The Tegna Deal

FTVLive had tipped you off that Tegna was going to announce that they were selling the company and that announcement came down yesterday.

Standard General will buy up the Tegna stations and will sell off some of those stations to Cox, which is run by the hedge fund Apollo.

Cox is snatching up the Tegna stations across Texas.

So, what does this all mean for the people that work at Tegna?

First off, the sale will likely not be approved until at least the Summertime and that means no big changes for months.

After Standard General takes over is when the changes will happen.

First off, Tegna boss Dave Lougee is done, he will not be continuing with the company after the sale and will parachute out of the Tegna plane with a pile of money.

He will be replaced by Deb McDermott, who some of you might remember from the old days of Media General.

McDermott seems to understand Journalism a bit more than Lougee, so I would expect you will see the Tegna stations move back slowly to be more focused on “real” Journalism and less on doing TikTok on TV as the Tegna stations do now.

Tegna would have you believe that it is due to their great work that Standard General swooped in to buy them, but that is not the case.

FTVLive talked to executives at Standard General a number of times and they always thought that Tegna was an underperforming company.

Standard felt that they could do a much better job at running Tegna and now we are about to find out if that is indeed the case.

So, the big question is, what does that mean for me, the Tegna employee?

Well, in short, most likely not much.

When sales happen, everyone is concerned about what the new company is going to do? Will they come in and clean house?

In reality, that almost never happens. If you are in the rank and file, it is more than likely your job will not be impacted.

Now, this will not be the case for managers.

I would expect that you will see a turnover in many of the GM’s running Tegna stations. It wouldn’t happen on day one, but I think you will see it in the months just after the sale is approved.

Of course, a new GM could mean they want to bring in their own News Director and that could be part of the change. But that is likely to happen many months, if not over a year into the sale.

Tegna is very heavy when it comes to managers. Some stations have more than one News Director, along with a VP of News and more EP’s than you can count. If Standard General is looking to save money in an area that will not have much impact on what the viewer sees, trimming the mid-level managers would be a good start.

If you’re a Producer, Anchor, Reporter, MMJ, or Photographer it is very likely nothing will change for you.

Standard General wants to prop up the bottom line and make the shareholders happy. In this regard, they aren’t any different than say Nexstar, Sinclair or any other publically traded company.

But, remember when Tegna forced you guys to take a furlough and you lost a paycheck for a week? Well, Standard General was against that and they said that if they were running the company, that would have never happened.

So, you hope that this company will be a bit more focused of the employees and their needs.

No one really knows what will happen after the sale goes though and even the suits at Standard General don’t know until they can get inside the company and see what needs to be done?

I know this, if Deb McDermott comes in and puts and end to dancing social media posts on station branded accounts, she will be looked at by many Journalists as a hero.

Now, what about those Tegna stations that are going to be spun-off to Cox?

Years ago, if you were one of these stations that was moving to Cox, it would have been great news.

Cox was one of, if not the business media companies to work for. But, since being taken over by the hedge-fund Apollo, sadly that is no longer the case.

Apollo is certainly not the worse company out there, but they sure took the Cox name down several notches after they took it over.

Apollo wants to run their stations lean and they are not afraid to make cuts in what they deem is fat.

But, in today’s media, it really doesn’t make them different than any other media company out there.

Going through a sale is always scary, but after it’s done, you will think to yourself, I worried way more than I should have.

My advice is to try and not dwell on it, because in the end there is not really much you can do? But, most of you that are reading this will be fine.

But, if you’re a GM, you might want to update the old resume and after the sale goes through, you might want to stay away from buying the green bananas at the store. You might not be around long enough for them to get ripe.

Stay tuned….