As Adam said, we are very proud to win our first national news Emmy at Scripps News. In addition, two Scripps local stations were recognized with National Murrow awards. WTVR and Richmond won for an investigation into a string of sniper shootings and KTBQ and billings won for coverage of the devastating flooding there in 2022. And Phil Williams, Chief Investigative Reporter at WTVF in Nashville was awarded Columbia University’s John Chancellor award for Excellence in journalism. Phil is the first local TV news reporter to be honored with this award. And now operator, we’re ready for questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] And first we’re going to the line for Dan Kurnos, Benchmark. Please go ahead.
Dan Kurnos: Great. Thanks. Good morning. And you talked you guys talked all through the accolades but Adam no one brought up your own industry accolades so kudos to you for being named B&C broadcaster of the year. Just a couple. I think I really want to dive into the sports angle and really appreciate the incremental data you’ve given us around local. And I really want to spend some time maybe Adam just parsing out kind of the local versus the national strategy. Obviously, a lot — let’s just start on the local side a lot is really dependent clearly on what happens with some of the existing contracts. And it sounds like early maybe next year, February time frame, we might run out of extensions for Diamond. But just in general the opportunity that you’re seeing out there, whether you have specific markets you target pace. Anything you can give us on just how you’re thinking about the local opportunity? And then I’ll follow up with a national question after that.
Adam Symson: Thanks, Dan, and thanks for the kind words. Look I think you should absolutely assume that we’ll continue to execute this strategy where we see opportunities for our local brands to align with local sports. We’re, obviously, dedicated to approaching each of the deals with discipline. And I would say, we’ve developed a real reputation that’s appreciated among the owners and the leagues for partnership and shared risk and shared reward that frankly really feels good to them especially after the trauma that they’re coming off of with the chaotic illusion of the RSN business. There are definitely markets where we see significant opportunity, markets where we think we can do what we’ve done in Las Vegas. In other, words flip an ION station to a local independent without negatively impacting the ION reach, because we move the programming stream to different spectrum.
And then with sports as the anchor tenant of the programming of that independent station, really disrupting that local marketplace and significantly taking local advertising share and increasing our take of local retrans in that market. And so that’s why I referenced earlier from a local perspective with every new rights deal that we signed, we would expect to see core revenue growth and the opportunity for continued expansion for revenue for distribution even between contracts. So I think that’s an important thing to point out. Typically you would only see us expand retrans revenue based on step-ups or based on new contracts. And in this situation, we have the opportunity to increase our retrans revenue every time we signed a new local sports deal.
And so the opportunity there to dramatically impact, I think core revenue growth is sizable. On the national level, the revenue growth we’re seeing is just as important. But given the exposure of a single national deal, which is essentially like one night over 15 weeks it’s obviously not going to show up as impactful to the overall revenue growth of the Scripps networks. But that said, we really think it’s about the opportunity to leverage the national rights as a way to solidify linear viewing, grow diversify the audience and more broadly raise the rates of ION. So we talked about the fact that 30% audience growth for the WMBA in my prepared remarks came from ION’s rights. For us the season also represented good diversification and expansion opportunity.
