Ohio's Nexstar Deal Protects the Newsroom. It Writes the Photographer Out of It.
On April 30, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced an agreement with Nexstar over two stations the company picked up in its $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna: WBNS-TV in Columbus and WKYC-TV in Cleveland, the two Ohio markets where Nexstar would end up owning a second station. Nexstar promised to keep editorial decision-making at the station level, to keep "separate journalist teams" at each, and to hold local programming at the hours that existed at closing. In return, Ohio agreed to "release, waive, and forbear from any antitrust claims" against the deal, while a dozen other states went to court. "Journalistic independence is a cornerstone principle of our democracy," Yost said. The coverage was about that promise. The part worth reading is one sentence further down.
That sentence, in section 1(b)(i) of the memorandum of understanding, defines who is on a journalist team. It is "personnel whose primary role is to gather, verify, interpret, and present news content to the public," such as "anchors and editors who exercise editorial judgment." It then names who is not: "technical, engineering, and administrative personnel who enable the broadcast but do not determine its journalistic content (e.g., photographers, engineers, production assistants, newscast production-support, and the like)." So the independence Ohio negotiated belongs to the people who choose the words. The people who choose the pictures are filed with the engineers.
Anyone who has carried a camera on a story knows that is backwards. The first verb in the agreement's own definition is gather, and gathering is most of what a news photographer does. Where the camera points is an editorial decision. So is whose face is in the frame, whether the shot is wide enough to show how few people actually turned up, and whether you keep rolling when someone tells you to stop. In a television story the pictures are not decoration on the script; very often they are the evidence, and the reporter writes to them. I have argued here before that the plumbing that moves footage shapes the journalism. The person making the footage shapes it more. The agreement does not mention multimedia journalists — the one-person crews who shoot, write and edit their own stories — at all, which leaves the people doing both jobs to be sorted by a "primary role" test no one has yet had to apply.
The definition matters because of where consolidation savings come from. Nexstar has promised investors $300 million a year in what it calls "synergies," NPR reported, and after it bought Tribune Media it merged the Indianapolis stations' newsrooms. In blocking further integration in April, Chief Judge Troy Nunley wrote that Nexstar's integration efforts would "eliminate competition and result in newsroom layoffs and shutdowns." Read against that, a promise of separate journalist teams that excludes photographers leaves room for exactly one kind of saving: a single pool of crews feeding two newsrooms that are independent on paper. Two anchors, two producers, the same pictures. I am not saying that is Nexstar's plan for Columbus or Cleveland; I do not know. I am saying the agreement, as written, would not stop it. Nor would much else survive a bad year — the commitments lapse on a "Material Adverse Change," which the document defines to include market conditions with a material negative impact on the stations' advertising revenue.
For now the question is frozen. Nunley's preliminary injunction still bars Nexstar from combining Tegna's operations with its own, Nexstar's appeal is with the Ninth Circuit, and trial is set for July 2027. Whatever happens, Ohio's memorandum is now a written example of what a state will accept as a local-news commitment in a TV merger, and the next state or regulator to negotiate one will have it on the table. They should start with the definitions. A newsroom is independent only if the people deciding what the audience sees are inside the promise, and a commitment that protects the script but not the shot protects half the story.