Nexstar Media Group, Inc. (NXST) Q3 2020 Earnings Call Transcript @themotleyfool #stocks $NXST
Tom Carter — Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer
When we — after we did Tribune and prior to really the Supreme Court agreeing to take up the FCC case with regard to end market ownership. We are singularly focused on improving the operations and mining additional value from the assets we have you can — I think the poster child for that right now is News Nation on WGN America, taking something from nothing, reruns and turning it into a product that clearly has value from our perspective, and we do from advertisers’ perspective. If you go back and look at the political coverage, the largest advertiser in the political coverage on WGN America News Nation was Facebook. So kind of strange bedfellows, I know, but they clearly see the value in this. And also, Perry mentioned it before, it’s these large market CWs that are — have historically underperformed.
As a matter of fact, those CWs, they’ve underperformed to such a degree that in a number of the large markets, we’re really more about local news than we are in any sort of secondary network affiliation with either the CW or MyNetwork. So it’s really taking those assets that we believe to have substantial value and are just underperforming from a financial perspective and to make that — and to realize that on the income statement in terms of greater potential and greater cash flows contributions to the financial side of the business. So there are strategic, there are tactical areas that we’re all working in both long and short-term to create value.
Zack Silver — B. Riley — Analyst
Got it. That’s really interesting. And then just on News Nation, apologies if I missed this, but in terms of viewership and engagement with the new News Nation offering, any numbers you can give or if not, is viewership engagement meeting your expectations, given that it’s early days?
Perry A. Sook — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Sure. Well, I guess the headline is that 12% of America knows that News Nation is on WGN America in Primetime seven nights a week. So that is job one, is increasing awareness. As you know, the project basically finances itself, other than the initial capex outlay, which is now in the review mirror, not renewing rerun contracts allows us to invest in News Nation launch and now going forward in expansion, and we have plans to do that. So I’m very pleased with the product. I don’t know if you happen to see any of it on election night. I tend to watch a little bit of it just about every night. And we are working very hard and staying true to our mission of balance, not bias and facts, not opinion. And we had 35 correspondents from around the country from our Nexstar Nation stations as well as correspondence that News Nation employs directly reported with more liveshots than anybody — any other news organization in the country, providing news from the states and localities where it was happening, not a roundtable of pundits talking about what was going on. And that’s our point of differentiation. And again, I can tell you, we’ve never had political revenue on WGN America in its existence.