KRON to sell longtime studios

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KRON, San Francisco's MyNetworkTV affiliate is looking to move from its longtime studios in downtown San Francisco's Western Addition section. This report from the San Francisco Business Times:

 

Young Broadcasting is looking to sell its longtime KRON-TV building at 1001 Van Ness in San Francisco and move to a smaller but more modern digital facility elsewhere in the Bay Area.

KRON-TV General Manager Brian Greif said the media company has far more space than they need.

“While we love the Van Ness building and the location, the space required for a state-of-the-art digital television station is a fraction of what we have here,” said Greif. “Relocating to a smaller facility will enable us to build a new platform to effectively serve our viewing audience within the San Francisco DMA with the best of today’s and tomorrow’s digital TV advances.”

Greif said the process of the sale of the Van Ness building and finding a new San Francisco/Bay Area facility that meets KRON-TV’s existing and future needs will take up to a year. The 90,000-square-foot Van Ness building was designed by Gardner Daily, who also was the architect for the Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission streets in San Francisco. It was completed in 1967. Young Broadcasting bought the four-story structure in 2000 for $8.4 million, or $185 a square foot.

Daniel Cressman, Mike Taquino and Kyle Kovac of Grubb & Ellis are representing Young Broadcasting in the sale of the building and the search more new space.

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KRON, San Francisco's MyNetworkTV affiliate is looking to move from its longtime studios in downtown San Francisco's Western Addition section. This report from the San Francisco Business Times:

 

As a San Francisco resident, it's probably my duty to say that KRON is not really in the Western Addition (which is a separate neighborhood from Downtown), but more of the Civic Center/Tenderloin area. Either way, it's not the greatest part of our fair City, but being on the major north-south artery does make it a valuable piece of land. That being said, the building was purpose-built as a TV station (and it's not exactly a pretty building, either), so I'm not entirely sure what a new tenant could do with that space aside from tearing it down and starting fresh.

 

“Relocating to a smaller facility will enable us to build a new platform to effectively serve our viewing audience within the San Francisco DMA with the best of today’s and tomorrow’s digital TV advances.”

 

That is a load of crap. Young is desperate for cash and they see that property as a gold mine (which it is). Granted, they don't need all that space anymore, as they were in talks with Comcast a few years ago about leasing out part of the building for CSN Bay Area's studio and office facilities (they ended up leasing out the ground floor of a building at 3rd and Harrison in SOMA, a few blocks up from AT&T Park). Young has been trying unsuccessfully to get rid of KRON for a while now, so this might be a sign that they've given up and have decided to just operate it on even more of a shoestring budget.

 

I'm really interested to see where KRON ends up, though. If they're looking to save significant amounts of money, I'd have to strongly think they'd move out of the City. There just isn't any such thing as "affordable" real estate here.

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Does anybody still watch KRON? I just moved here a few months ago, and I can't really tell what KRON has to offer other than trying to recapture the past. As a viewer, I've found that KTVU shines out the rest in terms of news content.

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Does anybody still watch KRON?

 

No. They do not.