For a company that's posting record profits quarter-to-quarter and expanding, buying up more stations, Nexstar is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!
The many talented people that work at Nexstar stations are often not valued at all. And I'm not talking about base salary here, which isn't awful.
No company likes to pay out OverTime -- but in this business, sometimes breaking news happens and people HAVE TO stay late -- corporate, HR, management, etc. do not sympathize with that at all. They will rip you a new one if you try to log OT even if you had good reason to do so. And technically the company forbids comp days. And they want you to put down 8 hours per day (if you're a full-timer), even if you didn't take that lunch or dinner break (cuz in this biz, sometimes you just can't). So basically they want you to volunteer to save a few dollars.
At the same time, there's people sitting around all day getting paid to do absolutely nothing. But if they're friends with management, that's totally allowed. Even as others hustle through the day and then cheat their timecard to not get in trouble for daring to ask for OT pay.
At Nexstar duopolies, more often than not, all the resources are put into one side of it; the other side is a VERY VERY VERY distant second. So you may have a different anchor but you'll have the same reporters with the same stories and same content -- but then you're still told by management or corporate that you have to make it different between the 2 stations. Which is usually easier said from on high than done on the ground level. And the few resources stations are given need very careful juggling to make the best use out of everything -- so if your management falters with that, it's just going to be a giant mess So if your management isn't on point every day, prepare to clean up a lot of their messes after they leave the building at 5 with little guidance.
If corporate comes for a visit and management just about freaks out and turns everything upside down and makes everyone do things that they literally NEVER have to do on any other day and changes the workflow completely just for that corporate visit -- start getting your reel together and begin looking at places to move on to elsewhere. That's a telltale sign your managers don't really know what they're doing cuz clearly they're not willing to stand by their product enough to show it off to corporate -- and that means if push comes to shove they won't stand by you either.
When corporate does come for a check-up, they are incredibly fickle and inconsistent. Your job actually IS on the line when they come because they may just decide they don't like you for whatever reason and if your station management has no backbone, you're out on the street in a second. Similar with their news philosophy and reviews of how things play out content-wise... One visit, they'll say one thing. The next, they turn around and say something else. Don't know if it's just a transition from one philosophy to another but you never know what newfangled thing they'll come up with, whether or not it's actually applicable or doable. Keep in mind that Nexstar is based out of Dallas, a Top 5 market where they don't own a single station so have no stake there -- but corporate watches those stations and then wants to apply practices they observe there across the company that are simply not feasible in the smaller-market operations they tend to run.
Also, quite a few Nexstar stations operate as if they're glorified high school community newsletters... if you want to be able to cover harder news and even throw in some top national headlines that are legit huge talkers nationwide -- don't even bother applying at a Nexstar station. It's not just that they want LOCAL LOCAL LOCAL (that alone wouldn't be too bad), but they have a heavy focus on just community events and features that aren't anything you can even put together a respectable A-block with, yet to stay local that's all you have to work with. So good luck building that reel with an A-block full of C-block-caliber pacers.
