The company that owns the Bucks County Courier Times, Doylestown Intelligencer and a handful of other newspapers and websites is getting out of the broadcast TV business, according to multiple reports.
TV News Check, an industry news site, reported Monday that Calkins Media will be selling WWSB (ABC 7) Sarasota, Florida, WTXL (ABC 27) Tallahassee, Florida and WAAY (ABC 31) Huntsville, Alabama to Raycom Media and American Spirit Media.
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Calkins CEO Mark Contreras sent a memo to staff at the stations and FTVLive.com reported that Raycom executives were at one of the stations that is part of the deal.
“We came to this decision reluctantly and after a long period of deliberation,” Contreras wrote in a memo obtained by TV News Check. “It has become clear to us that size and scale will matter more in the long term for local broadcasters.”
The financial terms of the deal were not released as of Tuesday morning.
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Calkins, which is headquartered just off Route 13 in Tullytown, leaves the broadcast TV business but will keep its newspapers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida along with its digital marketing and publishing arms.
Calkins has owned WWSB since the 1980s and bought the other two stations in the mid-2000s.
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The sale comes at a time when there is great consolidate between TV station ownership groups. Small owners have sold their stations to larger companies in recent years due to rising costs and a predicted shrinking of profits in the coming years.
Recently, the Calkins newspapers in the Philadelphia area have launched a series of web TV shows that stream through a variety of services, including Xfinity On Demand.
