The Reason Local TV Still Sells
variety.comTegna, one of the last large publicly held station groups, announced a $5.4 billion deal with Apollo and media-focused hedge fund Standard General to take the company private.
The deal for Tegna’s 64 stations comes to fruition as the nation’s largest station group, Nexstar, is taking steps to bolster its national reach by wrangling a deal to acquire The CW Network from WarnerMedia and Paramount (formerly ViacomCBS).This activity is driving speculation about Nexstar making next-generation programming plans for its nearly 200 stations in 116 markets around the country — ranging from the nation’s largest market (New York City’s WPIX-TV) to market No.
196 (San Angelo, Texas’ KLST) — out of the 210 total in the U.S.The reason TV stations are hot these days? Simply put, they’re still good businesses.“Local TV still has large audiences,” says James Goss, managing director of Barrington Research and a veteran broadcast analyst. “Even with so much programming chasing [audiences], there’s only so many hours in the day.
The strength of local stations that produce local news, weather and sports is that this is the kind of thing that is very personal to people.
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