The company announced Monday that it will pay about $3.9 billion for Tribune Media and its 42 stations, which includes KTLA in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago and WPIX in New York. Sinclair said it may have to sell some stations to comply with Federal…
Sinclair Broadcast Group, already the nation’s largest local TV station operator, wants to be even bigger.
The company announced Monday that it will pay about $3.9 billion for Tribune Media and its 42 stations, which includes KTLA in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago and WPIX in New York. Tribune also owns stakes in the Food Network and job-search website CareerBuilder.
Sinclair has 173 stations, including KUTV in Salt Lake City and KOMO in Seattle. The deal, plus pending acquisitions, will give it 233, putting distance between it and Nexstar Media Group, which has 170.
Sinclair said it may have to sell some stations to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules, although the FCC has recently loosened rules related to media ownership. Sinclair is also in the process of buying Bonten Media Group, which owns 14 stations, for $240 million.
In all, Sinclair said its stations will reach 72 percent of all U. S. households with a TV once the Tribune and Bonten deals close.
Jeffrey McCall, a media studies professor at DePauw University in Indiana, said buying Tribune will give Sinclair more power to negotiate better deals with cable companies and national advertisers. Adding Tribune’s stations will also expand Sinclair’s reach into major cities that it didn’ t have a presence in before, such as New York and Chicago.
Late last year, Sinclair had to defend itself against news reports that it made a deal with Donald Trump ’s presidential campaign for favorable coverage in its newscasts. In December, Sinclair said that it had no such deal with Trump’s team and that it had given both him and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton “the same opportunities to be interviewed by our local anchors on a regular basis.”
Bumble Bee Foods has agreed to pay a $25 million fine after pleading guilty to conspiring with competitors to fix prices, the U. S. Department of Justice said Monday.
The San Diego company will also cooperate with an antitrust investigation into the packaged seafood industry, the agency said.
The Justice Department said in December that Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea, a rival company, were abandoning a planned merger after the department raised concerns that the transaction would harm competition.
“Companies small and large hold a great deal of the American peoples’ trust and this type of unfair, greedy behavior will not be tolerated, ” said FBI agent John Bennett, head of the agency’s San Francisco office, which is leading the investigation.
Two Bumble Bee executives pleaded guilty to price-fixing charges last year and have agreed to cooperate with the federal investigation.
Microsoft’s would-be rival to Amazon’s Echo home speaker has a name: Invoke.
The cylindrical tower, built by speaker and electronics firm Harman International, was teased by the Samsung subsidiary and Microsoft in blog posts Monday. The speaker will come in black and white when it is released in the U. S. this fall. Pricing details haven’ t been announced.
The gadget is the clearest Microsoft response yet to the success of Amazon’s Echo, which is powered by the Seattle company’s Alexa digital assistant. The Echo functions as a speaker and can answer a range of voice commands, from toggling audio tracks to adding items to a shopping list and reading the news, among others.
Analysts have said that the Alexa software could radically change how people interact with machines in the home and become a profit engine for Amazon. Its utility isn’ t limited to the Echo, as builders of refrigerators, washing machines, and other appliances are rushing to make their own machines compatible with Alexa’s voice commands.
Google got in on the action in 2016, a year after the Echo, with a similar device, the Google Home, which uses the company’s own take on voice-activated software.
An Airbnb host who was renting out her Trump Tower apartment is among the first to pay a fine to New York City under a law banning advertising listings for short-term rentals.
The host and owner of the Trump Tower apartment, Yelena Yelagina, paid a $1,000 fine to the city.
A city official tells the New York Daily News the new law will further discourage people from turning their apartments into hotels. It is already against the law in New York to rent out an entire apartment for less than 30 days without the owner present, but the new law bans advertising short-term listings.
An Airbnb representative says the law doesn’ t distinguish between those who occasionally share their home and illegal hoteliers.
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