KMSB

KMSB
Tucson, Arizona
United States
Branding Fox 11 (general)
Fox 11 News (newscasts)
Slogan Tucson's News First
Channels Digital: 25 (UHF)
Virtual: 11 (PSIP)
Subchannels 11.1 Fox
11.2 Movies!
11.3 Justice Network
11.4 Quest
Affiliations Fox (1986–present)
Owner Tegna, Inc.
(Sander Operating Co. V LLC D/B/A KMSB Television)
Operator Raycom Media
(via SSA; transfer of SSA pending to Gray Television[1])
First air date February 1, 1967 (1967-02-01)
Call letters' meaning Mountain
States
Broadcasting
(former owner)
Sister station(s) KOLD-TV, KTTU
Former callsigns KZAZ (1967–1985)
Former channel number(s) Analog:
11 (VHF, 1967–2009)
Former affiliations Analog/DT1:
Independent (1967–1986)
FNN (secondary; 1981–1985)
DT2:
This TV
Transmitter power 480 kW
Height 1,123 m (3,684 ft)
Facility ID 44052
Transmitter coordinates 32°24′56″N 110°42′52″W / 32.41556°N 110.71444°W / 32.41556; -110.71444
Licensing authority FCC
Public license information: Profile
CDBS
Website www.tucsonnewsnow.com

KMSB, virtual channel 11 (UHF digital channel 25), is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Tucson, Arizona, United States. Owned by Tegna, Inc., the station is operated by Raycom Media (owner of CBS affiliate KOLD-TV, channel 13) through a shared services agreement; Raycom also operates MyNetworkTV affiliate KTTU (channel 18) through a separate shared services agreement with Tucker Broadcasting. The three stations share studios on North Business Park Drive on the northwest side of Tucson (near the Casas Adobes neighborhood). KMSB's transmitter is located atop Mount Bigelow; as a result of the transmitter's location, residents in the northern part of Tucson, Oro Valley and Marana cannot receive adequate reception of the station.

History

Tucson gained its first independent station when KZAZ signed on the air February 1, 1967.[2] It was licensed to Nogales, but had its main studios in Tucson.[3] The station aired movies in both English and Spanish, dramas, sitcoms, bull fights, cartoons and other general entertainment fare. It had a local news department and newscast.

The station was owned and operated by out of town investors, including Danny Thomas and Monty Hall, and had its facilities in a former Safeway supermarket on Tucson Blvd., just north of Grant Road. Gene Adelstein, a Tucson resident, put together a group of investors as "Roadrunner Television" and bought KZAZ in 1977. As Bonnie Henry wrote in the Arizona Daily Star: "They held live wrestling matches in the studio, organized a paint-the-station day and ran a 24-hour Star Trek marathon that sparked a run on blank videotape."[4] The sales manager, Hank Lominac, hosted the prime time movies. The sports anchor, Bill Roemer, anchored live sports from the University of Arizona. The hour-long newscast at 9 p.m. was anchored by former KOLD news director George Borozan and co-starred John Scott Ulm. It featured long interview segments, and its field reports were captured on one field camera/recorder.

In 1978, KZAZ bought a satellite downlink and started carrying the first half-hour of WPIX/New York's newscast, which was rebranded as Independent Network News on June 9, 1980. Borozan was cut to a half hour and either followed or led into (at various times) the tape-delayed INN report. From 1981 until 1985, the station carried business news programming from the Financial News Network each weeknight before sign-off.

In 1984, the station was sold to Mountain States Broadcasting, a division of the Providence Journal Company, who changed the call letters to KMSB-TV on September 12, 1985. To cut costs, Providence Journal axed the station's news broadcasts once it took over. The station became a charter Fox affiliate when the network signed on October 9, 1986, and has been affiliated with Fox longer than any other station in Arizona. As with most early Fox affiliates though, the station was essentially still programming itself as an independent since Fox offered only an hour of late night programming at the time (consisting of The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, an ill-fated talk show that locally suffered from intense competition from KVOA (channel 4)'s broadcasts of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson) and would only add a few nights of primetime programming by the end of the 1980s.

In the early 1990s, KMSB began operating KTTU, which had been owned by Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), and was allowed to move its city of license from Nogales to Tucson in 1991. Belo Corp. became the owner of KMSB after the company purchased Providence Journal's holdings in 1997.

KMSB retired from cartoons at the same time; 4Kids TV aired on KTTU until its shutdown on December 27, 2008, and airs Fox's Saturday morning infomercial block, Weekend Marketplace.

In November 2011, Belo announced that it would enter into a shared services agreement with Raycom Media beginning in February 2012. This outsourcing arrangement resulted in CBS affiliate KOLD-TV taking over daily operations of KMSB and KTTU and moving their advertising sales department into the KOLD studios (however, they remained employees of Belo). All remaining positions at the two stations were eliminated and master control moved from KTVK in Phoenix to KOLD.[5] The transfer of KMSB's operations occurred in several stages, with newscasts moving to KOLD's studios on February 1 and other operations being taken over by KOLD in the following weeks.[6][7]

On June 13, 2013, the Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Belo. However, as Gannett holds a partial ownership stake in the publisher of the Arizona Daily Star, the KMSB license was instead sold to Sander Media, LLC, operated by a former Belo executive, Jack Sander. While the other Belo stations acquired by Sander in the deal have various shared services agreements with Gannett, Raycom Media continues to operate the two stations, and the Belo employees handling advertising sales became Gannett employees.[7][8] The sale was completed on December 23.[9] On June 29, 2015, Gannett's publishing operations were spun off, with the remainder renamed Tegna, Inc.[10] After the spin-out, Sander filed to transfer the licenses of its stations back to Tegna—a deal completed December 3, 2015.[11][12]

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming[13]
11.1720p16:9KMSB-HDMain KMSB programming / Fox
11.2480iMoviesMovies![14]
11.3JusticeJustice Network[15]
11.4Quest

Analog-to-digital conversion

KMSB discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 11, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[16] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 25,[17] using PSIP to display KMSB's virtual channel as 11 on digital television receivers.

News operations

KMSB produces an hour-long 9 o'clock newscast each night. After not having a newscast for nearly 20 years, KMSB began a 9 p.m. newscast in 2003.[18] From the newscast's inception until August 2008, it was produced by sister station KTVK in Phoenix using KTVK news anchors and meteorologists, with live reports from KMSB reporters and NBC affiliate KVOA. Sports began originating entirely from the KMSB studios in Tucson in 2006.

In August 2008, the news portion of 9 p.m. newscast began originating out of the KMSB studios as well with Lou Raguse as anchor. In January 2009, the newscast expanded from 30 minutes to one hour nightly and began locally produced weathercasts, thus completing the transition of the newscast from Phoenix to Tucson. The station was one of the last top-100 market Fox affiliates to air late-evening news.

In March 2010, it was announced that KMSB's news partnership of seven years with KVOA would be ending.[19] KMSB's news staff, operating out of KVOA's building since 2003, would relocate to KMSB's studios. This move would unite the news staff with the sports department and weather announcers, both of whom have been working out of KMSB's building.

On February 1, 2012, KOLD-TV took over the operations of KMSB—taking over production responsibilities of KMSB's nightly prime time newscast at 9, as well as launching a two-hour weekday morning show (from 7 until 9), Fox 11 Daybreak, on the station. In addition, KTVK's Good Morning Arizona will no longer be seen on KMSB (the 5–7 a.m. portion will be replaced by syndicated programming), and Fox 11 Sports Force will be canceled (with the Sunday 9 p.m. newscast now airing for an hour).[6][20][21] The same day, KMSB and KOLD introduced a shared website, Tucson News Now.[22] As a result, the newscasts on KMSB are now in high definition (prior to the beginning of the SSA, KMSB was the only Belo station that continued to air its late night newscast in pillarboxed 4:3 standard definition because its then in-house news production lacked widescreen- or high-definition-capable cameras).

References

  1. ↑ Miller, Mark K. (June 25, 2018). "Gray To Buy Raycom For $3.6 Billion". TVNewsCheck. NewsCheckMedia. Retrieved June 25, 2018.
  2. ↑ "Channel 11 Will Start Telecasts", Tucson Daily Citizen, p. 13, 1967-01-31
  3. ↑ "KZAZ-TV Will Have Office Here", Tucson Daily Citizen, p. 56, 1966-11-17
  4. ↑ "Those Crazy, Hazy days At KZAZ", Arizona Daily Star, 2009-05-31
  5. ↑ http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/2011/11/15/55453/belo-turning-over-kmsb-kttu-to-kold
  6. 1 2 Hatfield, David (January 27, 2012). "KOLD will make Wednesday deadline to start doing KMSB newscasts". Inside Tucson Business. Retrieved January 30, 2012.
  7. 1 2 Hatfield, David (June 13, 2013). "Little change on Tucson TV expected from Belo's sale to Gannett". Inside Tucson Business. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
  8. ↑ Brown, Lisa (June 13, 2013). "Gannett to buy TV station owner Belo for $1.5 billion". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Retrieved June 13, 2013.
  9. ↑ Gannett Completes Its Acquisition of Belo, TVNewsCheck, Retrieved 23 December 2013
  10. ↑ "Separation of Gannett into two public companies completed | TEGNA". Tagna. Retrieved 2015-06-29.
  11. ↑ "APPLICATION FOR CONSENT TO TRANSFER CONTROL OF ENTITY HOLDING BROADCAST STATION CONSTRUCTION PERMIT OR LICENSE". Federal Communications Commission. Retrieved 1 July 2015.
  12. ↑ "Tegna Closes On Sander TV Stations Purchase". TVNewsCheck. December 3, 2015. Retrieved December 3, 2015.
  13. ↑ RabbitEars TV Query for KMSB
  14. ↑ Movies! TV Network - Where to Watch Retrieved November 3, 2013
  15. ↑ Watch Justice Network In Your Area
  16. ↑ "Analog Service Termination Notification". Federal Communications Commission.
  17. ↑ "DTV Transition Status Report". Federal Communications Commission.
  18. ↑ http://www.belo.com/pressRelease.x2?release=20030428-01.html
  19. ↑ http://azbiz.com/articles/2010/03/12/media_technology/inside_media/doc4b9a6b9b3ebb0719764027.txt
  20. ↑ http://www.mediabistro.com/tvspy/belo-shuts-down-kmsb-news-operations-dozens-of-layoffs-expected_b29282#more-29282
  21. ↑ http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/111511_kmsb_newscast/fox-11-lay-off-news-staff-cancel-newscast-feb/
  22. ↑ "Answering Your Questions about Tucson News Now". tucsonnewsnow.com. Raycom Media. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
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