On Sept. 30, Nexstar Broadcasting Group, which owns local CBS affiliate WCIA channel 3 and UPN affiliate WCFN channel 49, cancelled local news on its two Billings, Montana stations, Fox affiliate, KHMT-4, and ABC station, KSVI-6. According to the Billings Gazette, Brian Jones, senior vice president for Nexstar Broadcasting Group, laid off all 26 KSVI and KHMT reporters and anchors, citing unsatisfactory ratings as the rationale.

Nexstar had signed an agreement to buy the stations from Boston-based Quorum Broadcasting just two weeks earlier. Nexstar’s Jones said the news department stood between red and black ink on the balance sheet.

Instead of local news, the syndicated comedy "Everybody Loves Raymond" will air on one station, and the other will run the program “Blind Date.”

Nexstar bought local stations WCIA and WCFN in July of 1999 for $110 million. After making the deal, but before formally taking over the stations, Nexstar management fired WCIA's news director, which followed a a protracted lawsuit and the eventual firing of the channel's long-standing and popular news anchors, Jerry Slabe and Marta Carreira-Slabe.

Another local TV owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns NBC affiliate WICD-TV channel 15, has already announced its plan to roll out its NewsCentral program to all of its station. NewsCentral, which already airs on several Sinclair stations, replaces the local nightly news broadcast with one that originates from studios outside Baltimore, MD. Most of the broadcast is the same for all of Sinclair's stations, from Nevada to North Carolina, with only a short breakaway for local news that originates at the local station.

So far, the stations that air NewsCentral already had their local news programs cancelled. Thus Sinclair used the occasion of establishing NewsCentral at these stations to promote it as a gift to the community, because they brought back local news.

Although it has yet to begin airing locally, Sinclair has made no bones about its intention to bring NewsCentral to all of its stations, including those that already have a local news broadcast and a full news staff.

In comments both Nexstar and Sinclair made to the FCC this Fall in the Commission’s ownership rules review, they advocated loosening local TV ownership rules, so that a company could own more stations in a given market, and to allow more cross-ownership with TV and newspapers.

Based in Irving, Texas, Nexstar Broadcast Group owns 14 TV stations in nine states, not counting the two newly acquired Billings, MT stations, and the it operates another 11.

For more on what our local media owners, read these other stories posted to the U-C IMC website:

Concentrated Media Sausage: Making Sense Out Of The FCC's Changes To Media Ownership Rules, The Congressional Attempts To Reverse Them, And What This Means In Our Local Media Environment

The Oncoming DE-Localization Of Our Local "NewsChannel"