Forget Local, Let's Just Be One Big Nation

We would really like to go a full week without having to write anything about Nexstar. It isn’t like the nation’s largest television station owner isn’t newsworthy on a pretty regular basis. Plus, we are waiting on that federal judge in California’s Eastern District to decide what he is going to do about the “shot clock” winding down on his extended temporary restraining order that is holding up the $6.2 billion deal for Nexstar to assimilate TEGNA’s local TV outlets.

That story is large enough to distract from another news item involving Nexstar that caught our attention. Bloomberg reported last Friday that Nexstar had informed its NBC affiliates that it had ended its agreement with the network’s local affiliate news service, known as “NBC NewsChannel,” and that stations should instead utilize content from Nexstar’s “NewsNation” news channel. The Bloomberg piece went on to state that Nexstar will ultimately make the same move with its other affiliates, leaving ABC’s “NewsOne” and CBS’s “Newspath” when those affiliate agreements come up for renewal.

For those readers who may not have spent a lot of time in a local television station’s newsroom, some background: network-affiliated local stations have had a long-standing relationship with their network’s national news operations. Aside from carrying their traditional morning and evening news programs, the local stations also operate as contributors to those network news programs. Part of that relationship includes a “closed circuit” feed of video and audio from the network’s global newsgathering efforts along with coverage of local news stories from around the country.

Each network has a group within their news organization that acts as the conduit between the network news staff and those working in the local stations. If a major news story breaks in a location outside of the few major cities that have a bureau for the network, the local station will provide its video and audio to the network in realtime. In some cases, a local station’s reporter will appear on the network as typically the first to be on the scene of the story.

This relationship started in the early years of network news operations and grew as local stations began expanding their news programming and needing additional content, so they came to rely on the network’s feed for material to fill out those newscasts. When stations began using satellites to routinely transmit material across longer distances back to their local markets, the networks got in the business of booking and coordinating the expensive satellite time for their local stations. The networks also faced competition in this arena for the first time, as CNN offered a similar service to local affiliates called CNN Newsource, and Hubbard Broadcasting, who had pioneered using satellite news gathering on a local basis, created its CONUS operation.

By the late 1990s, the network and affiliate news relationship began to fray as larger station groups wanted to share material exclusively with their co-owned stations in other markets, even if those other stations weren’t affiliated with the same network. One of the largest early examples of this happened in Texas with the stations then owned by Belo. The company, based in Dallas, where it also owned the Dallas Morning News, operated the ABC affiliate, WFAA-TV. Belo also owned the ABC affiliate in the state capital of Austin (KVUE), as well as the CBS affiliates in Houston (KHOU) and San Antonio (KENS). In 1999, Belo launched a statewide cable news network, known as TXCN. The Belo stations began to hold or “embargo” local stories from being shared with the network news operations in favor of TXCN, causing headaches on both sides of the network-affiliate news “partnership.”

More recently, the network news services, “ABC Newsone", “CBS Newspath” and “NBC Newschannel” have become part of the financial terms included in the affiliation agreements that local stations have with their networks. The premise was that if there was money changing hands for this news sharing relationship, local stations would be less inclined to favor certain stations over others.

And that’s where this move from Nexstar comes into play. When Nexstar launched its “NewsNation” operation in 2020, originally on the former “WGN America” channel that Nexstar gained when it took over Tribune Broadcasting, it featured a newsroom in Chicago with regional “desks” that worked with the local Nexstar stations across the country, in much the same fashion as the major networks had been doing. Nexstar also demanded a “NewsNation” priority on local station’s coverage, going so far as to require the network news services to brand all video from any Nexstar station as being originated by “NewsNation” rather than giving credit to the individual local station, as had been previously done.

Now, poised to become the nation’s largest local TV station group by far, it appears that Nexstar wants to “go it alone” and be its own “news hub” for all of its local stations within the NewsNation operation.

Garrett Searight, writing on the industry news website Barrett Media has the idea that this move by Nexstar signals an even larger ambition. Searight supposes that the bringing of local news aggregation in-house by Nexstar may signal that the company wants to expand the “NewsNation” brand to all of its local stations. He postulates that Nexstar wants to follow the playbook that ESPN adopted when it created its radio network in 1992, and in turn, licensed the ESPN name to local radio stations who signed up. This created the plethora of outlets now branded “ESPN (Location)” or “ESPN Radio (Local Frequency)” You can find one of these in well over 400 locations across the country now. The local stations benefit from having a major brand name that instantly is identified with sports, in as much as ESPN is known as “The World Wide Leader in Sports.”

Simply put, we don’t share Mr. Searight’s enthusiasm for Nexstar slapping the NewsNation brand on all its local stations, especially if the thinking is that the local station’s brand name would be either diminished or done away with in favor of being just the local outpost of “the Nation.” By the time ESPN Radio launched, the ESPN name was over a decade old and the sports television network was heading towards being in over 100 million homes.

By comparison, NewsNation is now reportedly carried into 60-70 million homes. And much of its programming is, like most every other “cable news” network, more “talking head” centric than being a true 24-hour live news feed. As cable and satellite subscriber counts have fallen in recent years, NewsNation has had to add streaming to its distribution mix as well.

Even if the NewsNation brand were stronger, anybody who has paid any attention to Nexstar as it has built its growing empire over the years knows that one word has been at the core of the company’s television ambitions. That word is LOCAL. It even appears as the beginning of the copyright animation that plays at the end of each local newscast on every Nexstar station. Heck it even did on the TEGNA stations for a hot minute, when they were believed to be part of the “Nexstar Nation.” (Yes, that is what they called themselves internally, well before “NewsNation” was launched.)

We can’t believe that CEO Perry Sook and his trusted lieutenants are going to forego all the truly local television names in their portfolio, from “PIX 11 News” in New York City to “KELOland” (Sioux Falls, SD.) These are brands that have been built over multiple decades. It sure doesn’t seem like something a company that bills itself as having “A Commitment to Local” would do.

Listen, we read the same research studies that you probably have, the ones that detail that trust in local news is sliding in the wrong direction. But it is (as of this writing) still way ahead of any other news source for a large majority of Americans. Why would any marketing “genius” want to trade in that long established trust just to prop up some struggling, also-ran network in the battle for fewer and fewer national television news eyeballs?

That said, we have also seen our fair share of dumber TV marketing moves over the years. (Here’s looking at you HBO, “HBO Max”, “Max” — or whatever the heck you are called now.)

Let’s just say that nothing truly shocks us anymore. With that, we’re going to go see if there is a “New Coke” in the fridge.

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