Abernethy Keeps Fox Stations Focused on Local

WHY THIS MATTERS: Jack Abernethy's role running Fox's station group will gain even more importance as the post-Disney deal New Fox hones its focus on live content.

Anyone who thinks the broadcast business is slowing down should spend a day or just half an hour with Jack Abernethy.

Jack Abernethy, CEO, Fox Television Stations

Abernethy is chief executive officer of Fox Television Stations, overseeing 28 stations in the nation's major markets, including WNYW New York, KTTV Los Angeles and WFLD Chicago. Since his start there in 2004, the Fox-owned stations' locally produced programming has more than doubled, with more than 970 hours of local news a week these days.

Up until a few months ago, he was simultaneously co-president of Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, overseeing business components of both networks beginning in 2016. (He was executive vice president of Fox News from 1996 to 2004, helping launch the cable network, after more than 15 years at NBC.)

These days, Abernethy is chest-deep in issues pivotal to the station group's future: building a streaming platform, reacting to viewers' changing tastes in news, assessing the deal market for stations and taking full advantage of ATSC 3.0. He also continues to out-local the competition in content, news and charity efforts in the community.

For these reasons, Abernethy was named Broadcaster of the Year by B&C, and will be toasted Sept. 28 at the TVB Forward conference in New York. Mark Robichaux, managing director of content for B&C and Multichannel News, singled out Abernethy for being a pillar in the local TV community, tirelessly pushing the Fox station group to further its relationship with viewers in its markets, and setting standards that other groups can emulate.

The Fox veteran was inducted into the B&C Hall of Fame in 2012.

Abernethy spoke with B&C senior content producer Michael Malone about the current year, and the future, for the Fox-owned stations. Here's an edited transcript of their conversation.

What are a few things from the station group this year that made you particularly proud?

The number of test shows that we've done. We get two hours a day from the network, and the rest of it we're on our own. Primarily we do local news, but we're also dependent on syndicated shows, and we had six or seven tests this year. Some of them we did with Mark Burnett, some of them we did on our own, some we did with Warner Bros. They were good shows. We don't know how many of them we'll go ahead with, but we're very proud of the way that worked out.

When you have a group as large as ours, the successes are rarely group-wide. We love to take credit from the corporate standpoint for everything, but the reality is that successes come from the markets. We've had tremendous success in Minneapolis, where we've expanded news [at KMSP]. We've done a local show there [The Jason Show] that's in its third year, and continues to do well. It's one of the few local talk shows. Their news competition is really strong, so that station has done really well.

[WTTG] Washington has expanded to two hours [of news] at night, and it's been really successful.

The other thing that worked out really well is the World Cup. The timing was not good [the event was held in Russia, and the time in Moscow is five hours ahead of New York], and the U.S. team was not there. But we just decided to get b ind it. The ratings were a little bit below past years, but it was very successful, well beyond our expectations.

Digitally, the viewing on Fox Sports Go and Fox Now was very, very high and very encouraging, and that kind of drove those platforms because people went to authenticate. You had to watch it when you were at work, and if you didn't have a TV in your office, you had to authenticate. That was a success.

How does local TV compete in this age of Netflix?

We're excited about New Fox [the properties that will remain after The Walt Disney Co. closes its $73.1 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox's content studios, entertainment cable networks and other assets] as kind of a Netflix OTT platform to pick and choose what you're viewing, how you're viewing it, and then live/as-live platforms, and that's what local news is. We see that stream of local live news, and then programming like TMZ or Judge Judy as live programming and then sports, and premier events on [the Fox Broadcasting network] as being a different experience than choosing among the scripted and other choices on those platforms. That's at least how we see it, and I've always thought there's an opportunity there to watch live.

We've always seen young people following in their parents' footsteps in terms of watching local news. Any concerns that this younger generation just doesn't follow suit with how their parents consume news?

I think there's a concern, which means you've got to focus on mobile, and we have to have our digital products be up to snuff because that's the first place that young folks are going to touch our product and experience our product. The concerns that draw people to local news, I think, will still be the same. They're concerns that draw you to your community. A young person wanting to know what's going on with the storm tonight is going to be drawn to local news for the same reasons that they were 15, 20 years ago.

What will New Fox mean for the station group after Disney's acquisition happens?

I think it means a more-focused company, and it will definitely mean more integration of our digital objectives, our programming objectives. We're pretty well-aligned with Fox News already, so that part is working pretty well, but there could be some further ways to put those things together. It allows us as a compa

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