Tegna

Tegna said Kristie Gonzales has been promoted to VP, media operations. In her new role, Gonzales will continue as GM of KVUE Austin, Texas, and also oversee KYTX Tyler, Texas. She will also supervise recruiting across Tegna’s 11 Texas stations.

Standard General, the largest active shareholder of Tegna, is questioning the station group’s handling of an investigation into a 2014 incident where CEO Dave Lougee mistook a Black executive for a valet.

After Tegna rejected its proposed board members, minority owner Standard General, one of the company’s largest shareholders, is soliciting proxies for the Tegna annual shareholders meeting so it can seat those candidates anyway. That is according to an SEC filing Wednesday, March 17, in which Standard General said it is seeking to place three board members to help diversify the board, and cited the withdrawal of their fourth candidate, former FCC official and top ad association executive Adonis Hoffman, as a reason for needing to add that diversity.

Tegna CEO Dave Lougee’s apology to former board nominee Adonis Hoffman over a racially charged incident has been accepted, but Hoffman is amping up criticism of the company’s response. The back-and-forth is occurring against the backdrop of a proxy battle for Tegna. The company has rebuffed acquisition overtures despite the preferences of some of its privately held investors. One stakeholder — Soo Kim’s hedge fund Standard General — is calling for a shakeup of the board and had initially nominated Hoffman for a seat.

Tegna recently partnered with systems integrator BeckTV on the design, installation and integration of all systems for a new master control operation, the Tegna Stream Center. This new facility uses a cloud-based hub-and-spoke approach to serve all Tegna stations.

Tegna President-CEO Dave Lougee has apologized for an incident involving former top FCC staffer and ad association executive Adonis Hoffman that the latter found disturbing and was part of the reason Hoffman withdrew his candidacy for a Tegna board of directors seat. The result is that the Tegna board hired an outside law firm to investigate the incident and human resources reviewed Lougee’s human resources file.

Data-driven reporting and storytelling is on the rise at station groups including ABC, NBC, E.W. Scripps and Tegna, where ever-more sophisticated visualizations and interactive digital projects are helping viewers better navigate — and make more sense of — complex information. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

For the current quarter, Tegna is expecting advertising and marketing services revenues to be up from a year ago, with total revenues (including retrans) up in the mid-single-digits.

The increase to $938 million is driven by a record-breaking quarter for political advertising revenues, and ongoing strength of subscription business.

Executives from Tegna, NBCU Television Stations and Fox Television Stations told a TVNewsCheck webinar that local station marketing is best executed by those in the market itself — with support from corporate — and that marketing needs to start “from a place of brand, not from a place of product.”

The new multicast channel will premiere this spring and initially include hundreds of hours of home, food and reality content, much of it featuring exciting reveals — or twists — at the end of each show.

Tegna Inc.’s board of directors on Wednesday declared a dividend of 7 cents per share, payable on April 1 to stockholders of record as of the close of business on March 5. “Our sustained operational excellence has resulted in a record 2020 in the face of a challenging external market environment,” said Dave Lougee, Tegna president-CEO. “Due to the strength and resiliency of our business model and our strong performance, we remain positioned to continue our track record of delivering value for our shareholders.”

Content management systems are the workhorses of local stations’ digital operations. Executives from Tegna, NBCU, CBS, Gray, Nexstar and Fox have discovered that user simplicity and integrations for multiplatform distribution have become essential attributes. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

He joins the Tegna NBC affiliate from KOMO Seattle, where he’s been news director since 2018 and succeeds the retiring John Remes.

Tegna says Locked On will expand its presence in the quickly growing podcast market, joining digital content studio Vault Studios and stations’ podcasting efforts, and build on Tegna’s overall sports footprint.

The station group taps Jonathan Forsythe as managing editor of its Verify anti-disinformation iniative. He will oversee the daily content production of Verify, including segments for television, web articles, social content and other products. He is also responsible for recruiting and managing Verify’s team of journalists, producers and audience-engagement specialists as well as working with Tegna stations to source story ideas and co-produce content.

The partnership enables enhanced, automated access for media buyers to Premion’s CTV/OTT ad platform.

The company says it will exceed full-year 2020 guidance provided prior to the COVID-19 pandemic for all key financial metrics, despite the challenging external market environment. Tegna will host a conference call to discuss its fourth quarter and full-year 2020 results on Monday, March 1, at 9 a.m. ET.

About 16 Tegna stations in 11 states went dark to Mediacom Communications customers Dec. 31, after the parties failed to reach a retransmission consent agreement. Mediacom said its contract for the stations expired at 5 p.m. on Dec. 31, at which time it was forced to stop carrying the stations, even though it had offered to pay what the cable company called a “significant” increase over its previous agreement. The stations are ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CW affiliates located in about a dozen states, including Mediacom’s biggest markets in Iowa (Des Moines, Davenport and Ames).

The new deal provides measurement of digital linear audiences across all Tegna markets.

The new deal covers 20 markets that cover 17% of the U.S. Tegna is the largest independent owner of NBC affiliates.

Newsrooms see a “better normal” in terms of collaboration on the other side of COVID-19. Leaders from E.W. Scripps, Tegna, Fox Owned Stations and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism says remote pandemic projects between universities, stations and even different station groups have revealed new efficiencies in communication and technological fluency that will carry forward.

Here are the complete videos and story links for TVNewsCheck’s NewsTECHForum, featuring a keynote interview with veteran news producer David Bohrman and news and technology leaders from ABC News, Hearst, Tegna, NBCU Owned Television Stations, CBS Owned Stations, ABC Owned Stations, Gray Television, Graham Media, Sinclair, E.W. Scripps, Meredith, BBC, AJ+ and more.

The multi-year deal covers 64 Tegna-owned Stations in 51 markets across the DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-verse video services.

Trends driven by the pandemic are likely to persist into 2021 and beyond, while transitions to IP infrastructures will accelerate and aging on-prem infrastructure will give way to increased reliance on the cloud. NextGen TV will also likely pick up speed after COVID’s cooling effect on its rollout this year.

The new contract covers 22 markets, with Comscore’s local television currency serving as its exclusive selling and posting currency in 18 markets.

Liz Roldan becomes news director, Stuart Boslow is innovation director while Randy Klein is tapped for digital director at Tegna’s CBS Houston affiliate.

Retransmission consent battles have become as much of a year-end tradition as eggnog and holly, and 2020 is no different, with at least two disputes brewing and certainly more to come. Tegna and Nexstar kicked off this year’s station negotiation season with blackouts.

Approximately 60 Tegna television stations were dropped after carriage negotiations failed to reach a new contract Tuesday evening. The old contract between the station group and the satellite and cable provider expired last month and was extended until 7 p.m. ET Tuesday.

The group broadcaster grants a retrans extension to Dec. 1 as talks continue.

Tegna has two stations in Atlanta and one in Macon, but until now Georgia hadn’t even been its hottest state for political spending. That has changed, with control of the Senate at stake. “We’re trying to size it now. We don’t have, frankly, a good answer, other than we know it will be very, very large,” Tegna CEO Dave Lougee said.

The increase to $738 million is driven by a record-breaking quarter for political advertising revenues, and ongoing strength of subscription business.

New tools are making it easier for viewers to submit video — and transfer rights — to TV stations. Groups like Gray and Tegna say simplified UGC has boosted engagement, and expanded coverage without increasing staff. Above, user-generated content appeared throughout Gray Television’s WECT Wilmington, N.C.’s coverage of the Surf City Fire story last year. (Source: Jacob Robert Younce)

Tegna’s independent KONG plans to begin NextGen TV broadcasts for itself and co-owned NBC affiliate KING in early December, with KONG serving as the host, or lighthouse station.

In a year crammed with arresting news images, local broadcaster Tegna has started to leverage photos and videos shot by its audience. Over the past five months, Tegna station reporters and producers have been combing through photos and videos that people have submitted to their CMS using a feature in their stations’ mobile apps called Near Me.