E.W. SCRIPPS Co (SSP) Stock Analysis and Metrics

E.W. Scripps

NASDAQ: SSP

$2.96 ▼ -0.03 (-1.00%)

At close: Jul 27, 2026 · 3:59 PM UTC

Financial Ratios

Market Cap268.40 Mn

P/E-1.64

P/S0.13

Div. Yield0.00

ROIC (Qtr)0.01

Total Debt (Qtr)2.55 Bn

Revenue Growth (1y) (Qtr)-1.43

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About

The E. W. Scripps Company is a diverse media enterprise that serves audiences and businesses through a portfolio of more than 60 local television stations in over 40 markets and through national news and entertainment networks. The local stations maintain programming agreements with ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, and the company also stewards the Scripps National Spelling Bee. In addition, Scripps offers the Tablo device for over the air and streaming viewing without a subscription and distributes free, ad supported content through its Scripps News, Court TV, ION, Bounce, Grit, ION Mystery, ION Plus, and Laff networks.

The company generates revenue primarily from the sale of advertising to local, national and political advertisers and from retransmission fees received from cable operators, telecommunications companies, satellite carriers, and virtual multichannel video programming distributors. Additional revenue is derived from connected television platforms and digital advertising.

The company operates through the following segments.

• Local Media: This segment includes more than 60 local television stations and their related digital operations, comprising 18 ABC affiliates, 11 NBC affiliates, 9 CBS affiliates, 4 FOX affiliates, 11 independent stations, and 10 low power stations, and earns revenue from advertising and retransmission fees while broadcasting network programming, locally produced news, syndicated content, sports events, and other programs of interest in each market.

• Scripps Networks: This segment consists of national news outlets Scripps News and Court TV and entertainment brands ION, Bounce, Grit, ION Mystery, ION Plus, and Laff, reaching nearly every U. S. television home through free over the air broadcast, cable/satellite, connected TV, and digital distribution, and generates revenue mainly from the sale of advertising while delivering news, sports, and entertainment programming, including broadcasts of Las Vegas Aces games and Tampa Bay Lightning games.

• Other: This segment aggregates smaller operations that are not reported separately, including the Tablo over the air streaming device and other miscellaneous businesses, and contributes supplemental revenue to the company.

Within the broadcasting industry, Scripps holds a leading position in free, ad supported television, competing with other major station groups such as Gray, Nexstar, Sinclair, and Tegna, as well as with cable networks and streaming platforms, and differentiates itself through its extensive local station footprint, national network portfolio, sports rights agreements, news content, the Tablo device, and its participation in the ATSC 3.0 focused joint venture EdgeBeam Wireless, LLC.

The company serves a varied customer base that includes local, national, and political advertisers, cable and telecom providers, satellite carriers, virtual MVPDs, and television viewers, with specific relationships involving sports teams such as the Las Vegas Aces and the Tampa Bay Lightning, leagues including the WNBA and the NHL, joint venture partners Gray, Nexstar, and Sinclair for EdgeBeam, and station exchange counterpart Gray in the recent transaction involving stations in Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, and Twin Falls.

Investment Thesis

▲ Bull case

Scripps is strategically positioned to capitalize on the accelerating shift to streaming and connected TV through its Scripps Sports Network, which has secured broad distribution on major platforms including Roku, LG, and Samsung while streaming over 100 live games annually alongside original programming. The company’s early investment in niche but rapidly growing women’s sports rights—spanning the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, MLV, PBR women’s rodeo, and others—creates a differentiated content library that attracts high-value, brand-safe advertisers seeking engaged, affluent demographics. Unlike competitors relying on legacy broadcast models, Scripps is leveraging its over-the-air (OTA) footprint to simulcast premium sports across linear and streaming, expanding reach without proportional cost increases. This dual-platform approach allows the company to monetize the same content twice—once via traditional broadcast and again through programmatic CTV ad sales—while benefiting from lower carriage fees compared to cable networks. The 26% year-over-year growth in connected TV revenue during Q1 FY26, driven by both organic demand and proactive ad tech investments, signals that Scripps is not merely riding a market trend but actively shaping its own growth trajectory in a segment where peers are struggling with measurement fragmentation and declining linear viewership.
The company’s transformation initiative, targeting $125 million to $150 million in enterprise EBITDA improvement, is already delivering tangible results, as evidenced by the reduction in net leverage to 3.9x—well below the 4.25x threshold required to resume preferred dividend payments—and the achievement of over $100 million in annualized run-rate cost savings embedded in the LQ8 EBITDA calculation. Management emphasized that the financial benefits of this plan will begin to materialize in the second half of FY26, with an annualized run rate of approximately $75 million expected by year-end and a path to $125–150 million as initiatives scale. Crucially, the transformation is not limited to cost-cutting; it includes revenue-enhancing initiatives such as AI-driven yield management in advertising, automation in newsroom operations to increase field reporting capacity, and programmatic ad tech optimization in CTV—each designed to improve both top-line growth and margin expansion. The fact that Scripps is able to reflect transformation-related savings retroactively into its leverage calculation under its credit agreement demonstrates the depth and credibility of its operational restructuring, providing a sustainable foundation for future FCF generation that could be directed toward debt reduction, preferred dividend resumption, or strategic M&A—none of which are currently priced into the market’s valuation.
Scripps’ Local Media division possesses a structural advantage in political advertising revenue due to its concentrated footprint in key battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Montana—where U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races are expected to drive record-breaking midterm spending. While political revenue was already nearly $9 million in Q1 FY26, management noted this is merely the beginning of a surge, with strong execution already underway and advertiser demand outpacing supply in these markets. Unlike national advertising, which faces headwinds from macroeconomic volatility and Nielsen measurement discrepancies, local political ad spending is largely insulated from broad economic cycles and benefits from Scripps’ deep community integration, newsroom credibility, and hyperlocal targeting capabilities. The division’s ability to grow core advertising at 7% YoY in Q1—driven by NHL rights, Olympics, and Super Bowl spillover—while maintaining flat ex-sports expenses, underscores the operating leverage inherent in its local model. As the midterm cycle intensifies through Q3 and Q4 FY26, political revenue could become a meaningful, high-margin tailwind that offsets softness in national networks and provides a predictable, non-cyclical boost to Local Media profitability—an outcome the market appears to be underestimating given the current focus on Networks’ near-term volatility.

Scripps is strategically positioned to capitalize on the accelerating shift to streaming and connected TV through its Scripps Sports Network, which has secured broad distribution on major platforms including Roku, LG, and Samsung while streaming over 100 live games annually alongside original programming. The company’s early investment in niche but rapidly growing women’s sports rights—spanning the WNBA, NWSL, PWHL, MLV, PBR women’s rodeo, and others—creates a differentiated content library that attracts high-value, brand-safe advertisers seeking engaged, affluent demographics. Unlike competitors relying on legacy broadcast models, Scripps is leveraging its over-the-air (OTA) footprint to simulcast premium sports across linear and streaming, expanding reach without proportional cost increases. This dual-platform approach allows the company to monetize the same content twice—once via traditional broadcast and again through programmatic CTV ad sales—while benefiting from lower carriage fees compared to cable networks. The 26% year-over-year growth in connected TV revenue during Q1 FY26, driven by both organic demand and proactive ad tech investments, signals that Scripps is not merely riding a market trend but actively shaping its own growth trajectory in a segment where peers are struggling with measurement fragmentation and declining linear viewership.
The company’s transformation initiative, targeting $125 million to $150 million in enterprise EBITDA improvement, is already delivering tangible results, as evidenced by the reduction in net leverage to 3.9x—well below the 4.25x threshold required to resume preferred dividend payments—and the achievement of over $100 million in annualized run-rate cost savings embedded in the LQ8 EBITDA calculation. Management emphasized that the financial benefits of this plan will begin to materialize in the second half of FY26, with an annualized run rate of approximately $75 million expected by year-end and a path to $125–150 million as initiatives scale. Crucially, the transformation is not limited to cost-cutting; it includes revenue-enhancing initiatives such as AI-driven yield management in advertising, automation in newsroom operations to increase field reporting capacity, and programmatic ad tech optimization in CTV—each designed to improve both top-line growth and margin expansion. The fact that Scripps is able to reflect transformation-related savings retroactively into its leverage calculation under its credit agreement demonstrates the depth and credibility of its operational restructuring, providing a sustainable foundation for future FCF generation that could be directed toward debt reduction, preferred dividend resumption, or strategic M&A—none of which are currently priced into the market’s valuation.
Scripps’ Local Media division possesses a structural advantage in political advertising revenue due to its concentrated footprint in key battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Montana—where U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races are expected to drive record-breaking midterm spending. While political revenue was already nearly $9 million in Q1 FY26, management noted this is merely the beginning of a surge, with strong execution already underway and advertiser demand outpacing supply in these markets. Unlike national advertising, which faces headwinds from macroeconomic volatility and Nielsen measurement discrepancies, local political ad spending is largely insulated from broad economic cycles and benefits from Scripps’ deep community integration, newsroom credibility, and hyperlocal targeting capabilities. The division’s ability to grow core advertising at 7% YoY in Q1—driven by NHL rights, Olympics, and Super Bowl spillover—while maintaining flat ex-sports expenses, underscores the operating leverage inherent in its local model. As the midterm cycle intensifies through Q3 and Q4 FY26, political revenue could become a meaningful, high-margin tailwind that offsets softness in national networks and provides a predictable, non-cyclical boost to Local Media profitability—an outcome the market appears to be underestimating given the current focus on Networks’ near-term volatility.

▼ Bear case

Scripps Networks continues to face structural headwinds from Nielsen’s revised audience measurement methodology, which has artificially depressed reported impressions for over-the-air (OTA) and streaming viewers despite stable or growing actual viewership, creating a persistent revenue drag that management admits is impacting their ability to sell inventory at scale. Although the company insists the marketplace demand remains strong and sales execution is on point, the Nielsen change—effective mid-to-late February—has directly reduced the supply of sellable impressions, particularly hurting multicast network viewers who are disproportionately rural, lower-income, and older demographics, thereby undermining the value proposition of its OTA-centric distribution model. Management’s refusal to quantify the impact publicly or accept recast data from Nielsen suggests a lack of confidence in a near-term resolution, and the ongoing advocacy for methodology correction implies this is not a temporary glitch but a systemic issue requiring industry-wide recalibration. With Scripps Networks guiding to a 10% revenue decline in Q2 FY26—attributed in part to this measurement flaw—and no clear timeline for Nielsen to issue recasts or adjust its model, the segment’s ability to recover to its historical 30% margin target remains questionable, especially as macroeconomic pressures on direct response advertising persist and geopolitical uncertainty continues to weigh on performance-driven ad spending.
The company’s transformation plan, while promising on paper, carries significant execution risk due to its reliance on unquantified AI and automation initiatives to drive both cost savings and revenue growth, with management explicitly stating they cannot yet quantify how much of the $125–150 million EBITDA improvement target stems from AI—a critical omission given the technology’s uncertain ROI in legacy media environments. Furthermore, the $40–50 million estimated cost to achieve these initiatives, weighted toward the back half of FY26, introduces near-term earnings pressure that could offset anticipated benefits, particularly if implementation delays occur or expected synergies from newsroom restructuring (e.g., increased field reporting via automation) fail to materialize as projected. The fact that shared services and corporate expenses are rising due to higher medical claims and insurance premiums—projected to remain elevated at ~$27 million per quarter—suggests that cost inflation in labor and benefits is eroding some of the gains from operational efficiencies, and the transformation’s success hinges on achieving behavioral and cultural change across a decentralized organization, a challenge historically difficult for broadcasters entrenched in linear workflows. Without clearer metrics on AI adoption rates, productivity gains, or measurable improvements in account executive yield, the market remains justified in viewing the EBITDA uplift as aspirational rather than assured.
Scripps’ heavy reliance on live sports as a growth engine—particularly through its Local Media division’s NHL partnerships and Scripps Networks’ WNBA/NWSL/PWHL portfolio—creates concentration risk, as the cyclical nature of sports seasons means revenue and margin expansion are tightly coupled to event calendars rather than sustainable, year-over-year operational improvements. While Q1 FY26 benefited strongly from NHL telecasts, the Olympics, and Super Bowl spillover, management acknowledged that Q2 Local Media core advertising is expected to decline low single digits due to the absence of similar premium sports inventory, with recovery contingent on the WNBA and NWSL restarts in Q2 and the heavier sports quarter in Q3. This dependency exposes the company to external shocks such as league labor disputes, scheduling changes, or diminished advertiser interest in women’s sports should macroeconomic pressures shift brand spending toward more proven, broad-reach categories like NFL or NCAA sports. Moreover, the strategy of acquiring rights for insurgent leagues (e.g., PWHL, MLV, PBR women’s rodeo) on the Scripps Sports Network to test and learn before potential ION simulcast introduces execution complexity and uncertain ROI, as these niche properties may not generate sufficient scale or advertiser demand to justify the rights costs, especially if streaming monetization fails to keep pace with linear audience fragmentation. The market may be overestimating the scalability and durability of this sports-centric model, particularly if linear viewership continues to erode and CTV ad tech monetization remains challenged by lower CPMs and fill-rate pressures despite increased investment in DSP relationships.

Scripps Networks continues to face structural headwinds from Nielsen’s revised audience measurement methodology, which has artificially depressed reported impressions for over-the-air (OTA) and streaming viewers despite stable or growing actual viewership, creating a persistent revenue drag that management admits is impacting their ability to sell inventory at scale. Although the company insists the marketplace demand remains strong and sales execution is on point, the Nielsen change—effective mid-to-late February—has directly reduced the supply of sellable impressions, particularly hurting multicast network viewers who are disproportionately rural, lower-income, and older demographics, thereby undermining the value proposition of its OTA-centric distribution model. Management’s refusal to quantify the impact publicly or accept recast data from Nielsen suggests a lack of confidence in a near-term resolution, and the ongoing advocacy for methodology correction implies this is not a temporary glitch but a systemic issue requiring industry-wide recalibration. With Scripps Networks guiding to a 10% revenue decline in Q2 FY26—attributed in part to this measurement flaw—and no clear timeline for Nielsen to issue recasts or adjust its model, the segment’s ability to recover to its historical 30% margin target remains questionable, especially as macroeconomic pressures on direct response advertising persist and geopolitical uncertainty continues to weigh on performance-driven ad spending.
The company’s transformation plan, while promising on paper, carries significant execution risk due to its reliance on unquantified AI and automation initiatives to drive both cost savings and revenue growth, with management explicitly stating they cannot yet quantify how much of the $125–150 million EBITDA improvement target stems from AI—a critical omission given the technology’s uncertain ROI in legacy media environments. Furthermore, the $40–50 million estimated cost to achieve these initiatives, weighted toward the back half of FY26, introduces near-term earnings pressure that could offset anticipated benefits, particularly if implementation delays occur or expected synergies from newsroom restructuring (e.g., increased field reporting via automation) fail to materialize as projected. The fact that shared services and corporate expenses are rising due to higher medical claims and insurance premiums—projected to remain elevated at ~$27 million per quarter—suggests that cost inflation in labor and benefits is eroding some of the gains from operational efficiencies, and the transformation’s success hinges on achieving behavioral and cultural change across a decentralized organization, a challenge historically difficult for broadcasters entrenched in linear workflows. Without clearer metrics on AI adoption rates, productivity gains, or measurable improvements in account executive yield, the market remains justified in viewing the EBITDA uplift as aspirational rather than assured.
Scripps’ heavy reliance on live sports as a growth engine—particularly through its Local Media division’s NHL partnerships and Scripps Networks’ WNBA/NWSL/PWHL portfolio—creates concentration risk, as the cyclical nature of sports seasons means revenue and margin expansion are tightly coupled to event calendars rather than sustainable, year-over-year operational improvements. While Q1 FY26 benefited strongly from NHL telecasts, the Olympics, and Super Bowl spillover, management acknowledged that Q2 Local Media core advertising is expected to decline low single digits due to the absence of similar premium sports inventory, with recovery contingent on the WNBA and NWSL restarts in Q2 and the heavier sports quarter in Q3. This dependency exposes the company to external shocks such as league labor disputes, scheduling changes, or diminished advertiser interest in women’s sports should macroeconomic pressures shift brand spending toward more proven, broad-reach categories like NFL or NCAA sports. Moreover, the strategy of acquiring rights for insurgent leagues (e.g., PWHL, MLV, PBR women’s rodeo) on the Scripps Sports Network to test and learn before potential ION simulcast introduces execution complexity and uncertain ROI, as these niche properties may not generate sufficient scale or advertiser demand to justify the rights costs, especially if streaming monetization fails to keep pace with linear audience fragmentation. The market may be overestimating the scalability and durability of this sports-centric model, particularly if linear viewership continues to erode and CTV ad tech monetization remains challenged by lower CPMs and fill-rate pressures despite increased investment in DSP relationships.

Segments Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

Peer Comparison

Companies in the Broadcasting

S.No.	Ticker	Company	Market Cap	P/E	P/S	Total Debt (Qtr)
1	NXST	Nexstar Media Group, Inc.	5.66 Bn	31.28	1.11	12.15 Bn
2	NMAX	Newsmax Inc.	0.84 Bn	-8.44	5.82	0.03 Bn
3	IHRT	iHeartMedia, Inc.	0.57 Bn	-1.97	0.14	5.04 Bn
4	GTN	Gray Media, Inc	0.39 Bn	-2.63	0.13	5.75 Bn
5	SSP	E.W. SCRIPPS Co	0.27 Bn	-1.64	0.13	2.55 Bn
6	FUBO	FuboTV Inc.	0.25 Bn	-0.97	0.08	0.14 Bn
7	CURI	CuriosityStream Inc.	0.14 Bn	-21.98	1.97	-
8	MDIA	Mediaco Holding Inc.	0.08 Bn	-1.21	0.61	0.07 Bn

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Investment Thesis

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Segments Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

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Investment Thesis

Product and Service Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

Segments Breakdown of Revenue (2025)

Peer Comparison

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