Nexstar Media Group Inc. completed its acquisition of Tegna Inc. on March 19 after regulatory approval for the merger of the television station operators, despite antitrust concerns.
Tegna owned 64 U.S. television stations, including Jacksonville NBC affiliate WTLV-12 and ABC affiliate WJXX TV-25, which operate under the First Coast News brand.
Nexstar owned or operated 201 stations. As part of its deal for Federal Communications Corp. approval, Nexstar agreed to divest six stations, leaving it with 259 after the merger.
“This transaction is essential to sustaining strong local journalism in the communities we serve. By bringing these two outstanding companies together, Nexstar will be a stronger, more dynamic enterprise — better positioned to deliver exceptional journalism and local programming with enhanced assets, capabilities, and talent,” Nexstar CEO Perry Sook said in a news release.
However, attorneys general in eight states opposed the merger and cited recent cuts in local news staff at Nexstar stations as one issue.
“Alarmingly, reports have already detailed Nexstar’s firing of long-standing journalists in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a news release.
Bonta and the other seven attorneys general filed lawsuits March 18 seeking to block the deal. After the FCC approved it March 19 and Nexstar closed the deal, they filed a motion for a temporary restraining order to try and stop it.
“This merger is illegal, plain and simple, running contrary to federal antitrust laws that protect consumers. Nexstar/Tegna is not a done deal. I will not let these corporate behemoths merge without a fight,” Bonta said.
The two First Coast News stations in Jacksonville already began displaying a “Nexstar Media Group Inc.” logo at the end of their newscasts this past weekend.
The major regulatory issue is an FCC rule that limits one company to operating stations that reach 39% of all U.S. television households, which Nexstar exceeds with its large station group.
But FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said the merger is legal.
“The D.C. Circuit has already determined that the relevant media ownership regulation is an agency rule, not a firm statutory limit, and the full Commission has reached the same determination on multiple occasions,” Carr said in a March 20 statement.
“Waiving that rule here is consistent with longstanding FCC authorities and doing so promotes the underlying purpose of the FCC’s media regulations by promoting competition, localism, and diversity,” he said.
Carr also said the deal will ensure local stations have resources to invest in local news at a time when some newspapers are cutting back or closing across the country.
“If you care about local news, you should care about the future of local broadcast TV stations,” he said.
However, a joint statement March 20 by the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians–Communications Workers of America and The NewsGuild-CWA said the FCC approval “can only be seen as an attack on our democracy and the freedom of the press.”
“NABET-CWA and The NewsGuild-CWA condemn the FCC’s approval of Nexstar’s acquisition of local news stations that consolidates corporate control of the media, allowing a single entity to reach 80 percent of U.S. households,” it said.
Fidelity National Information Services Inc., or FIS, reduced its global employment by 7,000 to 44,000 last year, and many of those job cuts were related to use of artificial intelligence, Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe said at an investor conference.
“There are multiple actions we took in that,” Kehoe said during a March 18 talk at the Wells Fargo Annual Payments & Fintech Symposium.
“You should assume a large piece came out of AI,” he said.
Jacksonville-based FIS said in its annual report it operates in 80 locations and 27,000 of its 44,000 employees as of Dec. 31 were employed outside of the U.S.
In response to an emailed question about the financial technology company’s employment level in Jacksonville and the AI impact, FIS would not provide details.
“As a global company that regularly evolves through acquisitions, divestitures, and ongoing investments in technology and innovation, FIS does not comment on site-specific employee numbers,” the company said in a statement.
“Like many of our industry peers, we are actively investing in AI to deliver modern solutions for our clients and drive efficiencies across our operations, and we are proud to be making these tools available to all of our employees globally,” it said.
FIS opened a 12-story headquarters building at 347 Riverside Ave. in October 2022 and said at the time it would add 500 jobs to the 1,216 workers it had in Jacksonville before it built the new location.
While the company operates sites around the world, Kehoe said the conflict in Iran is not having a big impact on operations.
“We do have some locations, but I think we’re in the neighborhood of 30 people,” in the region, he said.
“Our primary concern was protecting individuals. Our business exposure is minimal.”
Jacksonville-based title insurer Fidelity National Financial Inc., which spun off FIS in 2006, should also see an impact on operations from AI, Stephens analyst Oscar Nieves said in a March 19 report.
“Our core view is that AI is emerging as a meaningful driver of productivity across the title workflow, with more structural changes to the industry’s cost model likely over time,” Nieves said after hosting a session with an AI executive about the title insurance industry.
He said title insurers, including Fidelity, should see efficiency gains in the near term and “lower labor intensity and transaction costs” over the long term.
In a March 20 report after a virtual session with Fidelity executives, Nieves reiterated his “overweight” rating on the company’s stock.
“Despite recent volatility in mortgage rates, softer consumer confidence, broader macro concerns, and headlines suggesting potential disruption in the real estate market, the outlook for FNF’s results remains largely unchanged,” he said.
“Residential trends continue to point to a gradual recovery, while commercial remains a key support to earnings and capital allocation priorities are unchanged.”
Nieves has a $61 price target for the stock, which was trading at $44.89 at the time of his report.
CSX Corp. has been dealing with severe winter weather in some areas and rising fuel prices recently, but Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Maryclare Kenney said at an investor conference the Jacksonville-based railroad is handling those issues.
“I’d say the operating team has done a really nice job building resiliency into the network and really getting it back up to strong levels of service performance,” Kenney said March 17 at the J.P. Morgan Industrials Conference.
“From a market perspective, there are certainly certain areas that have been more impacted by the weather issues than others.”
Kenney said shipments of construction aggregates were slowed because mining companies had difficulty getting the material out of the frozen ground. And while the cold weather increased demand for coal, the freezing conditions slowed that market.
“Unfortunately, it does not make it easy to unload coal when it’s frozen. It creates challenges both on the producer side and at the distribution side at the end,” she said.
Kenney does not expect a big impact on CSX from rising fuel prices because of surcharges passed on to customers.
“We do feel confident, while it’s impacting this quarter right now, that we will recover that over the course of this year,” she said.
J.P. Morgan analyst Brian Ossenbeck, who hosted the session, maintained his “overweight” rating on the stock, saying in a research note he didn’t expect Kenney’s remarks to change the near-term outlook for CSX.
However, Evercore ISI analyst Jonathan Chappell downgraded CSX from “outperform” to “in-line” in a March 19 preview report on second-quarter earnings for railroads.
“Our view on CSX has not changed. We still believe the rail has the potential to post industry-leading EPS growth in each of the next two years,” Chappell said.
“However, after a strong run in the share price (up 51% from the 52-week low, up 9.35% YTD, and up 8.3% over the last 3 months – all highs for the industry), we believe much of the organic (and potential inorganic) upside is currently reflected in the stock,” he said.
Jacksonville-based ParkerVision Inc. has been in courts for more than a decade with several lawsuits alleging major telecommunications companies infringed on its patents for wireless technology.
The company was expecting a trial in its lawsuit against Taiwan-based MediaTek Inc. to begin this month, but ParkerVision said the trial was postponed.
After announcing March 12 that the trial would begin March 20 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division, ParkerVision said March 17 the trial was postponed after a pretrial conference.
ParkerVision said the court took the case off the calendar for now pending updates to expert reports and related briefings.
ParkerVision said in February that a trial in another case against a Taiwan-based company, Realtek Semiconductor Corp., is scheduled to begin in Texas on April 27.