Nexstar Growing Its Washington News Bureau

When Nexstar closed on its $4.6-billion purchase of Media General last month, it could have closed down its five-person Washington bureau. Instead, it chose to double down on the two-year-old operation.

Nexstar is now hiring a bureau chief, an executive producer and three more reporters to find the local angle on Washington goings-on for the station group’s 171 stations in 100 markets.

“Our intention is not to chase what the president is doing and cover it from a national perspective, says Jerry Walsh, Nexstar’s director of local content development. “Our intention is to cover how the story in Washington affects our local markets.

“We do not want to wrap up what happened in Washington today. We get enough of the national from our network partners. There has to be that local feel, that local flavor.”

That’s a marked shift in perspective. Up until Nexstar took over, the bureau was focused on national stories, says Blake Russell, SVP, station operations, Nexstar. “We make no bones about it: Our goal is to cover the local story in Washington, not the national story in Washington.”

The expanded bureau will continue to lease space within the offices of the NBC News Channel, the affiliate news exchange, at 400 North Capitol Street, also home of C-SPAN, Fox News Channel and other TV news operations, and a short walk to the Capitol and congressional office buildings.

“We will be able to bring members of Congress by our office, put them in front of a camera with an earpiece in their ear and do a little talk-back interview with local anchors,” Walsh says.

The building itself is a news platform, Walsh adds. Reporters have the option of doing shots, live or recorded, from the rooftop with the Capitol as a backdrop.

Russell stresses that the Nexstar reporters are by no means tethered to the bureau. The bureau has arrangements for “connectivity” with all the major venues around the city and has plenty of go-anywhere TVU bonded-cellular packs, he says. “There’s really not a whole lot of places we can’t go in Washington and go live.”

That includes the White House, Walsh says. The bureau has one reporter who is credentialed to attend White House briefings and other events.

Kim Kalunian of Nexstar’s WPRI Providence, R.I., was the first local TV reporter to ask a question at the recently introduced White House briefing via Skype. But that was the result of the station’s initiative, not the bureau’s, Walsh says.

He said that the bureau flexed its muscle on Inauguration Day and the day before. The bureau invited members of Congress from the Nexstar markets and others to stop by for interviews, he says, and the coverage included more than 90 live shots from the rooftop.

Sometimes local may mean regional, Walsh says. For the nine Nexstar stations in New York state, he explains, the bureau could bring in someone like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and allow anchors at  each of Nexstar’s nine station in New York state to interview him live, one after another.

“We might give Syracuse and Rochester the five o’clock window and maybe Utica and Binghamton pick up a late six o’clock window.”

Or, adds Blake, it may make more sense to interview Schumer in Washington and offer it live to all the New York stations at the same time.

The bureau chief and executive producer will have their own ideas of what to cover each day, Walsh says.

“We get good, unique content in the field. We make the markets aware that we have this content and then we work with them to find good relevant holes to plug that into within their daily news operations.”

At the same time, he said, the bureau will be listening to the stations on what to cover. “We need to know about stories in San Francisco and Albuquerque are important to their viewers.”

For more on the new positions, read TVNewsCheck’s Market Share blog on the subject here.