The coming duopoly at Channels 2 and 4

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Editor’s mote: This story was updated on Sept. 1

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My item last week about the pending purchase of Channel 2’s parent company by Channel 4’s parent company generated a lot of traffic and a fair amount of speculation and hand-wringing. 

Well, the deal went through last week and from what I’ve learned, there’s plenty of justification for continued hand-wringing.

Alan Pergament of The Buffalo News wrote a good analysis on the local impact and The Washington Post produced an insightful analysis from a national perspective. Both are worth a read. (The Post story is a gift link.)

Pergament wrote about the concerns of staffers worried about their job security and viewers about losing their newscast.

“It stands to reason that viewers would want the two top news stations to be competing against each other, not working together as they likely will be after the deal is closed.”

Said The Post: 

“The deal would give [Nexstar] a total of 265 stations in 44 states plus the District of Columbia, reaching 80 percent of national households. The deal could also violate existing limits on local ownership … Nexstar has expressed confidence that those rules will change.”

The Poynter Institute also offered an analysis.

I called around last week to a number of TV insiders and media analysts to get their take on what the deal foretells for Buffalo. Several said they expected Nexstar, which owns Channel 4, to do away with the Tegna (WGRZ) newsroom and simulcast its newscasts on its new sister station.

That seems pretty radical, so I called Nexstar’s public relations office and bounced that scenario off their spokesman. I was directed to statements made by Perry Sook, Nexstar’s chairman and CEO, which didn’t directly answer my question.

If you look at Tribune as an example, when we acquired the Tribune stations, we have increased in total now the amount of local programming those stations do by approximately 30%. And so, we see  opportunities to do that here where — for example, where I’m speaking to you in Dallas, TEGNA owns the ABC  affiliate, a very strong and successful station. We own the CW affiliate that has no real local news presence  whatsoever. 

So, we will have the opportunity to leverage the existing newsroom of WFAA to be able to launch more robust  local news and time periods that are not competitive with the TEGNA station on the current Nexstar station which  is KDAF, the CW affiliate here. So, repeat that time and again across the 35 overlap markets. 

And you can see that not only are there cost synergies of running two newspapers off of a single printing press, if  you will, but also there will be content expansion opportunities, therefore leading to revenue opportunities for more local content. And that’s been consistent with our playbook of acquisitions for time and memoriam, and we see repeating that same opportunity and that same strategy here. 

I then looked into what Nexstar did in Indianapolis when it purchased the Fox and CBS affiliates from the Tribune Media Co. in 2019.

Consolidation in Indianapolis

For starters, a whole bunch of newsroom personnel got laid off. The remaining staff were housed in the same building. The two stations retained separate studios, but reporters, photographers and producers were assigned to a single newsroom and they produced stories that ran on both stations. The stations share the same news director and assistant news director. 

The on-air product differed in two ways: The stations had different anchors and weather people. But, again, the bulk of the stories were the same on both stations. 

I was told Nexstar pays relatively low wages for the industry and offers employees miserly pay raises, the same criticism that’s been aimed at Channel 4 here in Buffalo. I was also told the staff over time in Indianapolis has skewed younger, less experienced and more transient. The quality of coverage has suffered as a result. 

Expect the same in Buffalo, I was told.

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Everyone I spoke with said Buffalo will be the worse for the Nexstar-Tegna deal.

“It’s horrible for local journalism,” one TV-type told me. “Less choice is never good.”

The one party that could benefit is WKBW 7 News, whose ratings lag behind their competition. Eighty percent of news viewers tune into Channels 2 and 4. A like number visit their websites.

Some viewers might give Channel 7 a look if 2 and 4 are broadcasting the same news with only different anchors and weather forecasters. But we’re not there yet.

In fact, we’re going to have to wait a year or two to see how this all plays out. Nexstar’s purchase of Tegna faces a year or so of regulatory review and additional time for the revamped chair to figure out what to do with its assorted stations.

Buffalo market in trouble

Stepping back to look at the Buffalo media market as a whole, I see a four-alarm fire.

The Buffalo News continues to struggle, despite the better efforts of its journalists. The economics of the newspaper business and mismanagement by Lee Enterprises, its parent company, conspire against it.

Local TV news is likely to suffer from the Nexstar-Tegna sale. Not that our local stations are producing a ton of stellar news programming.

And Buffalo Toronto Public Media is dealing with the loss of $2 million in federal funding, which could well affect its NPR station, formerly known as WBFO.

All this bodes ill for the community. Western New York has more than its share of problems and challenges. A vibrant and vigilant press is needed to give the public and policy makers information they need to intelligently address the issues. 

The trends in media are mostly going in the opposite direction, however.

Investigative Post on the upswing

That said, I have some positive news to report on Investigative Post.

Last week we hit 1 million page views for the year — more traffic than we had in all of 2024. It marks a continuation of steady growth we’ve enjoyed during our 13 years of publication. By the end of the year I expect we’ll surpass our total page views for 2023 and 2024 combined.

That growth contrasts with a decline in website traffic for major news sites. Visits have dropped at more than half of the 50 largest news websites. Growth at outlets that are gaining readers is relatively modest.

Our web traffic is a sliver of that of The Buffalo News and the three local TV stations, but that’s to be expected, as we’re a boutique operation publishing a lot fewer stories. (We also don’t publish clickbait.)

Then again, our readers have higher regard for the quality of our work than that of our competitors. In a survey last summer, our readers rated the quality of our work 4.6 out of a possible 5, vs. 2.6 for the competition.

On another front, we continue to add publishing partners. 

Last week we co-published a story written by J. Dale Shoemaker and Akela Lacy from The Intercept. We recently published a story produced by the Investigative Journalism Bureau, based out of Toronto, and our reporters are collaborating on a story with them that we expect to publish in the coming months. We also recently published a piece by the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, which in turn is publishing stories of ours.

Our past collaborations include ProPublica and, more recently, New York Focus.

Closer to home, our reporters appear an average of once a week on WKBW 7 News and we frequently swap stories with the Niagara Gazette.

Collaboration is a wave of the present, as well as the future, and we don’t lack for publications wanting to work with us. 

I’m not suggesting Investigative Post can fill the gap that’s been created by the decline of our local legacy media outlets. There’s no substitute for a good daily newspaper, for example.

But we’re doing a good job providing the community with watchdog journalism. Our challenge is raising the money necessary to hire more reporters so we can expand our coverage. There’s still too much that goes uncovered.

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