Granite Broadcasting Corporation
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| Private | |
| Industry | Television |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Headquarters | 767 Third Avenue New York City United States |
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Key people
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W. Don Cornwell and Stuart Beck, Founders |
| Website | Website |
Granite Broadcasting Corporation is a broadcasting holding company in New York City which owns two television stations in the United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Syracuse, New York. Granite was founded by W. Don Cornwell and Stuart Beck in 1988 [1], and was the first African-American station group in the United States considered to be a "major" station operator (though not the first minority-owned chain, a distinction held by the Aleut-owned Cook Inlet Broadcasting).
Granite's chairman/CEO is Peter Markham, with Duane Lammers as COO.
Granite declared Chapter 11 (reorganization) bankruptcy on December 11, 2006, mainly due to the complications of the 2006 United States broadcast TV realignment which nullified the sales of the group's Detroit and San Francisco The WB affiliates due to those stations being left out of The CW because of CBS Corporation-owned stations in both cities taking the affiliation by default. It emerged from bankruptcy in June 2007 under the control of private equity firm Silver Point Capital (which also took over ComCorp later that year).
In February 2014, Granite reached deals to sell the majority of its stations. WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York and WMYD in Detroit were sold to the E.W. Scripps Company for $110 million (the latter forming a duopoly with Scripps-owned ABC affiliate WXYZ-TV), while most of its remaining stations (mostly in small markets), along with the Malara Broadcast Group's two stations, went to Quincy Newspapers and SagamoreHill Broadcasting (which originally planned to operate the LMA-controlled stations Granite currently provides services to for Quincy). SagamoreHill was subsequently dropped from the Quincy transaction.
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