A little over a month after losing the Fox affiliation of its station in Evansville, Nexstar is cutting ties with Fox at KSFX in Springfield, MO and WFFT in Fort Wayne, IN.
This week Fox announced new affiliation agreements with stations in Springfield and Fort Wayne, signing deals with Koplar Communications’ KRBK and Granite Broadcasting’s WISE. The new deals mean that Nexstar will have to forge new identities for its stations after decades with Fox.
“We’ve been negotiating with Nexstar for over a year and weren’t able to come to terms on a contract renewal,” said Scott Grogin, a spokesperson for Fox Broadcasting. “It was not a bidding situation.”
Fox has been pushing its affiliates to give up a significant portion of the retrans fees received from cable and satellite providers, which has drawn the ire of Nexstar.
At a recent SNL Kagan conference attended by Nexstar and Fox Broadcasting executives, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook emphasized the value that his stations have to Fox.
“They need us,” Sook said. Over the past couple of months, Fox has worked to refute this claim.
WISE will begin carrying Fox programming on August 1st and KRBK will start in September.