Nexstar Media Group, Inc. Common Stock Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Well, I will give you top of the waves from my perspective, and then I will let Leigh Ann, who just celebrated a recent anniversary with the company, who came in with fresh eyes, that maybe her perspective would even be more interesting to you. From my perspective, first and foremost, I came out of sales and management. We have a revenue-generating, sales-oriented culture at the company. That is important. I tell people the two things that we do, we produce a product, which is local content, and we help local businesses sell things, and that is our reason to exist. I tend to agree with your premise that at the core, this is a very simple business. Those are the things we do, and so let us focus on those.

I'm the third-largest shareholder of the company, and share price performance and company performance are very near and dear to my heart. As a consequence, this is the only thing that I do. This gets full-time attention from not only me, but the rest of the management team. I'm not indicting any other company, I'm just saying that's the way we do it, and I think we're very proud of our results and think they do speak for themselves. When you think about over-the-air broadcasting, we do have a peer. We think that our comp set is more like, from an EBITDA perspective, like Fox pre-Roku and Paramount pre-Warner Bros. Discovery. From an EBITDA perspective, we think we're entirely competitive with them from a financial wherewithal.

Yeah. I'll let Leigh Ann speak to it because she came in with a fresh perspective, and I think has formed some of her own opinions that might be similar to yours.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I've been with the company for five years.

I think Perry and the team have built just a great organization. Really focused on, as Perry said, making sure that we're delivering a product that our viewers want to see. Unbiased, fact-based news. Making sure that we have the journalistic freedom and ability to tell the stories that we need to be able to tell that can attract our local news viewers. The sales-focused culture, I think, is incredibly important in making sure that the advertisers are getting what they need, but then also evolving our business model as we need to. As we've been able to see, advertisers are gravitating towards more digital services. We're selling more digital services on top of our linear services, which has helped grow our business.

We are an incredibly, as Perry said, because he is a shareholder, but I think just in general, we have a very profit-focused organization. One of the things that we do every year is effectively a zero-based budget. We are very focused on every single dollar that we spend and making sure that it's being spent appropriately. If there are efficiencies to wring out of the business, we will look to wring those efficiencies out of the business, which has been great. I think, the other side of things is just on the scale side. We've been focused on M&A and growing the business, but doing it in a thoughtful way. Doing it in a way that will help us generate more profit, more ability to put dollars back into the business, help us continue to grow and focus on our journalism and our news programming.

Making sure that everything we do is going to be something that's going to generate good shareholder return. The acquisition of Tegna was one of those things. I think, we've been focused on pushing the envelope where we can. Perry created the joint sales agreement and shared services agreements, which helped us create some operational efficiencies. He was the first to create a distribution revenue model for the industry, which has helped grow. We've been sort of ahead of the curve in that regard. I think the last piece of it is just on capital allocation, right. We are very focused on making sure we have a good balance sheet that is strong and able to support the operations of the business, but then also make returns for our shareholders, either in the form of dividends, debt repayment, or share repurchases.

Those things have all kind of come together in a package.