A Favorite to Win Young Auction

A good source mentioned a few minutes ago that this H.I.G. Capital outfit is looking like the favorite to scoop up the Young stations, perhaps even meeting the minimum bid required to take the stations off Vincent Young’s/the bank’s hands.

Few in the broadcasting circles seem very familiar with H.I.G., and many are wondering exactly why they’d enter the station space now.

For what it’s worth, here’s a funny little Web bit about Young flagship KRON. If you Google KRON, the tiny blurb under the top link says it’s an NBC affiliate–almost eight years after the station famously lost its NBC affiliation and most of its value. Here’s what comes up on the search page under KRON-TV:

Jul 13, 2009 … News, weather, sports, community events, programming schedule, and traffic. [NBC]

I’d done a story over a year ago about how Googling ‘Sinclair Broadcast’ elicited a blurb with the phrase “politically conservative chain of TV stations” in it. We learned that the link descriptions after a Google search come not from Google or the party that’s been searched, but from a Wikipedia-like volunteer organization called Open Directory Project that indexes just about everything in the Google-able universe.

Someone should tell the folks at ODP (and perhaps H.I.G.!) that KRON ceased being an NBC affiliate at the end of 2001.