Blake Russell: Nexstar’s Make-It-Work Guy

“The architect” might seem like a curious nickname for a broadcaster.

But Blake Russell, SVP of station operations for the Nexstar Broadcasting Group, says that’s what he is sometimes called at the office. “It isn’t on the business card,” he says.

During his 18 years with the company, Russell, 45, has tackled such a wide variety of technical and operational challenges as Nexstar has expanded to a station count of 107 in 59 mostly mid-size and small markets that it’s easy to see how “the architect” handle fits.

Russell joined Nexstar in 1997 when it purchased KJAC Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas. Russell was working there as its operations manager, his second broadcasting job out of college.

Shortly after acquiring the station, Nexstar decided to move KJAC 25 minutes inland from Port Arthur to a shopping mall in Beaumont.

Only five years removed from the Arkansas State University in Jonesboro where he graduated with a B.S. in Radio and TV, Russell found himself the point man on setting up the new station.

“It was an incredible experience building that station in a shopping mall,” he says. “And it began a very long career in this company of building and transforming TV stations.”

Russell, who sees himself as optimistic by nature, takes his inspiration and interest in broadcasting from his father, Jack, who was a production executive at William B. Tanner, a radio ad agency.

“He was brilliant, one of the most creative minds I know, and seeing him do what he did as I was growing up is a whole lot of the reason I am in the broadcasting business.”

The elder Russell was known as Scott Blake on air and in professional circles. “They thought he was a nut because he had named his kid Blake Blake,” says Russell.

As a young boy in Memphis, Russell would hang around the Tanner studio, becoming familiar with the sights and sounds of broadcasting. He was even recruited at age eight to do voice work for a radio campaign promoting driver awareness of school-crossing guards, he says.

From Beaumont, Russell went to KTAL, the NBC affiliate in Shreveport, La., in late 2000 as director of operations.

Nexstar CEO Perry Sook “told me, ‘If you do a good job for me for three years, I’ll think about throwing you the keys to one of these stations.'”

While at the station, Russell says, KTAL underwent a complete makeover — “an implosion, new marketing, new station, new construction, a lot of new stuff.”

And true to his word, about three years later, Sook acquired KPOM (now KFTA) Fort Smith, Ark., and KFAA (now KNWA) in Fayetteville, Ark., and asked Russell to be general manager.

“We did some amazing work up there,” he says. With the DTV transition looming and a need to upgrade to HD, Russell helped centralize the master control, traffic and business operations for the Fort Smith and Fayetteville stations at KARK Little Rock, he says.

“Deploying the hub and spoke was an incredibly smart decision because it really tied in our group of stations in northwest Arkansas with Little Rock,” he says.

It also led to the development of the Razorback Nation sports franchise, he says. “The northwest [Arkansas] stations do sports for the Little Rock market every night, and that connectivity buildout enables that.”

Nexstar was a pioneer in sharing video content among its stations, and the idea grew out of this initial hub-spoke setup, Russell says.

Since then, Russell has helped design large, regional hub operations in Memphis and Salt Lake City and to build out an existing hub in Syracuse, N.Y., that Nexstar inherited when it bought Newport Television.

About eight years ago, Russell moved to the Nexstar corporate headquarters in Dallas. 

Initially responsible for marketing and operations, Russell’s job grew to include engineering and news, and then, about 30 months ago, IT.

Married for 22 years, Russell has two daughters, a college freshman and a high school freshman, and a son in sixth grade.

Working on the exterior of his home in the Dallas area is Russell’s outlet for relaxation, he says. “I might be kind of a boring guy.”

And while he is consumed with television in his professional life, he rarely finds the time to enjoy it.

“I’m not the highest consumer of digital media either,” he says. “I am not a Netflix kind of a guy. It would be really cool, but I don’t have the time.”

While he may lack the time to consume TV, Russell is bullish on its future. “I still believe that local TV is not going anywhere. It is the most relevant thing that anybody can be a part of as far as local media is concerned,” he says.

“I truly think some of our best days are yet to come,” he says. “Just think about what we can do with the technology and how we take it to the next level.”