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How Nexstar’s Perry Sook built a broadcast powerhouse from a single TV station

Live sports and a national cable news rollout pushed the Irving-based company to record revenue in 2022 and netted Sook a pay package totaling $39 million.

When CEO Perry Sook founded Nexstar in 1996, the media company had one local television station in Scranton, Pa. Since then, the company has acquired 200 broadcast stations across 39 states and 116 markets, making it the largest owner of television stations in the country.

Now, Irving-based Nexstar is launching its second act.

Through acquisitions like Washington, D.C.-based newspaper The Hill and national broadcast network The CW, Nexstar is revamping its broadcast business for the modern media era, with new sports programming and a national cable news channel taking center stage.

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As a result, the company brought in a record $5.2 billion in revenue last year, and Sook earned the title of Dallas-Fort Worth’s highest-paid CEO for fiscal 2022 with a compensation package totaling nearly $40 million. Performance-based stock awards accounted for $33 million of his pay.

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Nexstar’s financial performance led to an 86% hike in Sook’s compensation, propelling him from ninth in 2021 to the top of The Dallas Morning News’ annual analysis of executive pay at Dallas-Fort Worth’s 100 largest public companies. Nationally, CEOs took a slight pay cut in 2022 due to decreases in cash bonuses, according to compensation consulting firm Equilar. Communications company CEOs like Sook are typically corporate America’s highest-paid executives.

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“We’re probably the biggest company in North Texas that most people have never heard of,” Sook said. “The company is founded on local journalism and local content, which I think will always have a place in the media ecosystem, because there are precious few people that can produce it professionally like we do.”

To grasp Nexstar’s reach, look no further than its network-affiliated stations dotting the country:

  • NBC in Tampa, Austin, Columbus, Norfolk, Fresno and Little Rock;
  • ABC in Nashville, Salt Lake City, New Orleans and Albany, N.Y.;
  • CBS in Portland, Ore., Raleigh, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Birmingham and Albuquerque;
  • Fox in Denver, Charlotte, Cleveland, Sacramento, St. Louis, Kansas City and San Diego.
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Nexstar's local TV station footprint spans the country.
Nexstar's local TV station footprint spans the country.(Nexstar)

In Dallas-Fort Worth, it operates The CW’s KDAF-TV (Channel 33).

Sook’s connections to the broadcast business run deep. Before creating Nexstar, he was an executive at other small broadcasting companies including Superior Communication Group, which was eventually purchased by now-Nexstar competitor Sinclair Broadcasting, and Seaway Communication. He was also formerly a news anchor at a CBS affiliate in Clarksburg, W.Va.

Nexstar’s biggest move this year involved its 75% stake in The CW, which it acquired in September 2022 from previous owners Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. (They kept and split the remaining 25%). The acquisition essentially cost Nexstar nothing and actually resulted in a $54 million gain on its books — an indication of how badly the studios wanted out, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Though better known as the home of young adult dramas like Riverdale and The Flash, The CW is one of the country’s five major broadcast stations, not including PBS. Along with NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox, The CW reaches 97% of households in the U.S.

Nexstar wants The CW to evolve into a full-service network, broadcasting sports and unscripted and scripted shows that cater to audiences beyond young adults. The average age of the network’s viewers is 58, surprising given its reputation but comparable to the demographics of other major broadcast networks.

As The CW’s largest affiliate group, Nexstar was delivering CW content to over a third of the country and ensuring future access to its programs meant protecting that interest, Sook said. He also saw it as providing a growth avenue, given its potential national audience.

Through 2023, the most obvious area of growth has been in sports. In January, The CW became the broadcast home of Saudi-backed golf league LIV Golf, the network’s first-ever national sports broadcast contract. In April, the docuseries 100 Days to Indy premiered about the Indianapolis 500. June brought an announcement that Inside the NFL, a sports TV staple for nearly five decades, would move from Paramount+ to The CW.

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In May, golfer Dustin Johnson (left) and his caddy Austin Johnson celebrated during a trophy...
In May, golfer Dustin Johnson (left) and his caddy Austin Johnson celebrated during a trophy ceremony after winning a LIV Golf tournament in Tulsa. The CW is airing the tournaments this year. (Amy Kontras/LIV Golf / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

“The big takeaway from the first week of LIV Golf on The CW was that the Saturday and Sunday night entertainment programming audiences grew by approximately 20% each night,” Sook said, adding that live sports are one of the key things viewers and distributors are willing to pay for. “Sports as a lead-in to your entertainment programming can actually help grow your prime-time ratings.”

Now, The CW has a contract to air 50 Atlantic Coast Conference football and men’s and women’s basketball games a year beginning this season through 2026-27. The deal will bring marquee live sports events to the network for the first time. Some of the nation’s biggest college sports brands, including Clemson, Florida State, Duke and North Carolina, play in the ACC.

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The package includes 13 college football games a season, beginning with a revival of the River City Rivalry between the Big 12′s Cincinnati and the ACC’s Pittsburgh Sept. 9. The network will also air 28 men’s basketball games and nine women’s basketball games, including two Duke men’s basketball games a year, according to Sook.

There’s more on the horizon. In late July, Nexstar announced The CW will be the exclusive broadcast home of NASCAR’s Xfinity Series, beginning in 2025.

The CW also is reported to be one of the top bidders for the Pac-12′s ever mysterious media rights deal to begin in 2024, a deal the conference is expected to announce soon and will be crucial to its long-term stability and exposure. With Bally Sports’ March bankruptcy, the rights to many professional sports teams’ regional broadcasts could also potentially be on the table.

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“To use a sports term, we are playing Moneyball,” Sook said. “Because we’ve just taken over this network, ... we’re just doing our first foray into sports. … But what I hope is we can grow into [becoming] more and more competitive for more and more programming, including sports franchises as time goes on.”

Nexstar has grown from a one station company into the nation's largest owner of local TV...
Nexstar has grown from a one station company into the nation's largest owner of local TV stations.(Liesbeth Powers / Special Contributor)

Nexstar is also trying to make headway in cable news with its channel NewsNation.

After acquiring Chicago-based WGN America as part of its acquisition of Tribune Media in 2020, Nexstar developed NewsNation first as a segment on WGN America before renaming the channel entirely. NewsNation is now a 24/5 channel, and Nexstar plans to build it out to 24/7 like Fox or CNN.

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According to Sook, NewsNation didn’t retain any legacy audience from WGN America, forcing the company to build the channel’s audience from scratch. Nexstar’s bet, though, is that it can use its portfolio of local news stations to bring the best stories from around the country to a national audience. Nexstar employs around 5,500 local journalists, according to its annual report.

“We know the street names. We know the local officials because we live and work in those communities,” Sook said. “We can be in Oklahoma City when the tornado comes through because we have a local station and local reporters there before anybody else can charter a jet and fly in from New York or Los Angeles or whatever to cover the aftermath.”

The channel has also benefited from Nexstar’s 2021 acquisition of The Hill, a Washington newspaper distributed for free around the Capitol and mailed directly to congressional offices. Sook said the connection between The Hill and NewsNation gave the news network “instant credibility” in Washington.

A daily 5 p.m. segment called The Hill premiered on NewsNation in April to cover the day’s major political stories. Sook said that segment and NewsNation have capitalized on The Hill’s name to land on-air interviews with important political figures. He also said Nexstar wants to expand and add a Sunday morning interview show, which will probably be called some variation of The Hill.

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The partnership captures a section of the cable news market Nexstar believes was left unfilled by personality-based partisan news. Both NewsNation and The Hill consistently receive center bias ratings and high reliability ratings from media watchdog organizations like Ad Fontes and AllSides.

In 2021, there were concerns of a rightward turn following news that former Fox News president and Donald Trump’s communications director Bill Shine was consulting for Nexstar. However, NewsNation’s bias ratings have stayed steady by “building the reputation of NewsNation as an honest purveyor of news,” Sook said.

Nexstar's NewsNation cable news network features a lineup of well-known broadcasters (from...
Nexstar's NewsNation cable news network features a lineup of well-known broadcasters (from left): Elizabeth Vargas, Leland Vittert, Chris Cuomo, Dan Abrams and Ashleigh Banfield.(Nexstar Media Group)
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To burnish that reputation, NewsNation opened a New York City studio and made several big-name hires including former ABC news anchor Elizabeth Vargas, former CNN news anchor Ashleigh Banfield, veteran legal analyst Dan Abrams and talk show host Chris Cuomo following his termination from CNN.

NewsNation has yet to take a serious chunk out of overall cable news viewership, with an average prime-time audience just shy of 100,000 viewers, according to the U.S. Television Database. Compare that with other cable news networks in the high six figures and low seven figures.

Sook said NewsNation is the only cable news network whose ratings are growing. NewsNation’s ratings rose in the first three months of this year, following an average prime-time viewership of 63,000 people at the end of 2022.

NewsNation has also been profitable from its inception, Sook said.

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“You can call us fledgling. Don’t call us struggling because we haven’t struggled a day since we started,” he said. “Think about what happens if these trend lines of our growth and our competitors’ declines continue for the next three to five years. Eventually, our lines are going to cross. We’re playing the long game.”

The only thing that could rain on Nexstar’s parade this year is an ongoing and litigious carriage dispute with DirecTV. Currently, Nexstar stations are dark for all DirecTV and U-verse cable subscribers. DirecTV claims Nexstar is demanding excessive carriage fees that will raise prices for subscribers. Sook said he wouldn’t be surprised if the dispute was over by football season, as a similar summertime dispute between the two was four years ago.

Ultimately, the dispute doesn’t affect Nexstar’s long-term strategy.

Nexstar posted substantial growth in distribution fees in 2022, according to its year-end report, leading to its record revenue. Election year advertising revenue was also a major contributor. Though things like the carriage dispute, streaming and changes in the advertising market represent challenges to the company, Sook is optimistic about Nexstar’s future.

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“Technology may change the way we do business, but it won’t change our basic business of providing news and information for local consumers and helping the business community grow their businesses through [advertising and] local activation,” Sook said. “That’s our basic value proposition, and I don’t think it ever goes out of style.”

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