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$64 million-plus deal switches five affiliates from UPN
On Tuesday, June 10, hours before outgoing UPN President Lucie Salhany donned her now-famous brooch with an impaled Michigan J. Frog and rallied UPN affiliates at a meeting with talk of WB's poor distribution, Barry Baker, CEO-designate of Sinclair Communications, met with WB President Jamie Kellner. He told Kellner that Sinclair would defect from UPN if the WB leader wanted a deal badly enough. Kellner did, and within four weeks, WB and Sinclair crafted an affiliate deal that largely reduces the primary broadcast distribution advantage UPN has over WB.
WB has won the biggest battle of the year in its ongoing affiliate war with UPN, convincing Sinclair to switch affiliations next January in five markets where UPN will find it extremely difficult to fill the holes becuase of a lack of TV stations. The price for WB: a guaranteed $64 million to Sinclair over eight years, plus another $20 million for two more years if WB is still operational.
As part of the deal, a sixth Sinclair station, currently an independent, will switch to WB in 1999, and three other current Sinclair WB affiliates will re-up for 10 years. The Sinclair stations switching to WB in January are: wm-rTV Pittsburgh; WNUV-TV Baltimore; wSTR-TV Cincinnati; KRRT(TV) San Antonio, Tex., and KOCB(TV) Oklahoma City. Sinclair extended existing WB affiliate agreements for WVTV(TV) Milwaukee, wTTO(TV) Birmingham, Ala., and WDBB(TV) Tuscaloosa, Ala., through 2008....