Sinclair Broadcast Group

21st Century Fox and the private equity firm Blackstone are in talks to launch a bid for Tribune Media, a source with knowledge of the matter said Sunday. The deal currently under discussion would see Blackstone and Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox forming a joint venture. Blackstone would provide the cash for the acquisition while Fox would add all its owned-and-operated television stations to the joint venture.

Top technologists at Al Jazeera, Sinclair and Nexstar predict the cloud will help producers break news more quickly, while artificial intelligence and Big Data will help them mine their archives for information, not just about news trends, but about how to shape stories for different audiences and distribution channels including mobile, social and OTT.

At the Imagine Communications NAB Show press conference in Las Vegas, the company unveiled its Open Zenium initiative to further advance adoption of IP workflows and discussed how IP and the cloud can be used by broadcasters looking at how to deliver personalized, targeted content and ads in an ATSC 3.0 future.

The deal will add Bonten Media Group’s 14 stations in eight markets that reach approximately 1% of the U.S. TV households. Sinclair’s total coverage now stands at 39.6%.

The 2017 NAB Show exhibition opens Monday, April 24, and there will be much to see for broadcast engineers and technologists who find themselves grappling with the repack of the TV spectrum and a nearly completed new broadcast standard. Five top techs — one each from Gray Television, NBCU O&Os, Nexstar Media Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tegna Media — talk technology and what they will be looking for at this year’s NAB Show. For a recap of TVNewsCheck’s multi-part roundup of NAB Tech Hot Topics, click here.

Bloomberg’s Alex Sherman reports that a jump in stock prices today of Sinclair and Tribune may be due to the belief that an oft-rumored merger of the station groups may be imminent. The FCC is expected tomorrow to clear the way for the merger by easing its national TV ownership cap.

The two House Democrats tell FCC Chairman Pai that restoring the UHF discount would further concentrate station ownership. They also say take a shot at Sinclair Broadcast Group.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has purchased an R&S THU9evo high-power UHF transmitter from Rohde & Schwarz, which will be installed later this year as part of the company’s compliance with the […]

Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign spokesman, has joined Sinclair Broadcast Group as chief political analyst. Epshteyn will serve as a commentator on political news coverage offered by Sinclair’s 173 television stations.

The network will be built through the merging of 120 Sports’ live studio operations, Silver Chalice’s Campus Insiders’ live collegiate games and Sinclair’s American Sports Network’s distribution and live collegiate games.

On Jan. 31, staff at Sinclair’s ABC affiliate WJLA Washington gathered around a pair of sheet cakes for a sendoff to a pair of the market’s TV heavyweights: Maureen Bunyan, a 44-year veteran of local airwaves who in 1978 became one of the first female African-American anchors in the US, and Bruce DePuyt, who for 14 years hosted NewsTalk, the rare public-affairs show that was actually fun to watch. The cakes were, by this point, a familiar ritual. Anchors Leon Harris and Gordon Peterson, sports anchors Alex Parker and Tim Brant, and entertainment-reporter legend Arch Campbell are among those who have also exited over the past three years.

Circa News, a millennial-focused media outlet owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group that launched only eight months ago, has been embraced by Republicans for aggressive reporting on Russian meddling in the 2016 election that runs counter to reporting in more mainstream outlets.

21st Century Fox is weighing options to help derail a potential takeover of Tribune Media by Sinclair Broadcast Group, people familiar with the situation say. Fox is deliberating over possible choices after having been approached by several parties that are interested in acquiring Tribune directly or as part of a consortium, the sources say.

The two station groups’ goal is to promote broadcast spectrum aggregation, innovation and monetization, in anticipation of the adoption of ATSC 3.0. They say they want to include other broadcasters in the effort to compete in wireless data transmission.

Sinclair Broadcast Group appears ready to acquire all of Tribune Media Co.’s assets, which include stakes in the Food Network and the WGN cable network, as well as 42 TV stations nationwide, several sources say.

Ratings provider comScore has signed an agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group, adding WSBT (CBS) South Bend, Ind. (DMA 96); KUQI (Fox) Corpus Christi, Texas (DMA 128); and KHGI (ABC) and KFXL (Fox) Lincoln-Hastings-Kearney, Neb. (DMA 105). ComScore is now providing its local measurement currency to 704 television stations representing 82 ownership groups.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is offering 12 million primary shares of Class A common stock. The company said it intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1.8 million shares of Class A common stock on the same terms and conditions. Sinclair said the money raised will “be used to fund future potential acquisitions and for general corporate purposes.” It didn’t say how much it hopes to raise.

Sinclair NBC affiliate WOAI and its Fox affil KABB are expanding their midday news half-hours to an hour as of March 27. This comes follows KSAT’s much-earlier announcement that the Graham Media ABC affiliate will move Live with Kelly and the rest of its lineup forward to make room for a new 9 a.m. local newscast.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has begun to roll out a first-of-its kind, over-the-air multicast network showing digital programming that’s designed to appeal to millennials. TBD will feature web series, short films, fashion, comedy, lifestyle, online video game competitions, music and viral content and will air on many of its stations in 81 markets.

Despite rumors of a Sinclair tie-up, Tribune Media is unlikely to sell off the whole company, according to Jefferies analyst John Janedis.

It plans to align Tennis magazine and Tennis.com with its Tennis Channel on a unified platform. It’s paying $8 million plus an additional $6 million earn-out potential based on certain contingencies.

Outgoing Tribune CEO Peter Liguori didn’t comment on whether the company was in merger talks with the Sinclair. On his last call with analysts and investors he said he was “very bullish” about Tribune’s network affiliates’ getting carried on the virtual MVPDs; acknowledged that its stations’ core spot business was soft in December and January, but said Tribune is “highly encouraged” with the quickening pace of sales and predicted the company would meet its guidance for the year.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has made overtures to Tribune Media to discuss a potential combination, people familiar with the matter said today, a deal that would hinge on existing FCC ownership regulations being relaxed. A deal between Sinclair and Tribune, which have market capitalizations of $3.6 billion and $3 billion, respectively, would combine two of the country’s largest TV station owners.

Sinclair is building a national TV news organization and there is a lot to like about that. Unfortunately, what’s emerging is one with a conservative bent. If Sinclair wants to give its stations a push to the right that is certainly its prerogative, but I would hope it would not go that route.

In its call to analysts and investors today, the company said it anticipates a 13%-14% increase in 1Q revenue to $602 million-$606.7 million. It didn’t say where the growth is coming from, but it must be net retrans because political is pegged at just $1.5 million-$2 million and core spot is flat.

$113.2 million in political advertising, plus a 21% increase in digital are keys to the growth over the same quarter last year. For all of 2016, revenues increased 23.3% and operating income climbed 42.6% from 2015.

Sinclair fired an executive news producer at WWMT Kalamazoo, Mich., Randy Lubratich, for two tweets from her personal account that challenged the confirmation of Trump’s pick to head the Department of Education, Betsy DeVos.

On Dec. 29, 2016, employees of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s NBC affiliate WTOV Wheeling, W.Va.-Steubenville, Ohio, filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to decertify the International Brotherhood of […]

Sinclair Broadcast Group reached a new agreement with Frontier Communications, ending a blackout that affected the Tennis Channel and Sinclair’s ABC stations in Seattle and Portland, Ore. The deal also covers markets where Frontier now offers subscription video services after acquiring parts of Verizon’s FiOS business last year.

The news follows similar announcements from Tribune, Fox Stations and Gray.

Television broadcasters around the country today are testing the ATSC 3.0 audio watermark as part of their ATSC 1.0 (A/53) transmission. Not only are the tests aimed at offering them greater insight into who is watching and how internet-connected TV services are used by viewers, but they also offer the chance for participating broadcasters to come out of the chutes running once the next-gen TV standard is finalized and approved by the FCC. Above, NAB’s So Vang at an ATSC 3.0 interactivity demo at the 2016 NAB Show.

The largest TV station group in the U.S. is ready to triple-down its status as multicast channel programmer, starting with a millennial-geared 24/7 showcase of Internet content. As Sinclair continues to build distribution, viewership and ad revenue for Comet TV, the science fiction network collaboration with MGM TV, open multicast space in a number of the company’s markets will be filled next month by TBD, a collection of short- and long-form web series supplied by various digital content makers.

With Sinclair Broadcast Group’s blackout of two ABC affiliates on Frontier Communications in Seattle and Portland reaching the one-month mark, Frontier has begun offering free access to premium channels HBO, Showtime and Starz to affected customers.

Contestant Raven Gates says her anecdote on Monday’s ABC reality series was “censored” by Sinclair’s Little Rock, Ark., affiliate; the station says it was a technical error.

San Antonio Fox affiliate KABB became the 10th Sinclair-owned station to launch a drone. The station put its chief photographer Lalo Garcia and its operations manager Luis Escamilla through training at Virginia Tech University to pass the FAA UAS Pilot Exam.

Charge! will have access to more than 2,300 hours of MGM TV content and more than 2,000 movie titles. It is slotted to launch later in the first quarter.

The programming service devoted to tennis and similar pastimes using a racquet was available to 37 million subscribers when Sinclair Broadcast Group assumed ownership on March 1. As the rare network devoted to one sport or group of sports managed by a top owner of TV stations — Sinclair being the biggest station owner nationwide — Tennis Channel will end 2016 with around 50 million subscribers and expects to reach 60 million or more next summer, on or near par with the rest of its single-sport rivals.

Over four days in early August, Donald Trump gave interviews to four TV stations in Ohio, Florida and Maine, and to the Washington bureau of a national TV chain. The most striking thing about the interviews, however, may be that one company was behind all of them: Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair, which has drawn criticism for favoring conservative candidates before, says it had no special arrangement with Trump’s campaign and that it didn’t favor him at the expense of Hillary Clinton. However, a review of Sinclair’s reporting and internal documents shows a strong tilt toward Trump. 

Sinclair Broadcast Group is accepting applications for the second year of its Broadcast Diversity Scholarship Fund. The $500,000 scholarship fund was established in 2015 to help minority students finance undergraduate […]

Andrew M. Seaman, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists‘ ethics committee, posted a commentary on Saturday based on a Politico story that Sinclair Broadcast Group struck a deal with Donald Trump to air interviews with the candidate without added context in exchange for access. Today Seaman blogged: “After hearing from Sinclair’s representatives and viewing emails between the company and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign, I don’t believe the interview arrangements fell outside what would be considered ethical journalism.”