen” of top lawyers in these states were all Democratic was maybe even less surprising. (Though, to be fair, not all of those states would be considered Democratic strongholds. Both Arizona and Nevada went for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.)

As California AG Bonta put it in his explanation to Variety.com:

“Giving that much power to one media company would wipe out competition, jack up prices, hurt the quality of content we’re offered, and bring fewer movies and shows to our screens. Combining cable news channels would mean fewer journalists informing our electorate and fewer opportunities for Americans to hear the full breadth of information and opinions on a subject. Consolidation would mean fewer voices speaking truth to power and fewer documentarians, filmmakers, showrunners, producers, writers, and artists shedding light on important stories that too often go untold.”

All of which sounds like it would justify Bonta’s declaration that the deal is “a death knell for the film and TV industry — and for our democracy.”

At least Perry Sook wasn’t labeled as being that anti-democratic by the California AG. His deal to combine Nexstar and TEGNA was only called: “A gut punch to a thriving democracy that relies on an informed population.”

Whatever threat to American journalism that might be concerning about the Nexstar-TEGNA combination doesn’t seem to be as prevalent in the creation of a merged “WarnerMount,” as it is being called in some circles. The whole specter of rolling Paramount’s CBS News together with WBD’s CNN got only minimal reference in Bonta’s remarks.

Obviously, being potentially deprived of some movie titles and the production business that supports them is of more importance in the state where Hollywood lives, even if it is also the one that Jimmy Kimmel calls home.

And we’re not exactly sure which cable news channels Bonta thinks get combined in the proposed WBD-Paramount merger? CBS News is a broadcast-centric operation compared to CNN’s cable & satellite distribution. Both are struggling to reach large audiences with their streaming offerings on digital platforms.

That doesn’t pose the more ominous threat of local markets seeing fewer local news offerings that the Nexstar-TEGNA deal is being scrutinized for. Legal minds we have talked with tend to concur that the legal case that Perry Sook will be fighting for the next year is stronger than the one that David Ellison’s lawyers will be racking up millions of dollars’ worth of billable hours to defend.

Not to mention the millions of dollars that Paramount-Skydance will owe if it doesn’t close on Warner Bros. Discovery by September 30th. After that date, the so-called “ticking fee” is a cool $7 million every single day afterward.

Sheesh, at least Perry is getting to rake in those TEGNA profits as a wholly owned subsidiary of Nexstar at least until he gets a judgment in federal court, which isn’t likely before this time next year.

And we continue to believe that Mr. Sook and his reassembling of the band of heavyweight leadership to complete the full assimilation of TEGNA into “the gigantic Nexstar” have more than one plan for getting the majority of what they want approved by the federal courts.

Kara Swisher’s favorite media columnist, Puck’s Dylan Byers, wrote yesterday that the notable lack of legal concerns expressed by “The Dirty Dozen” of state AGs about David Ellison and his editor-in-chief at CBS News, Bari Weiss, getting their hands on CNN was “both remarkable and wholly unsurprising.” He went so far as to label his main article on the subject: “Let CNN & CBS News Eat Their Cake.”

While we are unabashed fans of Ms. Swisher, it does seem, in reading Mr. Byers’ take on things, that he may be carrying a little water for the much maligned Ms. Weiss and her reign at the former “Tiffany Network.” He posited this opinion:

“Meanwhile, at the risk of drawing the ire of some already voluble critics, any honest assessment of Bari’s tenure at CBS News should be able to discern that, the “Inside CECOT” debacle notwithstanding, she’s not actually transforming it into a MAGA-fied right-wing network. (Seriously, folks, watch it.)”

For the record, Dylan, we actually have. And while it doesn’t appear that CBS News has yet moved to the right of Newsmax, it sure hasn’t improved much in the Weiss era. And we’re still waiting to see what the final product ends up looking like on both the CBS Morning and Evening News, let alone the next season of “60 Minutes.”

But come the fall, that iconic ticking stopwatch may be marking a lot more of David Ellison’s money going out the door to pay for trying to grow his media empire.

And from his vantage point, Perry Sook has got to feel like his much smaller, yet still stalled deal, is something of a bargain.

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Things eventually settled down a few years later, and the AP recognized that it was better to have a wider membership, so it allowed radio stations and networks to join the cooperative and in turn created “the radio wire” in 1941, just ahead of the United States joining the Second World War.

Though, to be fair, radio (and later television) were always treated as a bit less-than-equal members of the AP. They were referred to as “associate members” of the cooperative, which remained newspaper-centric for decades that followed. But radio and television stations would pay subscription fees to have an AP teletype machine on hand to deliver the latest news headlines from around the world to their respective newsrooms.

This was why many radio stations would subscribe to the smaller and cheaper competitor, United Press (renamed United Press International, or UPI, after a 1958 merger) until 1999, when UPI ceased services to broadcast clients, leaving the AP to be the sole provider of news wire service to the nation’s broadcast newsrooms, which it continues to be today.

We were reminded of this history today when we spotted an article from the AP via its LinkedIn page that highlighted the work of a trio of online volunteers known as “Nashville Severe Weather.” In the paragraph highlighting the full article, there was this provocative sentence:

“Their hyperlocal focus allows Nashville Severe Weather to fill a niche left open by the local TV meteorologists who have to report on dozens of surrounding counties.”

Well that seemed to us like a bit of a shot towards our colleagues in the local television station newsrooms that serve the nation’s 26th largest market. So we opened up the full story on the AP’s website.

In his story that is headlined “Prepared, not scared: Dedicated volunteers in Nashville relay calm, straight-talk info during storms” AP reporter Travis Loller opens his profile of the three men behind Nashville Severe Weather with a frothy reference to the television show “9-1-1 Nashville” by suggesting that anyone who has watched an episode of the show could be forgiven for thinking that the place is “constantly beset by tornadoes.”

By the time we arrive at the article’s third paragraph, we get this lofty characterization of Nashville Severe Weather: “It’s a service that evokes the early promise of the internet, before the rise of the influencer.”

Which is followed in the very next sentence with this pronouncement: “This is happening at a time when many people no longer watch local news and weather reports.”

So it is pretty clear that the focus of this profile is to highlight the work being done by the online group and how they are somehow a calmer influence than the trained meteorologists who are seen on local television. No less than the Executive Director of the Tennessee Academy of Physician Assistants proceeds to call out the local TV coverage of severe weather as “a little over the top.” She adds about Nashville Severe Weather: “They’re a little more calm and telling it to you straight,” she says. “They don’t get people overly excited.”

Let’s make it clear here that we have no axe to grind with the folks at Nashville Severe Weather or any other online streaming weather coverage. We absolutely think they have every right to compete for an audience looking for local weather coverage, particularly during severe weather events, which are seemingly increasing in frequency and intensity in many locations, including Middle Tennessee.

And we also know that severe weather coverage has become a mainstay of local TV news outlets, with various approaches to that coverage, ranging from professional to a bit more dramatic than some folks might care for.

Our issue with this AP story is that it wants to put all severe weather coverage on local television in one box, and then proceed to tell us how wonderful this online service is because of its hyperlocal focus on just two most populated counties in the market. “One of the things that Nash Severe can do that even the TV stations have trouble doing is really bring it down to intersection level, school level, church level to let people know where the danger and the threat is.”

That quote is from Tom Johnstone, a veteran meteorologist who joined Nashville Severe Weather after 33 years with the National Weather Service. On the group’s website, their self description contained in the “About Us” section does contain a legal disclaimer from one of the groups’ founders who happens to be a lawyer: “We are not meteorologists. When we call ourselves tweeteorologists or media-orologists, we do not mean we are meteorologists.”

Of course the AP article includes the now seemingly obligatory reference to changing habits of local news consumption, with Kevin Trowbridge, a teacher at Nashville’s Belmont University, highlighting that in his informal survey of students in his strategic communications course, “many are turning to Nashville Severe Weather.” Just to underline his point that for college students, “their source of information is that handheld device.” Trowbridge then adds, “It’s not turning on a TV. And it’s not even looking at a traditional media outlet’s online presence. It’s finding sources that provide them quick information when they need it.”

At this point, we wonder why the four television stations in Nashville don’t just turn off their transmitters and call it a day.

One might suppose that the 47 other counties that are covered by the meteorologists working in their weather departments might have to hope that there are some dedicated weather hobbyists ready to start providing the vital severe weather coverage they might need to be “Prepared…not scared.”

(We’ll note here the irony that the first time we ever heard that phrase was from legendary broadcast meteorologist James Spann down in Alabama. He even used it in the title of his 2021 children’s book about weather than can be scary: “Benny & Chipper: Prepared..not scared.” And if you were looking for an example of a TV meteorologist who always strikes the right tone in telling folks about severe weather, James Spann would be role model that many working in the field would point to.)

To wrap this up on a positive note, let us state again for the record—we are happy to hear about the success of Nashville Severe Weather, as we are for all of the folks who do online coverage of severe weather in a reliable, professional manner. We believe that any way people in the path of the storm can be informed to take the actions needed to protect themselves is worth having. We recognize that social media’s advantage of connecting those people in a community where they can have a dialogue is a good thing.

We don’t think that has to be at the expense of the local broadcasters who have been serving those communities for decades, and do so without any ask for support via subscription fees or patreon donations. Let alone what they have to pay each month to be a member of the Associated Press.

In recent years, a small, but growing number of radio and TV stations have decided to drop their AP service and go without that support in their coverage. They’re not alone, in the past two years, the major newspaper groups of Gannett and McClatchy stopped using most AP content.

After reading this particular offering from AP.org, we can only think of the quote from the legendary comedian Joey Adams, who left us back in 1999.

“With friends like that…who needs enemies?”

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Or as it’s known everywhere else in the world, football.

“Football is Life!” exclaims the character Dani Rojas in the uber-popular Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso.” The character is played by Cristo Fernandez, an actual soccer player turned actor. (And yes, we can’t wait for the show's return this August either.)

But aside from the brief education we’ve gotten courtesy of Richmond A.F.C. and Coach Beard’s indirect recommendation of the treatise on the sport titled “Inverting the Pyramid,” we still don’t understand the offside call.

We do find it amusing that in almost every match in every football league, there is a moment when the referee draws the outline of a screen and then jogs to the sideline to watch… a television.

They call it the VAR, short for Video Assistant Referee (not video-assisted replay, as we first thought). The VAR enters a soccer match for two types of interventions. The first is when the officials operating the video replay room (conveniently sponsored by the technology brand Lenovo) decide that the on-field referee should review a play for a “clear and obvious error.” This is when a jog to a waiting monitor on the side of the field, or the “pitch” as it is correctly called, is called for.

It’s a similar application to sideline instant replay in professional and college football, which is also known as “going under the hood.” We’re not sure why soccer doesn’t feel the need to have the ref shrouded while watching the replay.

The other way VAR makes itself known is for more factual matters. In cases like the aforementioned offside infraction, the VAR can simply relay the correct call to the referee on the field, via the headset they wear during the match.

But the role of the VAR is itself confusing. It isn’t used to review everything in a match, but supposedly only for reviewing four categories of decisions: Goals, Penalty Decisions, Red Cards (ejections for severe penalties), and correcting the mistaken identity of players receiving either Red or the lesser Yellow Cards.

Of course, the 24 hours leading up to last night’s highly anticipated World Cup match between the United States and Belgium, crossed over from being a sports story to a global news story. The Athletic reported that the President of the United States called the President of FIFA to inquire why the Red Card had been given to star US player Folarin Balogun in the previous Wednesday’s match between the United States and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Let's call this what it is: FIFA blew up its own rulebook because the President of the United States picked up the phone. Balogun's red card wasn't even a real-time call — the referee waved play on, and it was VAR that sent him to the monitor, where he issued the card after watching the replay in slow motion. That was openly questioned at the time. FIFA’s protocol is that the use of slow motion in the review shouldn’t determine the severity of the foul. By that standard, Balogun should have received a yellow card instead of the red one given, which automatically suspends the player for the next game.

Then Donald Trump called Gianni Infantino, by his own admission, because he "didn't think it was a foul," and by Sunday the suspension had evaporated. FIFA's disciplinary committee dressed it up as an independent legal process in which the phone call played no role, but nobody outside FIFA's press shop is buying that explanation. Especially since the last time a red card didn’t result in a one-game suspension was in 1962.

Even before the US team’s 1-4 loss Monday night in Seattle, that phone call became the controversy that washed away much of the global goodwill generated by three weeks of World Cup matches played in stadiums across major cities in the United States.

The US will now watch the rest of its own World Cup, played on its own soil, without its national team on the field.

You might understand why other nations, far more soccer-crazed than we are, might feel some sense of justice in the outcome of this particular Monday’s events. That’s not the fault of the team itself, though the consensus is that the USMNT played far below the level they needed to challenge the higher-ranked Belgium team.

The other loser may turn out to be Fox Sports, which had been riding a wave of record viewership for its World Cup coverage. The network’s price tag this year was only $485 million for the rights to carry the English-language coverage of the 104 matches, divided between Fox’s broadcast network and its FS1 cable sports outlet. (The Spanish-language coverage is carried in the US via NBCUniversal’s Telemundo network, both on broadcast and on NBCU’s Peacock streaming app.)

When you compare that to the likely price tag of $1.5 billion to air the 2030 World Cup here (or even to the $2.25 billion that Fox pays each year for NFL rights), this year’s well-received World Cup coverage was already a blockbuster of a bargain.

It will likely still be considered that — when the final match ends in the New Jersey Meadowlands on July 19th.

But likely with fewer viewers than anticipated, given what transpired over the past couple of days.

As a friend who lives “across the pond” put in a half-joking message to us: “Leave it to the ugly Americans to tarnish the beautiful game a bit.”

We defended our nation by reminding our "Eurotrash friend" that we invented trash-talking here in the good old USA, and that we were just getting warmed up.

Turns out we didn't need to. We've got a guy who calls the ref's boss.

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Hyperscaling, as you might guess, is the verb applied to what is known as hyperscale computing. In the IT world, hyperscale computing is “the ability of an IT architecture to seamlessly scale (grow) computing, storage, and networking resources to meet massive demand.” Hyperscaling is at the foundation of modern cloud computing and, in turn, AI. Put more directly, it is the idea where, instead of building or upgrading a single machine, providers add thousands of servers to a distributed network.

Hyperscaling is really just the tech world’s term for what civilians might mean by something going from the proverbial “zero to one hundred” in no time at all. The tech management philosophy that springs from this (also known as the Bari Weiss school of management) is encapsulated in the pithy phrase: “Move fast and break things.”

Speaking of the broadcasting business, which is what we do here, we think of the current poster boy for hyperscaling, Nexstar Chairman and CEO Perry Sook. As you surely know by now, his argument for the future of local television is that, to survive the battle for the future of media against tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple, it has to get bigger.

It has to hyperscale.

Mr. Sook has taken to various outlets lately to make his case for growth and, in turn, to get the approval needed to basically end-run any current federal regulations that would require him to limit his company’s growth by acquiring more local television stations. That’s the current legal purgatory he finds himself in with the acquisition of rival group owner TEGNA. And it appears that the fight is headed for a federal courtroom in roughly a year from now.

In other words, Nexstar tried to move fast, and it broke things.

Now, TEGNA is operating as a separate, but wholly owned subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group. It has a new CEO and C-suite of officers as it continues to operate a portfolio of 64 local TV stations in 51 markets across the country. The acquisition of TEGNA by Nexstar was approved by both the FCC and the Department of Justice. But it turned out that a group of state Attorneys General had filed a motion to block the already-closed deal.

So now, the whole mess will likely be sorted out in a federal courtroom, and that won’t happen until sometime in the summer of 2027.

Meanwhile, Perry Sook isn’t showing any signs of worry. He made a bit of news this week when it was reported that he bought nearly 2 million dollars worth of Nexstar stock with his own money. The purchase puts Sook’s holdings in the company he founded at just shy of 900,000 shares, worth roughly $160 million. He and his wife “indirectly control” roughly another 976,000 shares through a holding company (“PS Sook Ltd.”), which would be valued at an additional $174 million.

In other words, he definitely can afford the purchase.

The buy did help move the stock off its recent 52-week lows; it gained nearly 5% in trading after Sook’s purchase was reported and closed on the last day of June at $178.59. Given that, over the last year, NXST shares traded above $250 per share at their peak, industry analysts would note that it was a bargain to buy.

(We will take a moment to remind you, dear reader, that this reporting should not be taken as financial advice of any kind. Based on our current 401(k) investments, we are the last people you should look to for any financial wisdom.)

Speaking of wealthy folks making investments in media, allow us to direct your attention to a purchase on the radio side of the broadcast industry. David Hoffmann, who controls the Hoffmann family of companies and last year bought a controlling interest in Lee Enterprises, a major newspaper publisher that owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has purchased the six St. Louis radio stations owned by Audacy, Inc. That group includes the heritage 50kw AM station, KMOX.

It’s a purchase of local interest for Mr. Hoffmann. The billionaire founder of DHR Global, the world's largest privately held executive search firm, Hoffmann grew up in Washington, Missouri, just 50 miles west of St. Louis. Among the “family of companies,” Hoffmann Commercial Real Estate has considerable holdings near its current home, in nearby Augusta, Missouri. He stepped down as CEO of the Hoffmann family of companies in 2022, because “my wife and I wanted more time to spend on our investments in Augusta.”

Whatever Hoffmann’s motivation is to grow his media holdings in St. Louis, the transaction removes Audacy, the nation’s second-largest radio company, from the country’s 25th-largest market. Audacy, like most major players in the radio business, has had a tough financial time since its 2017 merger with CBS’s radio stations division. (It was known as Entercom back then; it changed its name to Audacy in 2021.) Now the company is privately owned, with Soros Fund Management having a controlling interest.

Audacy isn’t alone in struggling with the business of owning and operating a lot of radio stations. Its portfolio of 220 stations (before the St. Louis sale) was built beginning in the “go-go” years of the 1990’s, following FCC deregulation on how many radio stations a single company could own. At that time, the company followed the rush to acquire as many radio stations as possible, following the lead of Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel became iHeartMedia in 2014, now the nation’s largest radio station owner with more than 850 stations in its roster,

It was the hyperscaling era for radio, long before the term was coined.

So the question we’re pondering is this: Does the purchase of an entire local market of radio stations from a large group owner like Audacy by a well-funded local owner like David Hoffmann represent the beginning of a sea change in the broadcasting industry — or is it just a “one off” type transaction that brings in some quick cash to a large owner like Audacy who could use the cash, especially if the buyer was willing to pay a decent price for the properties to go along with its ownership of the major local newspaper? (As of this writing, we haven’t seen the price that Hoffmann paid for the radio stations.)

All that brings us to the week’s other big media news, the announced spin-off of NBCUniversal by owner Comcast. The new NBCUniversal will include ownership of the NBC television network and the NBC-owned stations. And while, at first glance, it might appear that Comcast's move supports the view that this is another example of an anti-hyperscaling trend developing, there is strong belief amongst the financial community that separating the two companies makes the new NBCU a target for acquisition.

Or the split could free up NBCU to be an acquirer. Maybe bringing its just-spun-off cable networks, now known as Versant, back under the same company-owned roof (though not necessarily under the same physical roof at 30 Rock in NYC). Then there is the not-entirely-crazy scenario that NBCU could consider going on its own local station-acquiring spree, and buy up any number of current local NBC affiliates.

After all, if Perry Sook is successful in his quest to hyperscale his company’s ownership of local TV stations beyond whatever toothless regulatory limitations may be on the books, why couldn’t a TV network owner do the same?

Because when it comes to hyperscaling, maybe those 1990s Pringles commercials put it best:

“Once you pop, you can’t stop.”

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“To do do, down dooby doo down down. Comma, comma, down, dooby doo down down…”

Sedaka’s tune seemed to be the soundtrack our subconscious wanted to attach to the big breaking news in the financial world. Comcast will split itself into two companies. The move will place its NBCUniversal media holdings into a separate company, which will include the NBC and Telemundo television networks, the Peacock streaming business, Universal’s movie studios and theme parks, and also the various European holdings under the Sky brand.

Comcast will return to its roots as primarily the nation’s largest broadband (also known as cable) services provider, while adding wireless services to its consumer-facing Xfinity brand. Comcast will hold nearly 20% of the new NBCUniversal for some period. The deal, expected to close in less than a year, will result in current Comcast shareholders receiving stock in the newly spun-off media company, which will be known as simply “NBCUniversal.”

This will make the three largest companies in the media/entertainment sector look remarkably similar over the next 12 months or so. Disney has television networks (ABC), various movie studios, and, of course, a few theme parks amongst its holdings. Paramount/Skydance will have a similar portfolio, if and more likely when it closes on Warner Bros. Discovery. That will include television networks (CBS), various movie studios, but notably, no theme parks.

But while Disney and Paramount will hold various cable networks (like ESPN for the former and CNN for the latter) within their portfolios, NBCUniversal will emerge from its Comcast ownership unencumbered by those declining businesses. Comcast spun off its cable network group, including MSNBC (rebranded as MS Now), CNBC, and others, into a separate business known as Versant earlier this year.

The piece that will make the new NBCUniversal the most different from its two main rivals will be outside of the United States, and it’s this part of the split between the legacy cable operator and its various media holdings that we find the most interesting part of today’s announcement.

We’d speculate that most people don’t know a ton about Sky, which is technically named Sky Group Limited. The UK-based company is Europe’s largest media company and the largest pay-TV provider. It was Comcast Chairman Brian Roberts’ consolation prize when he dropped out of 2017’s bidding war to acquire Fox from Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch had held nearly 40% of Sky since its founding as the offspring of the 1990 merger of pay-TV rivals Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting into BSkyB, which eventually dropped the two Bs to simply be known as Sky. Murdoch would eventually sell his Sky holdings to Comcast in 2018.

In the 1990s, direct-to-home satellite providers were booming. Seen as the first real viable alternative to cable TV for delivering all the channels that weren’t available from terrestrial broadcasters, Sky grew in Europe at the same time DirecTV did here in the U.S. That included swallowing up rivals as small satellite dishes began to dot the landscape.

For its part, Sky is a much larger media company than its US-based cousin. Sky operates more like a broadcast network in that it produces a large quantity of original programming, including coverage of the very popular Premier League in the football (soccer) crazy UK, along with F1 racing and other major sports. It also operates a large news network, with Sky News rivaling the BBC in the 24-hour news business.

All of which might explain why Comcast chose to put Sky into the soon-to-be-separate NBCUniversal portfolio. It is a major content acquisition and production company, but it is also a major distribution and infrastructure provider, similar to what the newly slimmed-down Comcast will be. Color us a bit intrigued that Sky didn’t stay with Comcast.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook newsletter from The New York Times speculates on what deals might be ahead for the newly split Comcast and NBCU. He suggests that NBCU could be a target to either do some hunting for acquisitions like AMC or Starz, or NBCU could become the hunted, and be eyed for being taken over by the likes of Netflix, Apple, Amazon, or even Disney itself.

Could one company own two broadcast networks, such as ABC and NBC, in the United States? Well, if one company can own two local television stations affiliated with two different networks, you have to wonder what the logic would be to prevent that on the larger network level?

On the call with investors this morning, Chairman Brian Roberts was asked if the move to split Comcast from NBCU was a step toward potential strategic transactions for either company. His response: “absolutely not.” But given the current penchant for consolidation in the media business, we don’t believe that anything is beyond the possible these days.

In early trading on the stock market, Comcast (CMCSA) shares were trading at least 10% higher. The stock has been, like much of the media sector, pretty stuck in neutral for the past few years. It will be interesting to see what else transpires throughout that sector as we count down the next 12 months.

Back in 1975, when we were starting our broadcasting career by spinning records on the radio (and yes, it was still AM radio) we were informed by the late Casey Kasem on his eponymous “American Top 40” weekly countdown that Neil Sedaka had first recorded “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” as a single in 1962. It would top the charts, reaching number one in August of that year. The 1975 remake would only reach the No. 8 spot on the Billboard “Hot 100” chart.

But that was better than another remake of the song, done just three years earlier in 1972. That version never made it past the 28th top spot on the Hot 100 chart. A bit of a surprise, given that the artists were being seen weekly at that point. The artists? That would be television’s “The Partridge Family.”

As Casey would always say at this point in a musical backstory: “Now…on with the countdown!”

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The Apple story was pretty easy to tell on the surface level. The maker of iPhones and Macs raised its prices on most everything it sells, with the exception of iPhones, the company's best-selling product. The reason for the price hikes? Apple’s outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, blamed the worldwide memory chip shortage on the meteoric rise of AI-supporting data centers, seemingly everywhere.

OK, seems simple enough. But maybe this isn’t a general interest story. Maybe it’s just another business item that perhaps warrants pulling in an AP story for the website and letting the network handle this one?

But hold on, is this a story that the audience might be interested in? Given that we have seen local TV newscasts dutifully cover every announcement of a new iPhone or the recently announced upgrades to the Siri assistant that is built into every iPhone, and whether those AI-powered features represent a larger story in Apple’s lagging in the artificial intelligence race?

We saw many of those stories on local newscasts we checked in on.

Again, we would argue that the fundamental topics of these stories, all centered on the same company, one of the world’s largest, are telling of a larger struggle in every local newsroom. Figuring out what stories actually matter to the audience and delivering those in a manner that makes people want to consume the newscast in some form, on some platform.

The Apple price increase story has a fair number of angles. The stated reason for the move is that memory prices have skyrocketed as the chips have gone into short supply. Is it true that as of this article’s publication, there is only one significant memory “fabrication” plant in the entire United States—and that single Micron Technology plant in Virginia generates only two percent of the worldwide supply of memory chips? Plus, wasn’t there a recent government plan to address this problem?

Yes, yes, and yes.

The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law by former President Joe Biden in 2022. The approximately 280 billion dollars allocated by the bill included over 50 billion targeted towards “the manufacturing of semiconductors” here in the United States. What has happened since? To directly quote the Wikipedia page on the Act: “…these projects are faced with delays in receiving grants due to bureaucratic hurdles, shortages of skilled workers, and congressional funding deals that have limited or cut research provisions of the Act by tens of billions of dollars.”

There are new semiconductor manufacturing plants, known specifically as “fabrication plants” or just “fabs” by the tech world, under construction. But getting from breaking ground to producing chips at volume takes years, and projects to bring new “fabs” online won’t be completed until 2027 at the earliest.

Until then, the U.S. is at the mercy of large semiconductor makers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics. And of course, prices for their products have been impacted by the on-again, off-again, and back-on-again imposition of tariffs.

We’re reminded here of Ben Stein’s hilarious role as the economics teacher in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” who is doing the deadpan roll call and asking “Bueller?…Bueller?…Bueller?” If you’ve seen the movie (and what is wrong with you if you haven’t), you’ll recall that in the next scene, we see Stein’s classroom, where he is lecturing about the effectiveness of tariffs with the dialogue that includes: “Anyone..anyone? Raised or lowered tariffs? Raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”

Given the frozen teenage faces that director John Hughes intercuts with Stein’s lecturing, the same faces that anyone who ever sat in a high-school classroom has made, it is no wonder that a local TV newscast might avoid this kind of economics story.

But given the real-world reality of Apple raising prices on its products, just before the back-to-school buying spree gets underway in the coming weeks, this development would even qualify for some coverage under the heading of consumer news. Perhaps even more so, because Amazon’s Prime Day sales event, currently underway, still has most of the same Apple products either at the original (lower) prices or possibly on sale at their lowest price this summer.

Perhaps you are thinking of the inevitable defense to why this story didn’t make your local news last night: “It’s not really a local story. It doesn’t impact that many people in the community.” Well, that might seem the case, but we’d counter by asking just how many people in the community were impacted by the random crime event or vehicle crash that was probably on your local newscast last night?

By example, we’ll offer up what we saw on our local Fox O&O’s newscast last night after the coverage of the USA vs. Turkiye World Cup match. A Breaking News animation alert came on the screen, and the anchors delivered the news that a single-engine private plane had crashed four hours earlier at an airport some two hours south of the Twin Cities, near Rochester, Minnesota. The 74-year-old pilot, the single occupant of the aircraft, had died at the scene, but there were no other injuries and no other damage to any structures near the airport. Those were all the details available at the time.

The anchors then made the jarring pivot — to return to covering the World Cup, and a small watch party with local people enjoying the game. A story, based on the daylight in the reporter’s stand-up, was clearly recorded before the end of the match that had just concluded with a disappointing, yet relatively meaningless loss.

Of course, the small airplane crash is a news story. But given the facts available, including the location being hours away, in a completely different television market, did it really impact that many people that it should have warranted being the breaking news lead story for the significant audience coming off the primetime World Cup match?

With no other facts known at the time, we will state with some confidence that Apple’s price hikes would be of more interest than the “Breaking News” of the small plane crash hours away. And for the record, no—we wouldn’t have led the newscast with either story.

Our point is this: Economics stories might not seem like the flashiest stories of any given day. But in most people’s worldview, the whole issue of “affordability” is a daily concern. Like the completely disengaged faces in the movie classroom, you may not need to know the specifics of the significance of “The Smoot-Hawley Act.” Still, you definitely care about what is going on with the cost of everything, every single day.

And that should be reported more in every single newscast.

A final note about that scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” We recently saw an interview with Ben Stein in which he tells the story of how John Hughes asked him to step in as the teacher in the classroom for the scene in the movie! Stein had just been on the set, visiting a friend who was a producer on the film, when Hughes noticed his distinct voice and asked if he’d like to be the unseen voice of the teacher.

Stein jumped at the chance and so entertained the cast and crew on the set that Hughes decided to put him on camera in what became an unforgettable scene in the now 40-year-old comedy film. (It was released in June of 1986.)

Oh, and he improvised his entire dialogue for the scene. No script, no pages. He just adlibbed the entire thing.

“Anyone? Anyone?”

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Now this was back in the pre-internet days, and part of the appeal of watching SportsCenter for its many fans was actually learning who won and lost in any given sport, on any given evening. To that end, SportsCenter anchors prided themselves on setting up the inevitable highlights with a carefully crafted storyline that usually didn’t give away the game’s ending. The final score was revealed in the graphic that immediately followed the highlights. (This had been the format of ESPN’s nightly flagship show since it had debuted with the network’s launch in 1979.)

According to Eisen and Cohn’s recollections, the news announcing that “the ticker” would be airing during editions of SportsCenter was not greeted with much enthusiasm by those who appeared at the anchor desk. Many of them believed that this ticker would “give away” the story of games long before they would be shown during SportsCenter telecasts.

(We would note that there was an equal lack of enthusiasm some years earlier when the network debuted the ticker’s predecessor, known internally as “the 28/58 updates,” which was the airing of sports scores at the bottom of the screen, twice each hour at :28 and :58 minutes past each hour. We happen to know this because we were part of its launch during our time in the 1980s working at the “World Wide Leader.”)

Tickers had become common on 24-hour news channels at the time. CNN had featured one since the 1992 Gulf War. So, ESPN decided to make them a persistent feature of the sports network’s programming. A reminder to the younger members of our audience that we are talking about a time before everyone was getting scores and then video highlights delivered instantly to the phones in their pockets.

Rich Eisen recounted how he went into a manager’s office at ESPN to say he thought putting this ticker thing on was a bad idea, especially if it was going to air during SportsCenter editions. He was apparently given a few minutes to present his case, only to be told that the ticker was a “done deal” and more or less to show himself out. (He would be told he could show himself out of the network a few years later, when he would join the new NFL Network as its first on-air hire.)

We’ve been thinking about this story ever since hearing it with this question in mind: In an age of always-available information at the tap of a finger, via countless devices, have TV’s on-screen “tickers” outlived their usefulness?

That question could be followed by perhaps the even larger one: Is there too much crap on the television screen, especially during newscasts (yes, even sports-centric ones)? Morning news seems to be primetime for tickers, displaying everything from news to last night’s sports scores to the morning commute times. The ultimate display of this visual excess can be found every day on Bloomberg Television. It is that network’s attempt to emulate the company’s ubiquitous Bloomberg Terminal that sits on the desk of every financial trader, much like the old ticker-tape machines once did.

The timing of this query isn’t just from listening to Eisen’s conversation with his colleague, Cohn. No, we have been pondering the question for a few days since watching the various explanations of why they called it a “ticker-tape parade” in New York City, during the celebration of the city’s latest heroes, the Knicks as NBA Champions.

In case you don’t know the history, at the beginning of the 1900s, Wall Street financial types received stock quotes telegraphed from the floor of the stock exchange via a mechanical device that punched out the information on a long ribbon of paper. This was known as a “ticker-tape.” Each day produced a significant quantity of the stuff, and at some point, for some celebration in the streets of Lower Manhattan, somebody had the bright idea to throw it out the windows, raining down on those being honored.

Technology replaced the ticker-tape machines with electronic displays by the 1960s, and so for the occasional parades in the “canyon of heros” for everyone from the astronauts to the Yankees after winning a World Series, the paper tape would be replaced with shredded bits of paper.

We’d argue that the ticker displays on television newscasts should follow their paper tape predecessors and become relics of the past.

Given the amount of information that is now displayed during a typical TV newscast, including the multiple instances of on-screen branding that typically appear, what does a line (or two) of text marching across the bottom of the screen tell you that the newscast isn’t going to tell you — or that you didn’t already know about from the incessant pinging of your smartphone throughout the day? It isn’t like the on-screen ticker is that well curated in many instances.

Maybe we should concede here that tickers can have a place during breaking news or severe weather situations. A ticker (or “crawl,” as some newsrooms prefer to call them) is a definite plus, if only to deliver crucial information continuously throughout the event.

But we’ve seen too many tickers labeled “Breaking News” featuring outdated or overblown headlines.

We’d go so far as to say that one of the best possible use cases for the long-promised “NextGenTV” digital television format (aka ATSC 3.0) would be to allow viewers to see a newscast with or without tickers displayed on the screen non-stop. This idea doesn’t really have to wait, it could be done right now utilizing a “dot-two,” or other numbered “digital subchannel” from any local TV station.

Of course, that would require the bandwidth currently occupied by one of the countless recycled television filled channels called MeTV, RetroTV, COZI TV, etc., Or the occasional home shopping channels that are still in business.

Honestly, we don’t expect this idea to take off anytime soon. Ditching the ticker seems like a bridge too far in 2026. Especially as some local stations actually make money from their ticker presentations, usually by attaching the logo of one of the countless personal injury law firms. Or some other local business.

Like lemmings to the sea, the headlines will likely keep marching across the bottom of the screen.

Before we sign off for today, congratulations to the aforementioned Linda Cohn on the announcement of her retirement from ESPN this week. She’ll do her final shows this Friday, June 26th, after being recognized as anchoring more SportsCenter shows than anyone else. The tally is over 5,500 in her nearly 34 years with the network. In a business that was predominantly male for so many years, it’s nice to see a woman sign off holding that record.

Wonder if it will earn a spot on that night’s ticker?

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Obviously, we could pontificate at length about NBCU’s Anzio Williams saying “the quiet part way out loud” about Comcast donating to the controversial White House ballroom before a gathering at the IRE conference in Maryland. Whether his comments will rise to a Scott Pelley-level event remains to be seen. Still, many eyes are waiting to see if Mr. Williams’ use of the “my comments were taken out of context” defense will be enough to save his job as EVP of “Talent, Strategic Initiatives and Team Impact” for the NBC Owned Stations.

But aside from the news in the news business, we thought we’d share some content we consumed over the past week that you might enjoy to fill some time during what we hope will be a great summer weekend ahead. (As always, we’ve included helpful links to our selected offerings where possible.)

First on our list would be the documentary titled “Lorne” that is now available to stream on YouTube or via your Peacock subscription. (Should we still say “stream” versus just saying “watch”? Seems like a dated reference somehow.) “Lorne” would be Mr. Lorne Michaels to those of us who have only watched the television show he has helmed over the past 51 seasons. The documentary seeks to bring to the big screen a profile of the enigmatic Michaels. (“Lorne” was a feature film release before landing on Peacock.) The film builds on the terrific biography by Susan Morrison, published last year. If you haven’t read it, it is out in paperback and a great read.

The film version of “Lorne” is a great watch, even if you may not be a huge fan of “Saturday Night Live.” But for anyone who has ever produced anything on television, regardless of what level, the look inside the process that brings a live 90-minute network show together in just one week is definitely must-see TV.

While you’re on Peacock, you might also take in some episodes of “30 Rock,” one of the funniest shows ever, especially knowing from the “Lorne” documentary that Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin had the roots of the latter’s character “Jack Donaghy” based in the real-life Michaels.

But if you might favor something that you could just listen to while perhaps lounging in the sun near a body of water, then allow us to recommend the Tuesday, 6/16 edition of the Pivot podcast from Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. We’re unabashed fans of both hosts across their separate mini media empires. Still, the combination of the two just talking about everything from the UFC spectacle on the White House lawn to why Fox buying Roku makes a ton of sense.

While you’re at it, you might as well listen to today’s episode as well. Kara and Scott usually nail an alpha podcast twice each week. They are in “heavy rotation,” as we used to say in our days of playing hit records on the radio (that being waaaaaay back in the day.)

If you are tired of reading all the sudden items appearing about why the Nexstar-TEGNA merger, currently in legal purgatory, must be allowed to be fully implemented, lest local journalism as we know it will come to an end, then let us recommend a couple of other things you might want to read.

On our bookshelf at the moment is the very interesting and best-selling title, “How to Rule the World” from Stanford University student Theo Baker. The book is a revelation into the world within that storied academic institution and how it produces the “dweebocracy that sets the agenda for the planet” according to the New York Times Book Review. To us it was just a fascinating read that we’d recommend to everyone.

If you need a shorter item to peruse poolside, we’d point you to this article in The Hollywood Reporter titled “What Hollywood Can Teach Harvard.” It’s a fascinating look at a class in storytelling as a political tool, held at another storied academic institution. The list of guest speakers is a who’s who of famous creators from Hollywood and their key lessons are summarized by Marc Adelman who held the class at Harvard’s “Institute of Politics.” Even if you have zero interest, you’ll take something away from reading this. Trust us.

While you are on THR’s site, you might also want to read up on Hollywood’s hottest topic this morning, just why did Netflix cancel its series The Boroughs, before the show’s premiere week was even over. You could also watch the series, knowing that there will be only the one season to enjoy. (A fate reaching far too many shows in the uber-competitive business of streaming TV.)

Hopefully we’ve given you some decent suggestions on how to spend some time before getting back to the grind next week.

We’ll be back to it then as well, and look forward to seeing you back here.

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Well, for starters, it’s fried. In the same machines that fry the chain’s amazing French fries. It contains a filling similar to that of an actual apple pie, if that pie were made by a giant food corporation and filled with not-quite-all-natural ingredients.

And it’s damn delicious.

At least it was when we last had one. Which turns out to be in the early 1990s, when McDonald’s moved to having baked apple pie pockets on the menu. It was done, “for health reasons,” the chain said at the time. Apparently, on the occasion of the nation’s 250th anniversary of being founded, health considerations may be briefly suspended so that said pies can accompany orders — even to places like the White House.

Listen, we think a lot of things from the 1990s are worth reconsidering and appreciating for their true greatness. One of those things is the television program Inside the NBA.

Technically, Inside the NBA debuted in 1989, but it was 1990 that Ernie Johnson, Jr. took over the role of hosting the program, so that’s the decade we place the show’s true birth in. And some 36 years later, Inside the NBA, because it moved to a new network and due to that move, the show was able to wrap up its greatest season ever.

Inside, as we’ll shorthand it for the rest of this column, was born when Turner Network Television acquired its first NBA contract to televise games in the 1989-1990 season. From inauspicious beginnings, the show has grown into what many now call “the best studio show in sports television.” The additions along the way of opinionated and outspoken NBA greats Kenny “The Jet” Smith in 1998, Charles Barkley in 2000, and finally Shaquille O’Neal in 2011 have made the show truly “must-see TV” not just for basketball fans, but really any sports fan.

Yes, Inside has all the trappings of every sports-centric studio show. But the standard-issue highlights and analysis take a back seat to the personalities and one-upmanship of the participants. And giving credit where it’s due, host Ernie Johnson plays it all with a deftness and amusement that gives the proceedings an insouciance that would be perfect, even if it didn’t come with an occasional seriousness and gravity that gives the program a total range that is surprisingly impressive.

That network move we mentioned before was on full display this past NBA season. In getting itself ready to be sold to the highest bidder, WarnerBros Discovery, which owns TNT (and all the former Turner networks, including CNN) lost its contract to carry NBA games and it looked like “Inside the NBA” was headed for the shelves of television history. But in one of the smarter moves to ever be made in Bristol, Connecticut, the headquarters of the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader” of sports television, ESPN, Inside The NBA was drafted to be part of that network’s NBA coverage.

The truly inspired part of ESPN’s pickup of the show was to simply “not screw around with it.” Inside is still produced by TNT Sports in its Atlanta studios, and delivered to ESPN pretty much the same as it was in previous years. The on-camera folks all returned and what makes the show great is still on full display before, during and after each NBA game that ESPN airs.

And because the ESPN schedule includes the NBA Finals, which airs on the sister Disney-owned ABC television network, Inside the NBA got to do something this season that it never has been able to do before: Be live at the sites for each of the final games that determined the league’s champion.

It was some glorious stuff to watch. On top of the games that were pretty good as well. (Especially if you happened to be a Knicks fan.)

We share this appreciation of what could just as easily be dismissed as “another studio-based sports highlights show” because we think it has some lessons to teach about how to create any version of “must see TV” on any scale.

Inside may be the best example of what we were talking about in our last item here discussing Quarterbacks versus Teams at the anchor desk. While “EJ” as fans know Ernie Johnson is called, could be considered “the quarterback” of the show, he sets up and questions each of the other three stars like a conductor cueing sections of a symphony orchestra. His knowledge and love of the game are evident, but so is his understanding of the personas he is working with. The foursome is so strong that they added doing studio work during the annual NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament back in 2011, when Turner Networks began sharing “Final Four” coverage with CBS.

It is just as watchable when they are talking about college basketball rather than the pro game. Kudos as well to the production team behind the broadcast for being smart enough to roll with whatever the on-camera folks want to do and creating moments around things as simple as one of them having to take an unscheduled trip to the restroom during a commercial break.

Also, as the TV music aficionados that we are, a shout out to the memorable Inside The NBA theme frrom film composer and former frontman for the band “Yes,” Trevor Rabin. Airing for well over two decades, it is among the all-time great sports-on-TV themes. Even The New York Times said so. (ESPN has kept it as well.)

The foursome at the Inside the NBA anchor desk is reminiscent of when the best local television newscasts had foursomes that not only delivered the news, weather and sports each day, but also attracted an audience because of the interactions between the four that took place throughout the newscast. What was initially derided as “happy talk” by journalism purists, was seen by the audience as an attractive quality to have in the people they choose to invite into their home each night (and later, each morning as well.)

It turns out that people like to watch people who are interesting and have something to say.

Given that the 2025-2026 NBA season has ended, the Inside crew has “Gone Fishin’” until this October when they will return. We can hardly wait to see them again.

We just hope that the McDonald’s Fried Apple Pie is still on the menu then.

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We were immediately intrigued, since we are in the midst of a small quarterback drama here in the home of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings. There is a growing controversy over who will get the starting job when the regular season opens in a few months. (That’s right, with the NBA and NHL championships being decided over this last weekend, it is time to start thinking about football.)

The ad got us to do what ads are supposed to do, and that was to click on it to land on Barry’s Substack, where he explains the argument for moving away from the standard pairings of news anchors in local newscasts to having one “context-capable anchor” for a “context-capable newscast.” He goes on to lay out the thought-provoking case for making systemic changes in newsrooms to build a team to support the rise of newscasts centered on a single on-air host who can do more than just read introductions to each news story. A quarterback, if you will, who can execute the challenge of “managing the game,” as football analyst-types love to say.

All of which we think is interesting, but ultimately flawed in its premise.

If we take the football QB analogy further, the history of the game teaches us that for every Hall of Fame name you can think of, there are at least two or three names you can probably come up with who never found that level of success. And often, the most successful quarterbacks were not the ones most heralded coming out of college or picked first in the NFL’s annual player draft.

This is where we would remind you that Tom Brady was the 199th pick in the 2000 draft and was considered at the time, “a lightly regarded prospect” coming out of Michigan. Of course, he went on to become (with apologies to Larry David) “pretty, pretty good” at the position, winning seven Super Bowls and being widely regarded as “the GOAT” at the position. (We’ll avoid the far-too-easy commentary about his uneven transition to the broadcast booth in the years since ending his playing days.)

If you need a name to be the polar opposite of Tom Brady as a QB, then consider the less-than-remarkable playing years of one Ryan Leaf. Or perhaps JaMarcus Russell. Neither of those gentlemen will have a place in Akron, never mind down the road in Canton.

We point all this out to say that any team that bets its future on a single player is usually disappointed by the results. For every Most Valuable Player named Tom Brady, there are the names of all the other players on the same team who make all those championship seasons possible. Maybe even a coach like Bill Belichick had a hand in creating that success.

Yes, coaches have been known to help turn a good player into a great one.

To his credit, Barry Nash has long worked as a coach for folks who earn a living in front of a television camera. And his message here is not without merit. It is a modern-day variation of what was once widely endorsed as the “command anchor” model.

Our counter to the message is that great news anchors, just like great quarterbacks, aren’t in strong supply. And while we are at it, let’s make it clear that, unlike in football, there have been — and are — great anchors who are women. So the pool of potential greatness is a bit larger than on the gridiron.

Furthermore, the best local newscasts we have ever seen, both past and present, have been those in which the entire on-air team was competent and cohesive. Co-anchors who presented the news with real and relatable interactions, rather than trying to play ping-pong as if they were auditioning for the sequel to “Marty Supreme.” Those teams always included Weather and Sports anchors who could have genuine conversations with the news anchors and were given the breathing room to do so during the program, rather than appearing like they were coming from another part of the building.

One person can tell you something. A group of people can share something with you. It’s the difference between having an influencer in their basement or spare bedroom on a webcam telling you something and a team of professional communicators informing you about what is going on in the world.

In recent years, great news teams have become harder to find. The business has multiple narratives as to what has led to this point. The expense of paying commensurate salaries to multiple people is no small consideration, as the business's economics have contracted. There also isn’t much patience anymore in selecting and developing a team. It takes time and, of course, work.

Again, as in football, a lot of hard work is required to achieve greatness. Coaches (in this case, newsroom leaders) have to build a foundation for success and then be relentless at pushing to achieve it each day in every aspect of the newsroom.

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.” The words of the fictional baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, as delivered by Tom Hanks in the movie “A League of Their Own.” (Another GOAT who knows a thing or two about communicating in front of a camera.)

Another great football coach, Bill Parcells, may have made our argument in the fewest words.

"Individuals play the game, but teams win championships.”

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