What if Losing the Network was the best thing to happen to your station?

As we reach the midpoint of this week, the new order of things is settling in within those local television markets where the “seismic” changes occurred last Saturday. With apologies to our old friend Rick Gevers, we’ll extend the earthquake metaphor a little longer to suggest that the aftershocks are tapering off, the audience and station staffs are adjusting, and things are getting back to normal.

Well, it is the new normal at least.

In Greenville-Spartanburg (SC), Birmingham (AL), Albuquerque (NM), Jackson (MS), Bismarck-Minot (ND), and Rapid City (SD), the former Nexstar Media stations that used to be affiliated with the CBS television network are adjusting to life without that network and what the future holds.

In all of those markets, save for Albuquerque, the future is one without the half of each day filled with network programming now being the responsibility of those local stations to fill with…something. In Albuquerque, Nexstar’s KRQE has shifted the FOX network from its previous digital subchannel home known as “FOX 505” to the main channel 13.1 signal to accompany KRQE’s local “News Reporting You Can Trust” programming. Curiously, the station has dropped the channel number 13 from its branding to be just “KRQE”, likely because the station was displaced on cable and satellite lineups from that spot “on the dial.”

In the other markets mentioned, life after CBS ranges from a quickly assembled schedule of maintaining the local news programming that existed before August 1st, alongside whatever syndicated programming the station had access to. There is something of a mini renaissance going on for those pseudo-courtroom shows, with Judge Judy and her fellow robe wearers getting more airtime on many of these stations.

These changes happened so quickly that each station is still cleaning up its websites to scrub the last vestiges of the CBS “eye” from them. When we checked, WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi, was still showing CBS programming listed on the TitanTV schedule for the station. (In fairness, TitanTV can be slow in updating its listings in any market. We know this from our own experiences with that service.)

Because of our own history of working in the market, we have spent the most time analyzing the aftermath of “the great affiliation moves of 2026” in the largest market where Nexstar lost the CBS affiliation, and that is market number 36, the sprawling four-way hyphenated Greenvile-Spartanburg-Asheville-Anderson DMA that covers the “Upstate” area, being the Northwestern portion of South Carolina, along with much of the Western third of North Carolina, and a few counties in Northeastern Georgia. It is a sprawling 28-county area that surrounds those four cities.

That is where WSPA-TV 7, which had carried the CBS television network since the station flickered to life for the first time back in 1956, found itself without that network on August 1st, 2026. Rival station WYFF 4, owned by Hearst Television, acquired the CBS affiliation to be broadcast on a digital subchannel of 4.3, alongside the station’s long-standing NBC affiliation airing on channel 4.1.

There is an interesting historical footnote about this rivalry: WSPA-TV’s original owner, Walter Brown and his Spartan Radiocasting Company, fought a nearly decade-long battle to get on the air beginning back in the late 1940s. The station wanted to place its transmitter atop Paris Mountain, a peak within Greenville County, where the City of Greenville was located, rather than in WSPA’s official “city of license” in Spartanburg. (The “SPA” in the station’s call letters.) Their opponent in this fight was one WFBC-TV, owned at the time by the local newspaper, The Greenville News.

WFBC-TV got on the air first in 1953, in the flood of new television stations that took to the air following the lifting of the World War II-era freeze on station start-ups. The owners fought the launch of the new WSPA-TV, forcing the station to ultimately locate its transmitter atop Hogback Mountain, a higher peak further away from the City of Greenville. It was finally able to sign on three years later.

WFBC-TV became WYFF in 1983 with an ownership change. The rivalry between the two stations, and the two cities they call home, has continued ever since.

Now, WSPA-TV is adjusting to life with the much more limited programming offered by the CW network, and a heavy local schedule of the station’s “7 News,” which now covers over half of each broadcast weekday. And while we are sympathetic to the extra workload for our former colleagues at the station, we believe this forced change may be a unique opportunity for owner Nexstar to run an important experiment not only for itself, but also for the future of local television station operators everywhere.

You see, affiliation shifts in local television aren’t new. They have happened here and there in past years. In locations like Indianapolis, Raleigh-Durham, Jacksonville, and more recently in both Atlanta and Miami. The Miami shift was notable because it set the stage for this most recent round at the beginning of August. In Miami, the ABC affiliation moved from its longtime home of WPLG 10 to the 7.2 digital subchannel of crosstown rival WSVN, which is the market’s FOX affiliate on 7.1. WSVN has also run a very news-heavy schedule as “South Florida’s News Station” since it lost the NBC affiliation while known as WCKT back in the late 1980s.

This move marked the first time in a major market that one of the big four networks had agreed to leave a primary station’s channel as its home and move to a subchannel of another station. That’s now exactly what has happened to Nexstar in the six markets listed earlier.

But of those stations now without CBS, only WSPA-TV has followed the model that WSVN pioneered of loading up the program schedule with more local newscasts. The station now carries a morning local news block that runs eight hours from 5:00 AM to 1:00 PM, interrupted only for a single hour at 9:00 AM to air the local “infotainment” focused “Your Carolina” broadcast, which is done live each day. The station returns to local news at 4:00 PM each afternoon after a three-hour block of courtroom shows (The People’s Court/Judy Justice/Judge Judy) for four hours of news until 8:00 PM.

Then there are two hours of CW network in primetime, followed by late news from 10:00 PM to 11:35 PM. (We do wonder why the station isn’t taking its 11 PM newscast all the way to the full hour, when it would have the second half hour to itself as the only hour of local news at 11.) All totaled, it’s an impressive twelve and a half hours of local news being produced each weekday.

It is now even more hours of local news than WSVN produces in Miami, which was once known as the station that produced more local news than anyone in the Eastern Time Zone.

And what we first thought seemed like a forced move to fill WSPA-TV’s broadcast day now seems like a crucial experiment by the station’s owner, Nexstar, to see just how a station in a top 50 market can operate and possibly even be successful as a “local TV news machine,” if you will.

Exploring the challenges of how much it will cost in terms of resources, both human and other, to sustain this level of news production? What will the audience appetite be for a station with over half of its day delivering local news? Will advertisers buy time or other sponsorship opportunities from the station? These and many other questions will be answered in the months ahead, especially as WSPA-TV deals with the second half of an election year which now features not only a Governor’s race but also an unexpected U.S. Senate seat open, following the sudden passing of Senator Lindsey Graham.

We were disappointed to see that at present, the station only has job openings for one new multimedia journalist and one newscast producer. We’d hope that adding multiple hours of news might lead to adding more staff to WSPA’s news department, but we won’t be surprised if Nexstar keeps a tight hand on the purse strings and doesn't spend a lot more at the station until it knows what the future financial picture holds.

And finally, given what Paramount is doing at CBS, especially in the network’s news division under the leadership of Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss, who is remaking the network’s franchises like “60 Minutes”, “The CBS Evening News”, and “CBS Mornings” with a less-than-stellar record of success — who is to say that somewhere down the road that being without a CBS network affiliation and not paying for the privilege of carrying its programming, might not be the better business plan after all?

We suspect that is exactly what Perry Sook and company will be looking to find out from what happens at WSPA-TV. And perhaps from other stations, now affiliated with other networks, that might be facing the same situation in the not-too-distant future.

It might just turn out that what are considered the stations that lost something major on August 1st, 2026 could turn out to be winners come August 1st in a year to come.

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