Nexstar Media

As ATSC marked its 40^th anniversary at last week’s conference, conversations resoundingly turned to alternative uses for the NextGen TV spectrum including datacasting and PNT applications.

The Nexstar CEO said: “At the local level [LIV Golf] is selling like gangbusters. Car dealers are not deeply involved in national or international geopolitical conversations. They want to move product. This is televised sports. They’re all in.”

It’s paying $35 million to McKinnon Broadcasting to add the independent to its station portfolio that already includes the market’s Fox affiliate, KWSB.

Executives from Nexstar, Cox Media Group, Gray Television and ABC Owned Stations shared how their content businesses are evolving into 24/7 news networks, diginets, FAST channels, hyperlocal offerings and more at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at NAB in Las Vegas last week. Pictured (l-r): Brad Wall, LTN Global; Adrianne Anderson, ABC Owned Stations; Steve Pruett, Cox Media Group; Sean Compton, Nexstar Media; and Pat LaPlatney, Gray Television. (Alyssa Wesley photo)

Top executives from Cox Media Group, Nexstar, Gray Television and ABC Owned Stations frame up how they’re building content everywhere lineups, then branding and promoting them locally and beyond in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s Programming Everywhere conference at the NAB Show in Las Vegas on April 16. Register here.

The veteran news executive will oversee Nexstar Media’s national digital news programming.

Less than a month after Nexstar Media closed a deal to take 75% ownership of The CW, the broadcast network has been hit with dozens of layoffs. The exact number of departures is still becoming clear, but one person with knowledge of the situation pegged it at about 30 to 40. While Nexstar is known for local stations, the company also operates NewsNation, which it overhauled and reformatted from its prior incarnation, WGN America, after acquiring Tribune Media in 2019. The lower cost profile of news programming, a distinctly different neighborhood from the scripted fare that was briefly WGNA’s specialty, was the driving motivation of the makeover.

The FCC has proposed fining TV stations owned by Cunningham Broadcasting, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group more than $3 million collectively for alleged violations of the agency’s children’s-TV programming rules. The stations “apparently willfully and repeatedly violated rules limiting commercial matter in children’s programming,“ the FCC said, but conceded the actions were inadvertent.

Nexstar promotes the stations’ general sales manager to succeed Judson Beck  as leader of the Wisconsin Fox outlets.

WDVM and WDCW will occupy a new state-of-the-art newsroom and studio. The combined operation will offer 67-plus hours of local news and be known as “DC News Now” and will be led by veteran journalist and news management executive Ben Dobson.

BitPath, the Sinclair-Nexstar joint venture pursuing non-traditional revenue prospects from ATSC 3.0 spectrum, is experimenting with a new system that would improve location data accuracy, while also developing an IoT solution enabling energy utilities to better communicate with customers in times of peak need.

The veteran network, film and consumer communications professional will oversee internal and external communications at Nexstar’s NewsNation, Antenna TV, Rewind TV and WGN-AM Chicago.

The veteran executive with 25-plus years of broadcast and digital experience will lead the broadcast division’s multiplatform group sales efforts.

An 11 p.m. newscast joins the schedule; the morning news block adds a fourth hour; Rush Hour expands to two hours; weekend evening newscasts expand to three hours. By June the Nexstar cable network will offer more than 60 hours of live news, analysis, and talk every week.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center openings for a digital media producer and a senior vice president of sponsorship development and group sales.

The veteran broadcasting and sales executive is tapped to lead WCIA and WCIX.

The media executive with nearly 20 years of broadcast management and sales experience will oversee WREG and WJKT in Tennessee.

The media executive with nearly 20 years of local broadcast experience will oversee Nexstar’s WQRF, mystateline.com and Mission Broadcasting’s WTVO.

Beginning June 1, veteran media executive and Nexstar SVP-regional manager Andy Alford will lead the company’s 198 television stations, succeeding the retiring Tim Busch.

Las Vegas and Portland, Ore. will light up their NextGen TV markets in June from their initially-slated late April launch, but the broadcasters and coalition driving the new industry standard forward say major launches will still move ahead this year. The launches will coincide with the arrival in retail stores of the first 3.0-capable sets. Above, six LG sets will bear the NextGen TV logo, including the 55-, 65- and 77-inch class GX Gallery Series 4K Ultra HD models.

CLTV, the 24-hour local cable news channel launched as Chicagoland Television on New Year’s Day 1993, is shutting down at the end of the month, Nexstar Media Group announced Monday.

Nexstar CEO Perry Sook sacrificed 19 stations to bring his proposed $4.1 billion merger in line with FCC and DOJ ownership limits. There is now no reason why regulators should stand in the way of  the deal, including the transfer of Tribune’s top four duopoly in Indianapolis. Also, here’s a quick review of the winners and losers in Nexstar’s spinoff auction.

Apollo Global is cobbling together a major new station group by melding Cox, Northwest and spinoffs from the Nexstar-Tribune merger. Not much is known about the four-sided deal at this point, but it’s got everybody talking. Most surprising to me: Northwest and its retrans contracts may be the key to the whole thing.

Nexstar Media and TDS Telecom said they reached a new retransmission consent agreement, ending a blackout that has lasted since the beginning of the year. TDS said the comprehensive agreement will mean the restoration of the signals of Nexstar stations to more than 50,000 TDS consumers in eight states.

In a filing with the FCC, the station group says it will ask the agency for a waiver of the rule that prohibits common ownership of two top four stations in a market. Nexstar also acknowledges that it will have to exit markets to comply with the commission’s 39% ownership cap. As things now stand, the merger would swell Nexstar’s coverage to 47.1%.

Keeping a station on the air during a disaster means crafting and rehearsing a plan that’s often based on previous experiences. As Nexstar’s ABC affiliate in Panama City, Fla., learned from October’s Hurricane Michael, sometimes the unforeseen still happens. After the WMBB building lost power, the news team set up in the station’s parking lot for newscasts.