Is Tegna Headed Back to the Future
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This could be a smart move on the part of Tegna to end the so-called "millennial news" experiment and return to doing real news, even though the damage has been done to a lot of well-liked and well-respected (and in some cases, legacy) stations.
If you look at names, like Cox Media Group, or Hearst Television, or Graham Media Group, they get it.
Cox is the proud owner of notable legacy stations WSB 2 in Atlanta and well as WHIO 7 in Dayton. Hearst owns WBAL 11 in Baltimore, WCVB 5 in Boston, and KCRA 3 in Sacramento. Graham was very good during the Post-Newsweek Stations era, and when they fully owned and operated WPLG 10 in Miami, and WJXT 4 in Jacksonville, KPRC 2 in Houston and WDIV 4 in Detroit are good.
These stations having top-notch local news operations and programming. These stations are among the strongest performing stations in the country, in terms of ad revenue, ratings, accolades, etc.
Apollo Global Management is acquiring Cox and Northwest Broadcasting. Let's not forget that there's been plenty of chatter about Apollo sniffing around Tegna, and many Tegna employees are wishing for Apollo to come in to acquire them, in hopes of reversing the damage Tegna has inflicted. Maybe Tegna feels they would attract more buyers by doing real news and not the crap that they are trying to pawn off as news.
No matter what, if Tegna is making the move back to traditional news, we will be one of the first to applaud the move and it will surely make a number of Tegna employees very happy.
Stay tuned…
