Gray Media (NYSE: GTN) agreed to buy WBBJ-TV (“WBBJ 7”) in Jackson, Tennessee from Bahakel Communications, with closing expected after regulatory approvals in Q1 2026. The release says the station will join Gray’s portfolio of local stations in adjacent markets including Nashville, Memphis, Huntsville and Paducah.
Gray expects the acquisition to be immediately free cash flow accretive and plans to fund the deal with cash on hand. The announcement notes customary regulatory and closing risks and affirms intentions to support employees, audiences and advertisers during transition.
3 thoughts on “Bahakel Communications and Gray Media Announce Sale of WBBJ 7 in Jackson, Tennessee”
Will the Channels remain the same, ABC, CBS, MeTv, Metoons?
Hey John, Just an educated guess based upon my experience in broadcasting, but here’s how it usually works.
A TV station (and radio as well) consists of:
-The equipment in the studio/studio itself/the towers that broadcast what the studio produce the company who owns the studio/equipment
-The company itself which owns the aforementioned physical items
-The FCC license allowing the company to broadcast over a specific signal
When a new company buys another media company, they can buy all of the above or just some of the above. It would appear from the story that Gray is buying both the license (WBBJ and the specific frequencies associated with it) and the equipment/studio. However, as with any buy-out, the employees work for the specific company who owns the studio. I would imagine that some portion of the Bakahel Employees will end up transferring to other Bahakel stations, some will be hired by Gray (probably at a different rate of pay, different benefits, different attendance policies, different dress code policies, etc, etc) and some will be neither given a transfer to another Bahakel station nor hired by Gray and end up unemployed. It just depends on what Gray does. I remember back when the Jackson Sun was bought by the Commercial Appeal, they got rid of a lot of the local people who worked at the Jackson office and sent in people from Memphis on a rotating basis, essentially treating it as a field office of the main Memphis branch rather than an independent stand-alone newspaper. This is just pure speculation, but I can’t imagine that they would need a separate HR manager, business manager, sales manager, etc and that at least some of the other day-to-day office jobs will be consolidated into the portfolio of people already working at some of the other local Gray stations since they own quite a few that are only an hour or two from Jackson and could easily rotate workers between the two offices, unlike Bahakel whose nearest TV station was in Charleston – but again, that’s just pure speculation on my part.
Likewise, TV stations are independent stations (or part of a group of independent stations like Gray and Bahakel) who purchase their content from third-party content producers, like ABC, CBS, MeTV – third-party content producers who produce a large number of shows. Sometimes, stations purchase their content from smaller production studios that only produce one show, like the company that makes Jeopardy or the company that makes Oprah. Most of the content you see on TV is purchased from these third-party content producers, and usually only the local news and weather is made in-house. These shows are usually purchased in bulk at a certain price some years ahead of time. They are usually purchased at large trade shows where the companies who own the rights for specific shows/movies set up a booth with a list of what shows/movies they own. TV channels send salesmen to go to these trade shows and purchase the right to play a specific show/movie a certain number of times for a specific price. In the old days, they would rent you physical tapes that you would have to send back. Now, it’s all pretty much streamed digitally, but some of the older retro content is still on tapes/DVDs. Generally speaking, the specific contracts to purchase and re-play the third-party content are specific to each company, and do not automatically transfer with the sale of the building/studio or with sale of the FCC license. Some of the pre-existing contracts might be part of the buy-out depending on what the specific sales contract says, but we have no way of knowing without seeing the actual contract itself, which I would imagine is not available to the general public. In the short term, I would imagine that the content will remain the same.
However, Gray will eventually begin negotiating its own contracts with the third-party content producers, and probably has their own different standards for what content they like/don’t like, what price-point they’re willing to pay, etc. As such, I would reasonably expect that in the long-term there could be some changes to the content, especially since Gray owns WMC-TV in Memphis which has been been an affiliate of NBC for decades. In order for Gray to use WBBJ as a feeder station and integrate it into WMC-TV (which is just an educated guess/reasonable assumption on my part) I would imagine that they would probably at least be considering a switch to NBC, but I’m just making an educated guess from an outsider’s perspective.
So, the short answer to your question is, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the content does change in the future. I would be more surprised if they kept things status quo, since presumably Bahakel wanted to sell WBBJ for some reason.
This place hasn’t been the same in at least a decade. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read articles on their website that are just plain copy & paste from press releases, and a lot of times they don’t even remove the formatting or embargo date, just copy & paste. When they do crime stories, the majority of the story (and sometimes even all of the story) is just copy & pasting the press release from law enforcement. Just a consistent decline in quality over the last decade.
The kicker for me is this: they ran a whole lot of stories in Crockett County (4-5 stories daily, sometimes) for a very brief period of time around 2 years ago (and now have gone back to doing the usual 1-2 a week in Crockett County, if even that much) in order to petition Nielsen to move Crockett from the Memphis DMA to the Jackson DMA. Since doing so, all of the Memphis news stations dropped Crockett off of their weather maps. The problem? WBBJ isn’t available on DirecTV or Gibson Electric’s streaming service if you live in Crockett. DirecTV assigns us the Memphis news channels (and DirecTV said that WBBJ is the one who made the decision, not them), and Gibson Connect assigns us Paducah news. WBBJ is also not easily available OTA – even using a high-quality SmartTV, Bunny ears, etc – I can’t get it no matter how hard I try. The only people I know who can get WBBJ OTA in Crockett have those really huge, old 1980s antennas on the side of their houses, and even then most everyone I know still can’t get a signal from WBBJ (probably since their antennas are in Beech Bluff/Lexington, which is 2 hours from Crockett County). On the other hand, even using my backup $20 hand-held TV with a 3 inch radio antenna I got at Kroger decades ago, I can get every Memphis channel with no problems. Bells is only 45 minutes from Memphis if you go 70/79 through Mason/Braden, almost 1 hour from South Jackson and even further from Beech Bluff/Pinson – putting Bells as close if not closer to Memphis.
The end result is that I now have ZERO local weather on my TV – which is a dangerous situation to be in since we live in a high-tornado area. Sure, I can get the hourly forecasts from weather com and a few other websites, and I know Talk-N does a bit of weather here and there, but that doesn’t help me with live coverage of severe weather.
As far as I’m concerned, WBBJ poisoned the well when they took away my local weather, and I’m glad they’re being sold to Gray. Hopefully Gray brings in some new management to straighten that place up. And yes, for disclosure purposes, I did work there for around a year many moons ago and still consider it the worst job I ever had, but that has nothing to do with my aforementioned post.