Samantha

This was the image that was used when the call sign change happened in 1986. Looks like the whole thing was being phased in...the channel has a bump that's from May 16 (not 26) with this slogan and the KMOX-TV calls!

There's a rumble in them there Rockies... https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/cbs-news-colorado-announces-new-community-journalism-initiative KCNC CBS News Colorado is: * Shifting to the community journalism model (as is being implemented in Detroit and hinted at in New York) * Adding a 9am and a 4pm news hour (the 9am is a half-hour on TV plus an extra streaming half-hour) * Starting September 12 https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/cbs-news-colorado-announces-new-initiative-additional-newscasts/?fbclid=IwAR1fZUYQHbzc1nUCY5vuxQqHsJiPJmpCvUTeEAaDL8qg5mPbYRydlSgM2sk

This is a large rearchitecture. The reason it has taken this long is simply because of how comprehensive it is. Of the four O&O chains, CBS has the most problems ailing its. Most of the stations are ratings fixer-uppers and have spent two decades or more in such a condition. There was no news in Detroit. Post-Dunn and Friend, something radical needed to be done. And the investment in News and the fact that there is actual innovation and renewal in News are all to be hailed. If you watched the first night of the new Evening News look, you might have noticed the text elements listing places where CBS News has bureaus. There's London...Rome...Johannesburg...Atlanta...oh yeah, and Sacramento and Baltimore. News and Stations in a nutshell. There is a lot going on. A visual overhaul, the first top-to-bottom one at Stations in nearly a decade; a restructuring internally; the continued effects of the Paramount Global merger, etc.; the launch of news in Detroit; and the shift to a streaming-first or -co-first mentality at every outpost in Stations. This does not happen overnight. Why are we so excited? Because there is a sense of renewal at CBS that is long-deserved and needed. Because they are fixing, finally on a comprehensive level, a historic inequity in Detroit, and they are making the right moves in doing it. Because there is a pathbreaking branding approach. ABC has too many successful news franchises in its markets to do this. NBC has too many, and it also has Telemundo; it's hard to have that sort of fusion of national and local news when there are two separate networks (with separate teams) to feed and all of the NBC newsrooms it runs are bilingual. Fox fundamentally cannot do this without compromising and tainting its local news product to a significant portion of the audience.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-659A2.pdf We have Auction 112 results. Weigel takes 6 stations: Ely, Tonopah, Carlsbad, Silver City (x2!), and Wittenberg Gray nabs 5: Freeport, Winnemucca, Eagle River, Flagstaff, and Yuma Marquee gets on the board with 3: Price, Walla Walla, and Sheridan Radiant Life takes Alexandria Sinclair wins Syracuse BEK wins Grand Forks Ventura Media nabs Vernal

They've filed to do this again as of June 1 after dropping the idea last year. https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/public/tv/draftCopy.html?displayType=html&appKey=25076ff37f8fa68f017fb2ee03ad295e&id=25076ff37f8fa68f017fb2ee03ad295e&goBack=N Meanwhile, WMEB Orono ME seeks to move from VHF 9 to UHF 22.

Renard is clearly in the game for Syracuse and nothing else. Similarly, BEK Sports Network probably only has eyes for Grand Forks. Really curious what Estrella wants. I see only two channels they'd want: 11 Yuma and 32 Flagstaff. Maybe 9 Walla Walla. The Flagstaff station could be paired with KVPA-LD in Phoenix to force must-carry for Estrella TV. Not much else in this list that has a lot of Hispanics. Weigel will want stations that attribute to large markets as part of its national mux growth strategy. Alexandria MN 7 sticks out to me here, as do the Silver City channels. They could also go for Eagle River 26 or Wittenberg 31, which are in the Wausau area. Tonopah 9 also could be used with them to get into Las Vegas, though Rxdio is clearly gunning for Tonopah. The other Nevada sticks would go into Reno (Winnemucca) and Salt Lake (Ely) DMAs. Eagle River 26 is one of a handful of brand new allocations. It was sought by Gray shortly before Gray bought Quincy; it onsold WAOW but not WYOW, which gave it the Rhinelander-area transmitter it desired. (WMOW provides much the same service, thus why Gray hived WYOW off.) So there really isn't an obvious local bidder for it. Freeport IL 9 could and probably should be used to revive WIFR as a full-power station. This allotment was also requested by Gray. You might recall WIFR was sold for spectrum and converted to an LPTV. Not much of this list coincides with Gray's portfolio of stations, though Sun Valley ID could be used to expand the service area of KMVT. Sinclair's participation here is intriguing. Walla Walla 9 would not provide that much additional benefit to KEPR. Of the Montana stations on offer, one is in the NBC Montana service area (Butte 24) and the other two in the Great Falls DMA which has KTGF-LD as its NBC affiliate. Would they want to build high-power satellites in Price or Vernal, Utah?

The FCC released the list of 13 bidders (7 with complete applications, 6 with minor fixes needed) for TV auction 112 in a couple of months. Complete Gray Television Licensee, LLC Major Market Broadcasting of North Dakota, Inc. Marquee Broadcasting, Inc. Radiant Life Ministries, Inc. Renard Broadcasting Corp. RxDIO.com LLC TV-49, Inc. Incomplete BEK Sports Network, Inc. Estrella Television License LLC Sinclair Television Group, Inc. SJL Television Inc. Ventura Media Communications, LLC Venture Technologies Group, LLC A 14th bidder, Redwood Empire Public Television, Inc., was rejected.

Kent Dana has died. He was 80. https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2022/04/19/kent-dana-legendary-anchor-three-phoenix-tv-news-stations-dies/7362375001/

It's real but they did a ton of really cheap station-side editing...

WJAR went into their news archives and dug up a rarity that lasted just 5 months... the WLWC TV 28 News at 10!

https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/media/2022/04/05/kris-pickel-fired-arizonas-family-phoenix/9478247002/ Kris Pickel is out at KPHO/KTVK due to a "business decision".

This is Gray, so "My Little LPTV: U-Relays are Magic" is probably the answer. Of the BX LPTVs, they could use a U-relay in Montgomery, but they don't need an LPTV in the other markets (and indeed one they don't own a network affiliate in). They could always put Circle on WBXC; the network has no place to hang its hat in that market, and the LPTVs are all unremarkable diginet trees.

@ChesapeakeTVand I are pretty much in agreement. It's Peters. When you see full-page newspaper ads like this with copy like this... Who else could it possibly be? https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857000/ Peters LOVED flowery newspaper ads. I had already clipped three of these for KOLN/KGIN (10/11 Strong debuted 1977), KMST (It's a Must, used 1991–92), and WTXL (This is Our Place from 1984), and I was able to nab another five from WEAR Clearly Yours (1979), WXLT 40 is Yours (1980), KVIA 7 Together (1983), WQAD One Quad-City (1984), and WSPA In the Center of it All (1990). https://www.newspapers.com/clip/48745979/the-strength-of-nebraska-1011-strong/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/75942435/looking-toward-tomorrow-its-a-must-a/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/29141556/tallahassee-this-is-our-place/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857200/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857208/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857232/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857336/ https://www.newspapers.com/clip/97857453/

Thanks for posting, Dan. I think every single person who has said something in this thread (including myself) would say we really appreciate your work. I don't know of anyone else who had that many concurrent campaigns on the air in the same market. A lot of craft goes into making all that work, and this thread exists because we want to recognize the people that produced it.

They're also buying an associated digital media business, and the owners are joining Gray to run strategy for the Telemundo stations. Still doesn't make sense.

The second one is a specific service mark for the National Captioning Institute. It must be the case that NCI did not caption Cosby but captioned Family Ties (I found a 1986 newspaper article mentioning they captioned the latter).

Gray petitioned for tolling on K19KE-D and KKTM-L(D) in December due to tower crew availability. They'll be out at both sites in mid-February, and construction should take about two weeks. I wish they'd be a bit more precise about their wording. Lawton viewers don't *need* to rescan if they have a setup that's good at receiving the Grandfield transmitter. But they *should* rescan if they have signal problems or a setup that's not good at VHF.

You've missed this @CircleSeven, but I've talked a bit in the Discord about what Gray is doing. Gray buys LPTVs for two reasons: To provide UHF transmission in the core metro area for a VHF station that cannot move to the UHF band at full-power (what I call a "U-relay"). To provide additional translators, even for stations and regions where traditionally this has never been a consideration, at the outer edges of station coverage areas. I don't know how many LPTVs Gray is buying for ATSC 3.0, a la their Tallahassee test bed. However, I do believe the strategy also has to do with looking down the road and the idea of a more cellular signal topology (multiple transmitters ensuring a high SNR within the defined coverage circle of the primary station). Along the way, they get UHF sticks that can serve a high percentage (if not all) of the viewers of the DMA and their flat-panel indoor antennas and, where necessary, can serve as ATSC 3.0 transmitters if so desired. In Nashville, for instance, Gray has contracted to buy three different LPTVs: 15 Nashville, 29 Lebanon–Nashville, 29 Lewisburg. Lewisburg is a translator; it's toward the southern edge of the WSMV contour. 15 Nashville could easily be a U-relay. (RabbitEars lists the first two as U-relays already!) This is actually some cutting-edge stuff and shows that Gray sees value in improving signal coverage. It may be one of the largest efforts to commission new TV translators in 20 or so years at least, and a lot longer than that when considering the location in the eastern US of many of the stations that benefit.

That is sliiiiiiiiick... It's also a new design riffing off the 1960s version (with the sine wave in the A).

Watch the close at 36:34; guess the Newsmat was still in place when they debuted that look!

I'll note that some of these are assignments vacated a decade ago or more (by groups like Pappas and Equity, as well as the Apollo closures). Only Freeport and Eagle River are new allocations.

They look like knockoffs of that package. No eye, incorrect typefaces.

Wow, what a newscast! The answer is we don't have a lot of KMOX-TV of this era. They also likely used the Palmer package briefly in 1985–86, as we have some IDs and bumps with it.

How has that KEVN logo survived this long?

Gray is WYMPing out: they're acquiring WYMP-LD 14, virtual 7, southeast of Memphis (Bruce, Mississippi) from 5GTV for $500,000. On October 18, Gray executed a subchannel lease agreement with 5GTV, too.