Perry Sook, founder and CEO of broadcast giant Nexstar Media Group, isn’t a fan of streaming.

“The main reason we’re not in streaming is because we just don’t think it’s a good business,” Sook said during Nexstar’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday. “It’s not a business we want to get into to lose money.”

Noting Wednesday’s news that The Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery were putting Disney Plus, Hulu and Max in a new package for consumers, Sook observed that the industry is rebundling its assets.

“We’ve gone around the world to go around the corner and what we’re doing is repeating basic cable,” he said.

In some ways, basic cable was better than streaming is today, he said.

“One thing basic cable has that an amalgamation of apps doesn’t have is seamless navigation,” Sook said. “For viewers of a certain age, being able to change channels is something we grew up doing and something we still like to do.”

Also Read: Nexstar Pitches Sports on The CW, Extra Reach Via Stations

“You probably don't have the number of content choices that you do in a traditional bundle,” he added.

In the three and a half years since most media companies started launching direct-to-consumer offerings, those products have resulted in billions of dollars in losses and market-cap destruction, Sook said.

On top of that, those companies disrupted their own linear businesses. Sook called that a “lose-lose proposition.”

Looking ahead, Sook said the industry is developing better business models.

Those models “are being developed with broadcast as the anchor as it always has been, given viewer demand for our must-have local and national programming including sports and special-event programming that relies on our unrivaled reach to maximize audiences,” Sook said.

“We think there are any number of ways that we can reach the consumer. Everyone wants to stream because they don't have broadcast assets that are free over-the-air that can reach 100% of the population,” he said. “They are trying to expand outside of that traditional pay TV universe, but we've been there for time immemorial.”

Speaking of broadcast assets, an analyst asked if Nexstar would be interested in buying CBS’s stations if Paramount is acquired and opts to break up the company. Last year, Nexstar was reportedly interested in ABC and its stations when The Walt Disney Co. was considering putting them on the block.

Sook said Nexstar never confirmed discussing Disney assets, and that in the current regulatory environment, it would be difficult for Nexstar (which has ownership-cap issues) to digest the CBS stations. “If that were to change, maybe, you know, our opinion would change.”

Nexstar Media Group’s  board of directors has decided that separating the jobs of chairman and CEO would be a good idea, but it won’t be implemented until founder Perry Sook leaves the company.

Sook, Nexstar’s chairman and CEO, is the company’s third largest shareholders with a 4.6% stake in the broadcaster. His current employment agreement with Nexstar runs through March 31, 2026.

According to the company, the Board believes the adoption of this policy is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, as the new policy does not interfere with Sook’s continued leadership

of Nexstar and the benefits he brings to Nexstar, while establishing a plan that provides a runway for the most qualified individuals to serve as CEO and chairperson in the future.

Sook founded Nexstar in 1996. It has grown into one of the largest broadcasters, with annualized revenues of more than $5 billion.

Nexstar Media Group is in talks to bring more National Basketball Association games to its stations.

Nexstar made a deal with the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers to exclusively broadcast 15 games on its L.A. station KTLA this season. The games are also being aired on other Nexstar stations in California. (The Clippers’ other games appear on regional sports network Bally Sports SoCal.)

On Nexstar’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts, chairman and CEO Perry Sook said the broadcast group was in talks with at least two other NBA owners about carving out a similar package for its stations.

“I think you’ll see more of this as times go on,” Sook said.

Any deal would be done in consultation with the incumbent regional sports network and could benefit the RSN by whetting the appetite of sports fans and turning the growing number of non-subscribers into subscribers, he said. The big over-the-air reach could also help teams sell tickets, he added. 

Sook was also asked about the potential financial impact of NBC shortening its primetime and turning the 10 p.m. ET/PT hour over to affiliates, which network officials have said they are considering.

“It would be good,” Sook said. “We’ll make more money with an hour of news at 10 than we do with an hour of network programming.” The affiliates would be able to sell all of the ad inventory in a local newscast, compared to just a minute or two in a primetime network show.

“Listen, we have a number of Fox and CW and MyNetwork TV stations that program news in that last hour of prime, and they are extremely profitable,” Sook said.

If the networks cut back the number of hours of programming provided each week, stations would pay them less in reverse retransmission programming fees, he added.

Nexstar now owns a network of its own, having acquired at 75% stake in The CW.

CFO Lee Ann Gilha said Nexstar still expected to make the money-losing network profitable by 2025.

The CW will have revenue of about $70 million in the fourth quarter and run up a negative EBITDA of about the same amount. There will also be an eight-figure restructuring charge related to The CW. Nexstar will be able to offset a portion of the losses against taxes payable, Gilha said.

By next season, The CW’s commitment to most of the programming produced by former owners Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery will be “minimal,” she said.

“Warner Bros. and Paramount are not precluded from selling us programming,” Sook added. “It’s just going to have to be a financial deal that we like, and there may be a couple of shows that distinguish themselves this year that we want to roll over into next year.”

During the call, Sook also tried to persuade analysts and investors that Nexstar was likely to perform better than other media companies if the economy goes south.

Sook said that more than 50% of Nexstar revenue comes from distribution fees, “a contractual and recurring revenue source that has historically been resistant to periods of economic slowdown.”

Less than one-third of Nexstar’s third-quarter revenue came from core television advertising, making the company less dependent on ad revenue than ever before, he said. And political advertising will continue to grow, with local TV getting the lions share because, like other marketers, candidates have found that broadcast is best for reaching mass audiences.

Local advertising has also been more resilient than national advertising he said and Nexstar’s 1,500 member sales forces will be difficult to compete with.

“There is no one in the TV industry with greater sales resources and consumer reach than Nexstar,” Sook said. “This isn’t something the larger AVOD or streaming companies can easily replicate. While some pure-play streaming companies are now embarking on an effort to replicate our business model, ours is proven and consistent and currently delivering today.” ■

Nexstar Media Group said its board extended Perry Sook’s employment agreement as CEO through March 31, 2026.

Sook founded the broadcaster in 1996. He also serves as chairman and is Nexstar’s biggest shareholder.

The company went public in 2003 and since then revenue has increased from $87 million to $4.6 billion at the end of 2021.

“Given his long-term record of accomplishments, we are delighted to extend Perry’s employment agreement. He is rightfully recognized as the industry’s most effective leader and innovator, and his vision, commitment and team-building have driven Nexstar’s exceptional record of operating execution, consistent financial growth and the enhancement of shareholder value, while positioning the Company to aggressively compete in the ever-changing media environment,” said Dennis Miller, chair of Nexstar’s Board of Directors Compensation Committee. “On behalf of the entire Board of Directors, we are grateful for Perry’s contributions and look forward to the continued benefit of his vision and dedication to the company’s viewers, advertising clients, team members, shareholders and other stakeholders.” ■

Nexstar Media Group CEO Perry Sook said he could see his company owning a broadcast network in the future.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we owned a broadcast network and maybe other cable networks that we layer on top of our local content foundation,” Sook said when asked on a podcast to envision what Nexstar would look like in 2032. 

Nexstar has reportedly been in discussions to acquire a majority stake in The CW. The CW is now a joint venture of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, and Nexstar is one of its largest affiliate groups.

The giant station group acquired cable network WGN America when it bought Tribune Media. Nexstar has rebranded WGN America into NewsNation, gradually turning it into a cable news channel.

Sook said Nexstar will maintain the mission it now has as an owner of TV stations.

Also: Nexstar Earnings Rise with Core Ad Revenue Up 4%

“I think our core business focusing on local markets and producing relevant, contextual, interesting, factual content and helping local businesses grow will remain unchanged,” he said. “At our core, we are a local service business.”

The businesses it is looking to buy will be “complimentary content acquisition to what we have today.” He expects that digital will account for a much bigger share of the company’s revenue than its current 6% or 7%.

Mostly Sook said he’s focused on the opportunity he sees in the switchover to ATSC 3.0, the new NextGen TV broadcast technology, and said he would like other broadcast execs to make it more of a priority.

Sook said that by 2032 ATSC 3.0 will represent a revenue stream that will be equal or greater than the revenue it currently gets from retransmission and distribution. Nexstar has pointed to studies that show incremental revenue from ATSC 3.0 services reaching as much as $15 billion by 2030.

“I think that’s the next big, and perhaps the final, remaining huge value creation lever for the industry that does exist today in our business as we know it,” he said.

In addition to being able to transmit more digital broadcast channels, Nexstar is looking at the NextGen TV signal as being able to enhance GPS and other location and navigation systems. 

“It allows us as broadcasters with this signal that is basically omnidirctional to become the wireless connector of the internet of things,” he said.

Sook said these businesses can’t really get started until enough spectrum is converted from the current ATSC 1.0 spec to ATSC 3.0 and he would like for other broadcasters to get on the stick.

“The pace of change here is not satisfactory to me,” Sook said. “If this is as big a valuation opportunity as we envision it to be, why aren’t other folks in my CEO seat spending all day, every day, talking about how to get to the point of monetization?”  ■

Nexstar Media Group said its board of directors decided to increase the quarterly cash dividend on the company’s common stock by 29%.

The new payout is 90 cents per share, starting February 28 to shareholders of record on February 11.

“Nexstar’s ninth consecutive annual dividend increase represents a compound annual growth rate of 25% since the dividend was initiated in 2013,” said Perry Sook, Nexstar founder and CEO.

“Our capital allocation priorities remain focused on creating near- and long-term shareholder value by deploying our free cash flow through a mix of debt repayments, share repurchases, dividend payments and strategic investments and acquisitions. We look forward to reporting our fourth quarter financial results next month,” Sook said.

Nexstar is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings on February 22. ■

NEW YORK — Despite the number of available stations dwindling as the industry continues to consolidate, a panel of top broadcast executives at the NAB Show New York said there is still room for more deals.

Nexstar Media Group, which completed its $7.2 billion purchase of Tribune Media in September — making it the largest group in the country with nearly 200 stations — sees some opportunities to add scale. Chairman, president and CEO Perry Sook said M&A prospects are limited by federal ownership regulations, but added that other station groups are expected to seek additional scale.

Sook noted that the available pool of stations is shrinking: In 2001 there were 36 companies in local TV that had a national reach of 2% or greater. Now that has dwindled to about a dozen companies.

“I don’t know what’s on the horizon, but I predict there will be M&A,” Sook said.

Meredith Local Media Group president Patrick McCreery said he expects outside money, particularly from private-equity groups, will continue to flow into the sector, beefing up M&A opportunities.

Panelists seemed to take exception to analysts that have predicted that one of the more consistent growth engines in the business — retransmission consent revenue — is on the decline.

Sook said that he still sees double-digit percentage growth on the retrans front, with McCreery and Gray TV president and co-CEO Patrick LaPlatney in agreement.

Driving that optimism is the belief broadcasters account for about 35% of TV viewership while capturing just 18% of the revenue. And though achieving total parity — which Wolfe Research analyst Marci Ryvicker has predicted would mean a consumer’s retrans bill would rise to $28 per month — isn’t necessarily in the cards, the panelists believe there is room to get closer.

“The numbers are rough, but we think there is some runway there,” LaPlatney said.

New York -- Despite the number of available stations dwindling as the industry continues to consolidate, a panel of top broadcast executives at the NAB Show New York said there was still room for more deals.

Nexstar Media, which completed its $7.2 billion purchase of Tribune Media Group in September, making it the largest station group in the country with nearly 200 stations, sees some opportunities to add scale. Chairman and CEO Perry Sook said that M&A prospects are limited by federal ownership regulations, but he added that other station groups are expected to seek additional scale.

Sook noted that the available pool of stations is shrinking: In 2001 there were 36 companies in local TV that had a national reach of 2% or greater. Now that has dwindled to about a dozen companies.

“There are fewer companies left to buy,” Sook said. He added that “M&A is not as easy as hitting button and buying a stock. I don’t know what’s on the horizon, but I predict there will be M&A.”

Meredith Local Media Group president Patrick McCreery said that he expects that outside money, particularly from private equity groups, will continue to flow into the sector, beefing up the M&A opportunities.

“It [the broadcast business] isn’t new and it isn’t sexy,” McCreery said. “But it is profitable.”

The executives seemed to take exception with analysts that have predicted that one of the more consistent growth engines in the business -- retransmission consent revenue -- was on the decline.

At the TVB Forward conference last month Wolfe Research managing director Marci Ryvicker predicted that retrans revenue would slow to around 7% growth after 2024, flattening out in later years. Other analysts have also predicted a slowdown, especially as cable operators continue to lose video subscribers.

Sook said that he still sees double-digit percentage growth on the retrans front, with McCreery and Gray TV president and co-CEO Patrick LaPlatney in agreement.

Driving that optimism is the belief that broadcasters account for about 35% of TV viewership while capturing just 18% of the revenue. And though achieving total parity -- which Ryvicker predicted would mean a consumer’s retrans bill would rise to $28 per month -- isn’t necessarily in the cards, the panelists believe there is room to get closer.

“The numbers are rough, but we think there is some runway there,” LaPlatney said.

Sizing Up Cannabis Ad Prospects

On the advertising front, the panelists said the nascent move toward impressions-based advertising, which would make it easier for advertisers to buy a broadcaster's full audience across all platforms, would result in a 5% to 10% increase in ad revenue easily. Even before that, though, they said there is still life in traditional broadcaster ad categories.

While auto ads have declined along with car sales, execs said that other segments have picked up, including legal and professional services. McCreery said that professional services were on par with auto for the first time ever at Meredith stations in calendar Q1 and Q2. Broadcasters are expected to take a smaller bite of political ads in this cycle, though, as digital grows. Some predict broadcast’s share will drop from 66% to 57% of total political ad revenue this year. Station execs said they were taking action to try to address the decline. McCreery said at Meredith, which also has a publishing unit, direct mail ads could factor into to taking the edge off some of the political declines. 

Sook said growth in TV ad revenue is usually fueled by the emergence of a new segment, something he says he hasn’t seen yet. But McCreery said there is a potential windfall in the cannabis category. “None of us want to touch it with a ten-foot pole right now because of the legislation, but that’s a pot of money I’d like to get my hands into,” McCreery said.

There are legal hurdles, though, as McCreery acknowledged. Cannabis sales outside of medical purposes are only legal in a handful of states and are illegal at the federal level. Sook said Nexstar has been approached about running ads in the past, and has declined.

“We’ve been approached, and we’ve said we’re a federally regulated entity just like the banks and until it’s deemed OK to do business with these folks, we’ve got more at risk than that,” Sook said.

[embed]https://twitter.com/BCMikeMalone/status/1184494595989819392[/embed]

Perry Sook always keeps a legal pad nearby. The man who grew Nexstar from a lone-station operation to the nation’s second-largest local broadcaster, who saw retransmission as a significant potential revenue stream when few else did, who orchestrated the audacious $4.6 billion merger with Media General, likes to say that ideas are the new currency. He’s keen on to-do lists, say those who know him, but jotting down priorities is only half of the equation.

“He’s got a legal pad for everything,” says Tom Carter, executive VP and chief financial officer of Nexstar. “And he loves to cross things off his list.”

It was on one of those pads that Sook charted the growth of Nexstar, once a collection of unremarkable small-market stations, to a bona fide behemoth. On the eve of its 20th anniversary, Nexstar is on course to swell to 171 stations, covering 39% of U.S. households, once its blockbuster acquisition of Media General is approved and completed.

Also Read: Nexstar’s Journey From 1 to 171

Sitting in the conference room of Nexstar headquarters in Irving, Texas, Sook acknowledges the station-ownership cap the company is approaching. Left unsaid is the complex operating environment for local TV—every deal in this M&A wave, whether jotted hypothetically on a pad or brought to shareholders and regulators, faces intensifying scrutiny. There is more competition for viewers’ attention than ever before. And retrans fees, while an article of faith for many, are not guaranteed to last forever, with the networks demanding a bigger take to keep the partnership intact.

Even so, Sook, one of television’s most creative deal-makers, is charging ahead with his strategy. He still plans to sketch out goals and targets for Nexstar, and for himself. There is the spectrum auction, for starters, a once-a-generation event that will dominate conversation at next week’s NAB Show, plus Sook has been bullish on digital acquisitions since before it was fashionable.

Also Read: Nexstar Deal Dominates 1Q Station Sales Activity

“We’re closer to the cap than we are to zero, but I wouldn’t say we’re done,” says the busiest man in broadcasting. “I spend probably a quarter of my time looking at acquisition opportunities, broadcast and digital, and so more of that time will be spent on digital than broadcast, depending on how much cap space we clear in the auction process.”

Radio Days

Sook got his start in broadcasting as a teen, spinning Top 40 and country records on a Punxsutawney, Pa., radio station during high school. He had a big decision to make after graduating from Ohio University. Sook was presented with the opportunity to join his friends in Flagstaff, Ariz., as a TV reporter and anchor, or work at a radio station in Orlando in sales. Sook loved radio; besides his teenage days in Punxsutawney, he called Pittsburgh Pirates games for the college station.

Aspiring to build something, he went with the sales job. “It represented the fastest track to management,” Sook says.

Also Read: Nexstar’s Perry Sook Receives Borrell Associates’ 2016 Award of Merit

The track was indeed fast. Sook was national sales manager at KTVT Dallas at age 27. He was general sales manager of a different Dallas station a few years later, then interim general manager, then ran a group, Seaway Communications, all by age 32.

“I just had the drive to do so,” he says. “I’ve always had a high need to achieve.”

Also Read: Nexstar’s Sook Sees No Drag on Political Ad Revenue From Trump

Sook picked up key lessons along the way, such as working with a resistant board of directors and figuring out a Plan B or C for a deal when Plan A did not come through. When he could not get the Seaway board to see his vision on acquisitions, Sook took $250,000 of his own money to buy the Fox affiliate in Lexington, Ky., and launch Superior Communications. He next acquired WYOU in Scranton, Pa., in 1996, and Nexstar was born.

Nex’ Big Thing

Sook had a clear vision for the fledgling company, with a focus on localism, not the “video jukebox” model, he says, that some syndication-heavy, small-market stations employ. “Building a company serving medium-sized markets and smaller markets in local media with a substantial commitment to local news, and growing the local news was where we saw our niche,” Sook says.

The driven young executive was clearly going places. Blake Russell, Nexstar senior VP of station operations, first met Sook back when Nexstar bought his Beaumont, Texas station in the mid-’90s. “I remember thinking along the way, ‘If I could get to a point where I could just slip in his hip pocket and just go where he goes…’” Russell recalls.

Russell jumped on the Nexstar train in 2000. Much of Sook’s executive team came on board around then, including co-COOs Timothy Busch and Brian Jones and Richard Stolpe, VP/director of engineering.

Sook started to make his mark on the local broadcast industry, including the now legendary retrans fight in late 2004, when he demanded cash for carriage from pay-TV operators in four markets. The stations went dark for subscribers, but Sook stuck to his guns. After a months-long stalemate and many millions in lost revenue, the notepad showed Nexstar had prevailed.

“What gives us the moxie is the courage of our convictions,” Sook says. “And so we had to have a thick skin and say, ‘we’re right on this, we’ve got to stay the course and go the distance.’”

Today, retrans represents an absolutely essential chunk of all local broadcasters’ revenue. Last year, SNL Kagan forecasted U.S. TV station owners’ retrans fees to reach $10.3 billion by 2021, following $6.3 billion in 2015. (Of course, networks get their piece of that too.)

Fearless Deal-Maker

Retrans was by no means the only Sook disruption. Nexstar dropped Nielsen ratings, citing their cost and questionable accuracy, years before other groups began to do so. It was one of the first station groups to initiate joint sales agreements, which enable a single operator to steer the business strategies of multiple stations in a single DMA, saving money. Nexstar has also helped foster minority ownership through shared services and local marketing agreements with Marshall Broadcasting and Mission Broadcasting.

“If Perry thinks something is the right thing to do, not only for his group but the industry, he pushes whatever that agenda is forward,” Steve Lanzano, TVB president/CEO.

Before mass consolidation gripped local television, Sook penciled out his vision for the industry. Besides the network-owned groups, he believed, perhaps a half-dozen other station “super-groups” would have the scale to hold up amid the economic challenges presented by the networks and video distributors. He was determined that Nexstar be one of them.

After a series of medium-sized acquisitions in recent years, including deals for the Grant group, a bunch of Newport Television stations and Landmark-owned KLAS Las Vegas, Sook eyed a far bigger prize. He knows exactly how long it took from the announcement of Nexstar’s unsolicited public offer for Media General in late September last year to the signing of the deal in January: 122 days. He doesn’t recall how many of those days found him wide awake at 3 in the morning, staring at the ceiling. But it was a lot of them.

Sook had been interested in Media General for years, going back to the days of LIN Media, given their complementary geography, businesses and culture. After Media General acquired LIN, Sook had dinner at a Manhattan seafood restaurant with the combined company’s majority shareholder, Soohyung Kim, and told him Nexstar was the last piece of the Media General puzzle.

“There wasn’t much reaction back,” concedes Sook, as Kim and Media General preferred to partner with Meredith instead. In September, it was announced that Media General would acquire Meredith in a deal valued at $2.4 billion, setting up Meredith Media General to be the third-largest owner of stations in the nation.

A few weeks later, Nexstar made an unsolicited offer for Media General, a Hail Mary that nonetheless perked up the ears of its shareholders. Media General rejected the offer, but the negotiation had begun. Meredith, once the favorite, soon fell under investor scrutiny for its laggard print assets, and Sook’s approach looked better and better.

“[Media General] had already decided to go another route, and Perry changed their mind,” says Julie Pruett, Nexstar senior VP and regional manager. “He knows where he wants to go, and leads us all to do that.”

In January, Media General announced that it would be acquired by Nexstar in a deal that valued the company at $4.6 billion and left Meredith standing at the altar. Some 9,000 people will work for the new Nexstar Media Group.

“Perry is not big on the word ‘no’—he’s always looking for the word ‘how,’” says Gordon Smith, president and CEO of the NAB. “He finds a way around roadblocks.”

While Sook is a key industry leader, serving on the board of the NAB, TVB and NBC affiliates, among other vital industry posts, he was viewed with suspicion by some peers for disrupting an amicable pact between two respected broadcast companies. For Sook, it was strictly business—he saw an opportunity to improve Nexstar shareholders’ lot and better position the company for the future.

The company’s perch “was never a destination,” says Sook, who was inducted into the B&C Hall of Fame in 2014. “This is the byproduct of doing good business every day and making good acquisitions, and we just woke up one day and said, ‘Holy cow, we’re going to be the second-largest company in television.’”

Time to Get to Work

Earlier in his career, when Sook was running an Oklahoma station that moved from fifth place in its market to fourth, he printed up T-shirts for staffers and threw a pizza party. There was no such celebration after the Media General deal was signed. “Now the real work begins,” Sook told his staff.

Nexstar needs to obtain regulatory approval, which is expected to occur late in the third quarter or early in the fourth, then integrate the Media General stations into the company. Sook mentions an integration “SWAT” team that will dedicate seven or eight months to getting all the stations on the same page. His executive team is excited to take on the massive new group. “Perry does a good job communicating a vision and demonstrating his excitement and commitment to the vision,” says Carter. “I think that resonates with people.”

Through it all, Sook, who will mark 34 years of marriage with his wife, Sandy, in June, remains much more than a bloodless CEO. His well-organized office is adorned with photos of his family, perched next to those legal pads. Last fall, Sook—who frequently describes the broadcast industry in baseball metaphors—moved up his executive team’s flight to Toronto for investor meetings so they could catch their beloved Texas Rangers against the Blue Jays in the playoffs. “He doesn’t think he’s that far removed from the time when he was the lone corporate employee,” says Carter.

Sook’s favorite days on the job are when he visits a station—be it KARK Little Rock or WATN Memphis or WYOU in Scranton, the one that started it all—and holds an all-staff town hall. “It really is refreshing when you look at the numbers I look at every day and then you get to meet the people that are behind those numbers,” Sook says. “That kind of brings it all home as to why we do what we do.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Sook and Co. In 2011, Fox cut ties with Nexstar stations in Evansville and Fort Wayne, Ind., and Springfield, Mo., when Sook would not agree to aggressive new affiliation terms, whacking a giant chunk of value off the local outlets. That same year, Nexstar put itself on the block. The group was valued at around a billion dollars; there were a number of diligence requests and site visits from tire-kickers, but Sook did not hear an offer that justified a sale, and he quietly took Nexstar off the block over a year later.

But Sook stayed the course. A decade ago, Nexstar cracked B&C’s rankings of the top 25 station groups, holding down the final spot with slightly more than 7% of U.S. coverage. Five years ago, the company was No. 16, at 11.5%. A Nexstar station was not typically a primary competitor in news and ratings, but when you assemble a 171-station group, you end up with some winners.

Elizabeth Ryder, Nexstar senior VP and general counsel, calls Sook “the right man at the right time for this industry.…I don’t know that Perry started out as the biggest, baddest, best, [most] kickass CEO in the broadcast industry, but I think at some point he realized he could be.”

Colleagues ask the hard-charging broadcaster if he ever takes a moment to smell the roses and appreciate what he has accomplished. The answer is, not all that much. “I use the saying here that we are often pleased but rarely satisfied,” Sook says. “There’s always the next challenge and next opportunity. We should always be striving.”

—Additional reporting by Michael Malone.