Dispatches from the local television business from a small team of industry veterans working hard to provide the inside story.
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While on our annual vacation, the good folks at TVNewsCheck.com have issued their annual list of the Top 25 TV Station Groups, the definitive ranking of the companies that own the vast majority of this nation’s local television outlets.
We’ll start here with an infamous quote from an infamous business leader.
A brief note to make you aware that our editor of TVND.com, Kirk Varner, appears this week on Tim Hanlon’s excellent “In the Vicinity” podcast.
In what has to be the early lead for the least surprising decision by a governmental agency this year, your Federal Communications Commission voted last Thursday to make it official and do away with the congressionally mandated rule that prevented any one company from owning so many local broadcast television stations that they reached over 39% of the nation’s television households.
Like most people we know, there is a collection of music stuck in our heads here in the TVND.com newsroom.
As we reach the midpoint of this week, the new order of things is settling in within those local television markets where the “seismic” changes occurred last Saturday.
We were reminded of that slogan, first used by top 40 radio stations back in the 1960s, today because, as we noted earlier this week, the pace of change in the six markets where Nexstar will lose the CBS network affiliation on its local stations would be rapid.
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.
“Loyalty that is bought with money may be overcome by money.” - Seneca
Some Observations Post The World Cup
In what has to be the least surprising legal action of the year (so far), the official word came down yesterday that a dozen state attorneys general were filing a lawsuit in federal court to block the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.
