"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends." And with apologies to Emerson, Lake and Palmer--and the 1970s in general, we have to wonder as this new week begins—just what are the folks over at the Cox Media Group corprorate offices, in the Landings section of Atlanta, thinking about these days? Because when the active market for buying and selling television stations was set to return full force, everyone assumed that Apollo Global Management, the folks who bought 71% of Cox Media...| The Topline from TVND.Com
For some time now, we have had a small, but vocal number of readers who have suggested that we can be…how best to put this? That we can be a bit long-winded at times. (Well, it's not like we have had simple topics to cover in these dispatches lately.) But on this Friday, before we get to the weekend--we’ll leave this here with no added commentary. Other than to admit that when we recently watched this video, we started out laughing. That quickly turned to being uncomfortable at just how a...| The Topline from TVND.Com
As one of our long-time industry colleagues said yesterday, there was a lot to digest in TV Land on this third Tuesday in August. It all began unfolding on Monday, when the Wall Street Journal reported in an exclusive story, "Sinclair Proposes Merger with Tegna.” The Journal said that the proposal to combine Sinclair’s broadcast division of 185 owned or operated local television stations with Tegna’s 64 stations. The report pegged the offer as being worth somewhere between $25 and $30 a...| The Topline from TVND.Com
With apologies to Shakespeare, we had to borrow his line from “Romeo & Juliet.” In this case, it is what the folks at the “spinning-up-quick-co” known as Versant have taken out of the name of their flagship cable channel that matters. Faced with the need to drop the initials of the National Broadcasting Company, the future incarnation of what is known today as MSNBC wasted no small amount of time (and hopefully an even smaller amount of money) to announce the new name for the home of ...| The Topline from TVND.Com
It is no secret to anyone working in a local television station over the past few years that the current business model seems to have one constant theme. How much money can be saved by eliminating positions? Contrary to what you might think, the incredibly shrinking station staff is not a recent phenomenon. Since the early 1990s, with the advent of desktop computers and various software systems, there has been a gradual reduction in staffing across nearly every department of a station. Things...| The Topline from TVND.Com
This past Monday afternoon, Sinclair Broadcast Group President & CEO Chris Ripley sent an all-hands email telling the employees that “our Board of Directors has begun a process to explore strategic opportunities for the Broadcast division and to evaluate a possible separation of our Ventures division.” The email went on to explain how “this review is about unlocking new opportunities through innovation and scale” and about how the company has expressed in the past “the standalone va...| tvnd.micro.blog
In this past Saturday’s special edition on the still-developing news that Nexstar is in talks to acquire the television stations of TEGNA, we initially noted that there weren’t many markets where Nexstar might have run afoul of the current FCC limitation on owning two or the “big four” network-affiliated stations. Our eagle-eyed readers quickly began pointing out that we had missed some obvious markets where our original observation was in error. We had fully disclosed our somewhat im...| The Topline from TVND.Com
We'll spare you the ubiquitous "Breaking News" animation here, and our apologies for interrupting your weekend with a special Saturday edition of "The Topline." But much like the childhood game of musical chairs, the music has started in the real-life game of television station acquisitions--and already the chairs are filling up. One wonders who will be left standing when the music stops. And oddly enough, it might just be the group that everyone thought would be the first one taken in this b...| The Topline from TVND.Com
That word being “duopolies”(as we earlier wrote.) And they must have a decent line of credit available to keep buying up stations. Today, it’s ten of the Allen Media stations—which from all accounts have mostly been stripped down to being just a license and a bunch of leases for everything else. Hopefully, Gray got a good deal to add seven more duopolies—looks like they paid an average of about $17 million per station, for a total of $171 million. (Of course, some were worth more th...| The Topline from TVND.Com
The Walt Disney Company has been very busy lately with its property located not in Central Florida, nor in Southern California, nor even in some exotic International location, but rather in the once sleepy town known to sports fans everywhere as Bristol, Connecticut. Just this very morning, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (the original meaning of the letters ESPN) announced it had signed "a landmark deal" to bring the mega events of professional wrestling giant WWE to the new...| The Topline from TVND.Com
Here we are at the start of another work week. What this week will bring in the business of television is anybody’s guess. But in this week or the ones soon ahead, we expect a growing number of deals to be announced, with more local TV stations being sold or traded--and more local duopolies being created. Today, however, we’d like to focus on this modest idea we had, to see if it makes sense to anyone other than those of us trying to think up an idea to start a new column for a new week. ...| The Topline from TVND.Com
We come to you today from that haunt of frequent flyers, busy executives, and TV station consultants alike—The Delta Sky Club. It is packed, as these airline club locations tend to be more and more these days. But we have managed to secure a small bit of workspace, allowing us to pull out our trusty laptop and bring you this Friday edition of The Topline. Back in the early 1960s, the game show producing dynamic duo of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman brought a new game show to life on CBS. Crea...| The Topline from TVND.Com
We recently came across a Substack post that introduced us to an interesting concept. It’s called “compression culture,” and the TL;DR is that we, as a society, have come to value brevity more than depth. That in our always-connected, information-on-demand, perpetually switched-on world, we have replaced knowledge and understanding with information overload. We have tuned our attention span to be minimally focused at all times. To attempt our best Rod Serling impression as he might open...| tvnd.micro.blog
The Friday Odds and Ends| tvnd.micro.blog
The Friday Odds and Ends| tvnd.micro.blog
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of another week in summer! Hopefully, you are not sweltering too much wherever you are, and you will do something fun this weekend. Before we let you get to that, a few things we wanted to share with you at the end of another week in the television biz. The long road to merge Paramount and Skydance is finally at an end. If you had the under bet on your favorite sports betting app that Brendan Carr's FCC would finally approve the union of Paramount ...| The Topline from TVND.Com
If you are spending too much of your free time these days wondering what the fate of broadcast television in the near future is going to be, take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone. With the postings of people who are “getting out of the business” every day (whether by their own choice or as a result of never-ending cutbacks) you would.be forgiven if you felt that you might be the last person left in the building when they turn off the studio lights once and for all at some po...| The Topline from TVND.Com
We admit that we probably spent more time this past weekend than we should have, consuming all of the coverage about the CBS television network’s surprise decision ending its production of “The Late Show” and its relationship with Stephen Colbert, after a decade of his hosting what has typically been the #1 network show in the 11:35pm time period. As we suggested last Thursday night, there would be a lot of questions about the decision. And given the optics of it, studying how the story...| The Topline from TVND.Com
We still remember where we were when we received the startling news. We were in Buffalo, New York, where the news arrived that would jolt every CBS affiliate to its core. The announcement stood to change the fate of their late newscasts and impact the bottom line, in terms of both ratings and revenue. Frankly, we were a little gobsmacked when we heard it. It was August 1993, and the big announcement was that David Letterman was leaving NBC to come over to CBS and host weeknights at 11:35 p.m....| The Topline from TVND.Com
If you are finding that everything you read or hear about the television industry is as concerning as the telegraph messages that a young David Sarnoff was hearing in a Marconi receiving station at the end of Long Island on the evening of April 14, 1912, then trust us, Dear Friends, you are not alone. Each day seems to bring us more depressing news than the looming revelations for those unfortunate people who were ever in the vicinity of the late Jeffrey Epstein. A few folks have asked why we...| The Topline from TVND.Com
If you have been following along this week, you hopefully know the drill by now. (If not, go back and read this one first and then this one.) We are doing this series of hypothetically matching up group owners of local television stations that we think could be interesting. Our game is based on the coming-of-age game of “Spin the Bottle.” Yesterday we suggested the bottle might be an empty Jack Daniels one. Today, we’re classing it up by suggesting using an empty bottle of the pride and...| The Topline from TVND.Com
As we began detailing here yesterday, the dealmaking in the local television station business is poised to heat up faster than the cast members on “Love Island.” As the nation awaits the promised major deregulation decisions of the Federal Communications Commission (hoping that those files weren’t sitting anywhere near those Epstein files that disappeared right off the US Attorney General’s desk), we decided to do some good old-fashioned, journalism-adjacent speculating and throw out ...| The Topline from TVND.Com
It’s been a week since the folks at Gray Media and Scripps announced their rather benign sounding plan to swap some stations in smaller markets and so far, there has been no white smoke emerging from the FCC offices in Washington, DC. There is little belief that the Brendan Carr-chaired commission won’t approve these license transfers, but given the inscrutable nature of proceedings before the FCC these days, who knows how long it will be before these transactions are given the official s...| The Topline from TVND.Com
You made it to Friday. Congratulations on surviving another week! To celebrate this monumental achievement, we present you with our now infamous sampling of things you might want to read, listen to, or perhaps even spend a few bucks on. (Though the latter is completely optional, if you are like us then your Amazon Prime Week spending may have gotten a little out of control. So maybe just focus on the free stuff if your wallet needs a rest!) One of the big business stories of the last week tha...| The Topline from TVND.Com
Our assumption is this: our invitation to the annual gathering of media moguls happening in Sun Valley this week was lost in our overstuffed email inbox. Probably in there along with our still missing invite to the recent Sanchez-Bezos nuptials in Venice. Maybe that spam filter in Outlook is working a bit too hard sorting out the emails offering us countless “work-from-home” opportunities to become “rich and famous.” Can we just say how much we miss Robin Leach in times like these?| tvnd.micro.blog
If there was a Mount Rushmore of local television news directors, just whose faces would be on it? A few names immediately come to our minds. From the nascent early years of local news on television, a notable figure might be Miami legend Ralph Renick, who served as both the news director and main anchor at the original WTVJ (then on Channel 4). From the 1960s, legendary news director Al Primo, who invented the “Eyewitness News” format, first introduced it in Philadelphia and then achieve...| The Topline from TVND.Com
The search for the missing victims from the July 4th flash flooding in Kerr County, Texas isn’t over, and the toll of fatalities has risen to over 100 as of 6pm on Monday, June 7th. 27 of that number, including children, were in attendance at an all-girls Christian summer camp, are among the dead. There are no words, including offering the requisite “thoughts and prayers” that can suffice in this moment of heartbreak for the families of those victims and the missing still being sought i...| The Topline from TVND.Com
Long-time industry observer and talent agent (his day job), Rick Gevers, pointed out a rather uncomfortable truth in the latest edition of his must-read weekly newsletter, which tracks the comings and goings of television news directors. He chose not to attend last week’s annual conference of the Radio Television Digital News Association, held in New Orleans. No criticism from us about that, we chose not to attend as well. But in Gevers' case, it’s the first RTDNA conference he has missed...| tvnd.micro.blog
From one of our favorite podcasts, “The Techmeme Ride Home,” we are borrowing the idea that on each Friday we’ll give our readers something they can enjoy reading over the upcoming weekend. Techmeme dubs them “weekend long reads” and that title seems good enough for us to adopt for our offering here. For our inaugural “WLR” (yes—we have decided to abbreviate it because all cool things seem to have an abbreviated name, IYKYK) our first recommended read will be tech-centric.| tvnd.micro.blog