A Week of Shuffling Ahead
In the roughly 18 months we have been publishing this online column, we have never gotten as much response as we did to last Friday’s edition about Nexstar’s loss of its CBS affiliations in six markets that will surprisingly happen later this very week.
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To restate it, our ongoing goal here is to analyze and report on what is happening in the television business, especially on the local station level. We approach this from the perspective of answering the questions we had as members of local station newsrooms in markets big and small across this great nation.
As the new week begins on this Monday morning, we imagine that those working in the stations serving the six markets where they will either be without a CBS network affiliation come this weekend — or those who will suddenly have two network-affiliated channels originating from their stations — are in both cases facing a very busy week of what might best be described as “shuffling.”
Frankly, everybody will be dealing with a lot. And we respect that the old Broadway saying has never been more appropriate: “The show must go on.” But in this case, it will be for 24 hours a day for the foreseeable future.
In the case of a half-dozen Nexstar stations that are quickly removing the CBS logo from their branding on everything from their news opens to the front of their buildings, their biggest concern is what will be on the air for all the hours they used to carry CBS programming, however good or bad that might have been.
In primetime and on weekends, that appears to be Nexstar’s own CW network in at least a few of these markets, save for Albuquerque, New Mexico, where KRQE will switch from primarily being a CBS affiliate to a FOX affiliate. Frankly, that is not a terrible deal. The station will still have NFL and College Football games on the air come this fall. Their biggest challenge will be extending their morning news from a couple of hours to the five or six hours that most FOX stations now seem to routinely produce.
(We should acknowledge the error in last Friday’s initial dispatch, in which we listed the FOX affiliation for sister station KASA 2. That hasn’t been true for the last decade, since Nexstar was forced to sell KASA when it acquired the former LIN Television group. FOX has been on a digital subchannel of KRQE as “FOX New Mexico” since 2016, and KASA 2 has been the market’s Telemundo station, owned by NBC Universal, with local news coming from Hubbard Television’s KOB 4 there, which is the NBC affiliate. Our apologies for being stuck in the past on that one.)
So KRQE will likely become “FOX 13” or some variation of that branding. Hearst-owned KOAT 7, the longtime ABC station in the market, will be spinning up some version of a “CBS New Mexico” channel on a digital subchannel. The website Rabbitears.com currently shows it planned as channel 7.4. Over on KOAT.com, they are telling cable and satellite subscribers, “We will let you know exactly where to find it as soon as those channel positions are finalized.” Meaning that they are likely scrambling to get that CBS digital subchannel carried on all those providers.
What will be interesting to watch is how Hearst ultimately decides to operate its news department at each of the four stations picking up a CBS affiliation: KOAT in Albuquerque, WVTM in Birmingham, WYFF in Greenville-Spartanburg, and WAPT in Jackson. Initially, we suspect there will be extensive simulcasting of local newscasts, especially given the short lead-up to these affiliation switches. Long-term, the question will be whether the new CBS channels get their own dedicated newscasts and whether new hires will be made to support the separate operation.
Hearst has recently gained some real-world experience with this scenario. When it bought the former Waterman Broadcasting operation in Fort Myers, Florida, back in June of 2023, it gained a two-station operation from a single facility. Both NBC affiliate WBBH 2 and ABC affiliate WZVN 7 had separate branding and their own local newscasts. Since the acquisition, Hearst has adopted a common “Gulf Coast News” brand across the two stations, which share reporters and newsgathering resources but still have separate newscasts, under General Manager Darrel Lieze-Adams. It will be interesting to see if Hearst implements that same model at KOAT, WVTM, WYFF, and WAPT.
Meanwhile, back at Nexstar, for those stations losing CBS come this weekend, the situation is not quite as simple. For example, WSPA-TV 7 in Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville is expected to pick up the CW programming that has been airing for years on sister station WYCW 62, which has existed as a digital subchannel of WSPA since Nexstar sold off the actual WYCW spectrum in 2018. Even with that CW programming, the “new” WSPA broadcast schedule will have some holes to fill. Nexstar is putting the best face on this “opportunity” by stating that it will provide “additional local news and regional programming.” We’ll see exactly what that additional programming might be and whether any additional people will be brought on to help create it.
(Full disclosure here, your editor worked as WSPA-TV’s news director from 2015 to 2019.)
We find some room for optimism here. The most directly relevant precedent we can point to is Indianapolis, where WISH-TV 8 became a CW affiliate back in 2014 after owner LIN Television merged with Media General and lost the CBS affiliation to a market rival. Media General — later acquired by Nexstar — kept investing in local news at WISH-TV rather than retreating from it, and the station has changed hands twice more since. Today, under Circle City Broadcasting, WISH-TV produces some 85 hours of local news each week, the second-most of any station in the country behind Nexstar’s own KTLA in Los Angeles at roughly 94 hours.
The lesson: there is life for a station after losing a “big four” affiliation, but it requires real investment in a news-centric model — a strategy that’s admittedly a lot more viable in bigger markets than in smaller ones.
Not that anyone asked us, but we do hope that local TV stations experimenting with the “podcast” model for their streaming “plus” channels might consider taking some of that content to their broadcast outlets as potential programs — rather than just automatically adding news hours that repeat the same few stories and weather forecasts already being delivered over and over throughout the day.
Whichever way those hours get filled, it is the viewers who are going to have to cope with finding where on the dial they can watch what they want, and whether they’ll bother searching for the local anchors they used to watch alongside CBS network shows.
In at least six places in the United States, that is about to become the biggest challenge each of these stations faces, and it will continue to be “job one” for some time to come. We do wish all the folks doing that work the greatest success possible. In the face of the recent viewing trends for broadcast television, it wasn’t like the job was all that easy before.
To which we’ll offer the musical inspiration of a tune you’ve likely heard in every sports arena, from the ironically named group LMFAO, titled “Party Rock Anthem.” The 2011 song puts it best when it calls out: “Everyday I’m Shuffling.”
Godspeed to you all.
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