Perry Sook, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nexstar Media Group, recently sat down with John Dick for the CivicScience podcast, and we hear what will happen with the TEGNA merger straight from the top, focusing on the Dallas-Fort Worth television market.
This could also give us a clue about what will happen in Houston, since they are in similar situations.
Sook says television stations are now competing with “FANG” companies — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google:
Perry Sook: "YouTube can reach every screen in, in your house, right? The screen in your pocket, the screen in the den, the screen in the headrest of the car. But but for some reason, I've been legislatively kept small. And so, you know, we the Tegna acquisition would be a continuation of what we've done. We we currently reach 70% of the United States population through UHF discounts. And you know what the current rules provide? This would take us to 80%. It would give us we produce 320, 330,000 hours a year of local news. This would take us to over 450,000 hours of local news. We employ more journalists today pre-merger and provide more local news today pre-merger than any other company in in the United States. We have more journalistic boots on the ground than any other journalistic organization in America, and we think that's important."
He believes there's a national interest in maintaining a free and independent press and warns that if regulators wait too long to modernize ownership rules, local broadcasting could go the way of newspapers.
Perry Sook: "And if you want to look at what an industry looks like if you take too long to deregulate. That's called newspaper. And when they finally got around to deregulating newspaper, there wasn't much of an industry to go back to. And I don't want to see that happen to local broadcast. I don't want to see that happen to local news."
Now here is the part where Sook gives us some insight into what will happen if the Nexstar/TEGNA merger is approved. He mentions the DFW market where Nexstar is based, currently owns CW33 KDAF, and would merge with TEGNA's WFAA 8.
Perry Sook: "Well, you know, we operate a lot of markets where we derive an economic benefit from more than one TV station. Today, even though we can't own the second station outright. Now, those are not 100% efficient, but over in Scranton, we operate we own the NBC station and operate the CBS station. And we have two studios, one big newsroom, and we produce product, different product for each of the TV stations. So what I don't have to do is have two separate buildings. And when the mayor has a news conference, put two reporters and two photographers in two different news cars, have them drive, you know, to the to the scene and stand beside each other and shoot the same, you know, B-roll, you know, or, you know, cover the news conference from the same, you know, press pool podium in the back of the room. So a lot of that is, things that we do today. We call them virtual duopolies. You know, where the ownership rules preclude us from owning two TV stations in those marketplaces today, but they're not 100% efficient.
And again, you know, we've identified, you know, from where I speak, and here in Dallas, we own the CW affiliate (CW33 KDAF), Tegna owns the ABC affiliate (WFAA 8).
There's no local news on the CW because we can't afford to compete in a market like Dallas with a CW affiliate stand alone. So when we combine the two, they'll be in one building with, you know, one set of back office folks, and we'll be able to take the ABC news operation and expand their footprint and put, you know, news on the CW at 9:00, because ABC is programming until 10:00. We'll be able to when they go to Good Morning America, 7 to 9 in the morning, we'll be able to program local news on the CW affiliate using a lot of the same resources. And so, you know, we've identified probably a dozen markets in the acquisition just from our desk review where we can add more local news. And if you look at our heritage, when we bought Tribune back in 2019, we increased the amount of local programming on the acquired stations in those acquired markets by roughly 30%. And again, it's a big organization with more resources, may be able to try things and do things that smaller organizations can't. So again, you know, you by consolidating, you're not paying two electric bills for two facilities, two sets of property tax and all of that."
In my August post Texas TV outcome in Nexstar + TEGNA deal?, I guessed that in Houston, you will see the CW39 KIAH Nexstar staff mostly let go. The current leased ABC13 KTRK-produced 9pm news will go away in favor of KHOU 11 News at 9pm on CW39, or whatever they will call that.
UPDATE JULY 2026
KHOU 11 to provide CW39 9pm newscast
In Houston, KIAH produces only a CW39 morning newscast. The KHOU 11 morning anchors just started going all-digital at 7am, so why wouldn't they simulcast that online version on CW39, too? After talking to knowledgeable people about both companies, I imagine some KIAH employees will move to KHOU to train KHOU staffers on the Nexstar software, systems, and other operations.
I also guessed that CW39 will move to KHOU's Westheimer studios for now. Since Nexstar owns the KIAH studios, they could tear down that building and build a new, larger, modernized space for both stations to eventually move back into. Let's face it, the Galleria lease KHOU has can't be cheap.
As I said, stay tuned as we learn more and see if I am correct or totally wrong.
