Insiders at Nexstar Media Group sold $12 million worth of stock, pointing to potential stress at the media company, Simply Wall St reports.

This considerable offloading of stock over the past year — including $1.5 million in just the past three months — has raised some eyebrows among investors. Independent director Jay Grossman made the biggest insider sale, $1.7 million, in a single trade at $171 a share.

Furthermore, Nexstar insiders did not acquire any additional shares over the past year. Executives at Nexstar Media Group own about $303 million of shares, or 6.3% of the company.

The revelation comes on top of Nexstar announcing in December 2024 that it was reducing 2% of its workforce, or 260 employees, in its broadcasting and sales divisions. The layoffs come at a time when many traditional television companies are moving away from linear TV to streamlining.

In October, Nexstar eliminated the role of Chief Revenue Officer Michael Strober and assigned advertising sales to a group of top executives from various units.

Nexstar employs about 13,000 people, with its holdings including the NewsNation cable network and The Hill. In recent months, Nexstar has worked to cut operating losses at CW, which it acquired in 2022. In November, it said it had reduced CW losses by $119 million.

In January, 2 million viewers of Nexstar on 63 local stations were unable to see programming as the stations went dark due to a carriage dispute with Altice USA, parent company of Optimum. This affected NewsNation and New York’s WPIX stations, depriving viewers of local news, NFL playoff games, and other programs.

“Altice has consistently made unreasonable and unprecedented demands of Nexstar, culminating with their decision to walk away from the negotiations,” said Nexstar President and COO Michael Biard in a statement.

For its part, Optimum accused Nexstar of demanding “exorbitant rates” for its programming and “tying local channels to less popular ones, (including) NewsNation, which has essentially no viewership.”

On January 18, despite the distribution challenges that Nexstar has had in expanding distribution of its NewsNation channel, Nexstar and Optimum restored programming to customers.