Bigger is Not better

As a one person website that has beaten major media outlets on big media stories over the years, we know that bigger is not always better.

The same could be said about TV media companies.

While Nexstar is the biggest and trying to get bigger with the Tegna deal, they certainly are not the best.

In fact, looking at the Nexstar TV markets, it isn’t often that you see the Nexstar station leading the market in the news ratings.

One FTVLive reader sent along their take and they took a closer look at just one market as an example.

Scott,

With the pending deal for Nexstar to acquire Tegna, I wanted to comment that even with Nexstar's scale, Nexstar isn't necessarily the market leader in their local markets.

I could be talking about markets like New York City, LA, San Francisco, etc...where network O&O's dominate the local landscape and Nexstar clearly isn't going to gain any market share. But what about markets that are smaller and Nexstar has more of a presence?

Case in point: Youngstown, Ohio.

The Mahoning Valley--which includes both Youngstown and neighboring Warren and spills into Pennsylvania--is the 125th largest metro area in the United States, the 118th DMA, and sandwiched in between two much larger markets in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, so in the grand scheme of things is low on the totem pole for TV executives. To this day Youngstown is more known for its excessively high crime rates and terminally declining industrial base than anything else, though crime has declined significantly the last 20 years (partially due to people leaving and taking their crime to Cleveland and Columbus) and while still economically struggling has pretty much bottomed out on industrial businesses closing, mainly due to their being none left since GM closed Lordstown Assembly in 2019.

Anyways, in one corner you have Nexstar owning the local CBS affiliate, WKBN. They also own low-powered Fox affiliate WYFX (which, due to the size of the DMA sufficiently covers the market) which was launched by WKBN back in the late 1990s. They operate local ABC affiliate WYTV through an LMA, which in Nexstar's defense happened a decade before they took over operations of the three stations in 2017. To their credit, WKBN and WYTV do produce different newscasts despite the fact that they immediately merged the news departments back in 2007 when the LMA went into effect and even use different Nexstar graphics, though both stations share reporters and video packages.

 In the other corner you have NBC affiliate WFMJ, which is locally owned by the Maag family and, after selling off the local newspaper The Vindicator to c̶h̶e̶a̶p̶a̶s̶s̶ ̶P̶i̶t̶t̶s̶b̶u̶r̶g̶h̶ ̶P̶i̶r̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶e̶r̶ Bob Nutting through his family's Ogden Newspapers and merged with the Warren-based Tribune Chronicle,  literally own nothing else. No other TV stations. No other newspapers. They sold off their radio assets decades ago. They've never owned any media properties outside the Mahoning Valley.

Due to Nexstar's ownership, WKBN/WYTV have Nexstar's national resources available to them, including stations from neighboring markets whose viewing areas spill into their own, most notably WJW in Cleveland but also WJET in Erie, Pennsylvania (one of Nexstar's first stations I might add) and WTRF in Wheeling, West Virginia. Nothing in Pittsburgh (yet), but if they need Ohio state public affairs programming they do have access to WCMH in Columbus. Since their viewing area also includes Pennsylvania--officially per Nielsen only Mercer County but several other PA counties also have significant viewership--they can access WHTM in Harrisburg if they need Pennsylvania state public affairs as well.

WFMJ, being locally-owned with no sister stations, has none of these resources aside from NBC News reports through their NBC affiliation.

Guess who is the ratings leader in Youngstown?

It's not even close: WFMJ dominates the local ratings, and has since the late 1990s when WKBN lost its own local ownership status. That's despite going up against two Nexstar properties with three major network affiliations and the vast resources of Nexstar. The viewers aren't idiots, they know whats really local. And there's no indication the Maag family is selling WFMJ anytime soon, whether it be to Gray, Sinclair, or a smaller company like Marquee Broadcasting. It says a lot that we still have instances of David beating Goliath.

As a side note: WFMJ, through their second digital subchannel "WBCB" (the call sign is fictitious and just for marketing purposes), serves as the area's CW affiliate. Nexstar hasn't tried to reclaim the CW affiliation in Youngstown. It probably knows with a viable competitor in the area, it might face a lawsuit if they had all the network affiliations except NBC in the market. Lima, Ohio it is not.