Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Sinclair Broadcasting Facing Possible Bankruptcy

Yes, this is HUGE news, much like a similar situation going on in the territory of our friends at Ohio Media Watch this afternoon.

We have several stories sent to us by Friend of TSMW Rich Emery, all of which point to recent SEC filings by Sinclair Broadcast Group. We'll list them below.

The big detail is that all of the stories report the same thing: Sinclair is warning that it may file for bankruptcy soon based on sinking revenues and concerns about the finances of Cunningham Broadcasting Corporation. (They are one of the partners in Local Marketing Agreements or LMA's
p with Sinclair - but Cunningham is technically owned lock, stock and barrel by Sinclair, or at least members of the Smith family which founded Sinclair.)

What does this have to do with the Cincinnati or Dayton media markets? Sinclair owns four different stations. Those of course would be WSTR-TV 64/Cincinnati, and the FOX/ABC duopoly in Dayton of WRGT-TV 45/Dayton (with MNTV on the 45.2 subchannel) and WKEF-TV 22/Dayton. They also own the FOX/ABC duopoly in Columbus, WSYX-TV 6/Columbus and WTTE-TV 28/Columbus (together with the My Network TV station in that city).

Here's all of the links to our sources. More coming tomorrow, including (we hope) comments from WSTR management, and maybe WKEF or WRGT too.




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