KOKI-TV

As an independent station

The UHF channel 23 allocation—which had been dormant since a short-lived attempt to revive its original occupant, KCEB, by original licensee Elfred Beck foundered in September 1967—was contested between two groups that vied to hold the construction permit to build a new station on the frequency. The first prospective permittee was Wilson Communications, owned by Detroit businessman and Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson, which filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 7, 1978. The second applicant, Tulsa 23, Ltd. (originally Channel 23 Tulsa, Ltd.), filed on September 5; that group – led by managing partner Benjamin F. Boddie and original KOKI-TV general manager James Lavenstein—primarily consisted of prominent local corporate executives and community leaders that included Helmerich & Payne CEO Walter H. Helmerich II, and former Williams Companies CEOs John H. and Charles P. Williams (the latter two of whom were also responsible for the redevelopment of over nine square blocks and 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m²) of new office and retail construction in downtown Tulsa, including the establishment of the Williams Center, the Bank of Oklahoma Tower and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center). The FCC granted the license to the Tulsa 23 venture on December 12, 1979.^[2][3][4]

KOKI-TV signed on the air on October 26, 1980, a date chosen by Lavenstein at the suggestion of marketing and promotions manager Richard Enderwood, as it coincided with Enderwood's birthday. It was the first commercial television station to sign on in the Tulsa market since NBC affiliate KVOO-TV (channel 2, now KJRH-TV) signed on 26 years earlier on December 5, 1954, and the first independent station to begin operation in a market that, on paper, had a large enough population to provide suitable viewership for an independent station since the early 1970s. The station (which was then branded as "Tulsa 23," accompanied by a futuristic logo in which the numerical 23 was construed as the "LS" in Tulsa) originally operated from studio facilities located on East 46th Place (between Memorial Drive and Sheridan Road) in southeast Tulsa, which was fitted with used transmission equipment previously owned by other television stations within the U.S. The station operated on a lean budget, maintaining a general entertainment programming format that featured a mix of classic sitcoms, westerns and drama series, cartoons, and a limited amount of sports and religious programs. The Tulsa 23 partnership purchased programming at low cost, and tailored its schedule to appeal to older and rural demographics, leaving much of the higher-rated and more recent syndicated content to be acquired by its network-affiliated competitors, KJRH, CBS affiliate KOTV (channel 6) and ABC affiliate KTUL (channel 8). KOKI was opportunistic on occasion and picked up broadcast rights to college and major league sporting events.^[5]

Feature films were heavily emphasized on the station's schedule during this period, with KOKI typically carrying one to two films per night in prime time and one film in the afternoon on weekdays and three or four films per day on weekends. One of the station's film presentations was Creature Feature, which was hosted by Sherman Oaks (the stage name of local comedian Jim Millaway), featuring Gailard Sartain and Jeanne Tripplehorn (then known as Jeanne Summers, who left after the program's first season), both of whom worked as radio hosts for KMOD-FM (97.5) at the time; showcasing horror and science fiction B movies each Saturday night from October 1982 until October 1985, it featured wraparound segments before and after commercial breaks in which the hosts conducted various skits, often making ridiculous nonsequitir remarks. KOKI would gain a competitor on March 18, 1981, when Green Country Associates and Satellite Syndicated Systems signed on fellow independent KGCT-TV (channel 41, now a MyNetworkTV affiliate) with a mix of syndicated entertainment programs, locally produced news and talk programming in the afternoon and movies from the In-Home Theatre subscription service at night, before transitioning to a general entertainment format within three months of its debut. Despite its low-cost approach, KOKI became a major force in the market; this was evidenced in a 1983 study by New York City-based advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather examining Tulsa's commercial television stations, which showed that KOKI was the only station to increase viewership shares over the two-year period from May 1981 to May 1983, rising from a 6 to a 19 share in early evenings, from a 5 to a 9 in prime time and from a 4 to a 10 share against late newscasts on the three network affiliates, whereas KJRH, KOTV and KTUL saw steady declines in those same dayparts, which were linked to KOKI's overall growth.^[6]

The slogan used to promote its film offerings from the station's sign-on until 1984, "Oklahoma's Movie Star" (based off the title of the station's Movie Star film presentations), would be the center of a federal trademark infringement lawsuit that Tulsa 23 Ltd. filed against Home Box Office Inc. in October 1982 in over the "We Are Your Movie Star" image campaign implemented by Cinemax earlier that year. James Ellison, the U.S. District Court judge presiding over the case in the Oklahoma Eastern District court, granted an injunction against Home Box Office in November 1983, on grounds that the Cinemax campaign infringed upon KOKI's trademark. HBO appealed the ruling in the Denver-based Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which upheld Ellison's injunction order, forcing Cinemax to discontinue the campaign and begin developing a replacement on December 9.^[7][8]

As a Fox affiliate

Partly because of its status as the strongest of the market's two independent stations, in the summer of 1986, News Corporation approached and, later, reached an agreement with Tulsa 23 Ltd. for KOKI-TV to become the Tulsa charter outlet of the Fox Broadcasting Company in advance of the network's launch.^[9] Channel 23 formally affiliated with Fox when the fledgling network commenced programming on October 9, 1986. Though it was technically a network affiliate, as was the case with other Fox stations during the network's early years of operation, KOKI continued to be programmed as a de facto independent station as Fox's only initial offering was late-night talk show The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. Until Fox completed the expansion of its prime time schedule to a seven-night-a-week lineup (a seven-year transition that began with the launch of a three-hour Sunday night lineup in April 1987 and was completed with the rollout of the network's Monday lineup in June 1993), KOKI continued to air a movie at 7:00 p.m. on nights when the network did not offer any programming. In 1988, the station moved its operations into a low-rise office building on East 54th Street and South Yale Avenue (near LaFortune Park) in southeast Tulsa, which was named Fox Plaza.

Clear Channel ownership

After trying for several years to offload KOKI-TV, the Tulsa 23 partnership secured a willing buyer on March 6, 1989, when it sold the station to San Antonio, Texas-based Clear Channel Television for $6.075 million. Citing that KOKI had not generated a profit for some time as a result of an economic downturn spurred by an oil exploration slump in the region during the 1980s, division parent Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia)—which had owned KAKC (1300 AM) and KMOD-FM (97.5) since the company, as San Antonio Broadcasting Corp., acquired the two radio stations from Unicorn Inc. in 1973—applied for a "failing station" waiver of FCC ownership rules that then prohibited common ownership of television and radio stations in the same market on the basis that the combined ownership would provide KOKI with needed financial support to remain operational and expand its public affairs programming. The sale and crossownership waiver received FCC approval on November 17, 1989; the transaction was finalized in late February 1990. (KOKI would gain additional radio sisters when Clear Channel purchased KQLL-AM-FM [1430, now KTBZ, and 106.1, now KTGX] and KOAS [92.1 FM, now KTBT] from Federated Media for $15.4 million in April 1996; as the Telecommunications Act eliminated the radio-television crossownership restrictions, the company acquired the two stations without amending the earlier waiver.)^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

Under Clear Channel's stewardship, the station – which, in compliance with Fox's stricter branding requirements, began identifying as "Fox 23" in 1990 – significantly upgraded its programming, acquiring the rights to more recent sitcoms, higher-quality feature film titles and some first-run talk shows for its schedule. It would also begin to rely on Fox Kids for much of its children's programming inventory after Fox launched the children's program block in September 1990; as such, many of the syndicated children's programs that KOKI had aired to occupy portions of the weekday daytime and Saturday morning time periods were gradually relegated to early morning time slots as well as around the network-supplied daytime and Saturday blocks. With these changes, coupled with the growth of the Fox network into a major competitor to the Big Three networks during the early part of that decade, KOKI was generating respectable profits by the middle of the decade.^[17]

Former KOKI logo, used from February 3, 2002 to January 15, 2011.

On November 3, 1993, Clear Channel Television entered into a local marketing agreement with RDS Broadcasting – which had purchased and relaunched channel 41 three years earlier—to provide programming, advertising and other administrative services for then-independent station KTFO, which moved from its original studio facilities on Garnett Avenue in southeast Tulsa into the Fox Plaza facility. Both KOKI and KTFO pooled programming inventories, with the latter acquiring additional talk and reality shows as well as more recent first-run and off-network sitcoms and drama series to complement channel 23's offerings (although many higher-rated syndicated shows continued to air on KOKI).^[18] As was the trend for many Fox affiliates, channel 23 gradually shifted the focus of its syndication inventory away from classic sitcoms and syndicated children's programs during the latter half of the 1990s, becoming reliant on talk, reality and court shows to fill portions of its daytime schedule; more recent sitcoms were added to occupy early-evening and late night timeslots. The station continued to run Fox Kids programming on weekdays until its afternoon block was discontinued in December 2001,^[19][20][21] at which time, it replaced the children's programs on weekday mid-afternoons with additional talk shows and game shows; it retained the remaining Saturday morning children's lineup (which was relaunched FoxBox in September 2002, and was later branded as 4Kids TV from September 2005 until December 2008, when Fox stopped providing children's programming after declining to renew its agreement with time-lease partner 4Kids Entertainment).

Clear Channel acquired KTFO as part of a four-station, $11.663-million deal with the San Antonio-based Mercury Broadcasting Company in December 1999, which, following the sale's approval by the FCC on March 9, 2000 and subsequent completion that May, created the first broadcast television duopoly in the Tulsa market.^[22][23] In January 2002, Clear Channel relocated the operations of KOKI and KTFO from Fox Plaza into a 124,000-square-foot (11,500 m²) studio complex located at 2625 South Memorial Drive. The building—which was originally constructed in 1962 for an expansion of the Oertle's Family Discount Store and later rented out to house a Burlington Coat Factory location—was purchased to house the two television stations and the company's five Tulsa radio properties (which had operated from the Mid-Oklahoma Building on 41st Street and Skelly Drive in southwest Tulsa) under a single facility as well as to allow KOKI/KTFO to commence digital television transmissions and news operations. (An additional 40,000 square feet (3,700 m²) of building space was reserved for the Clear Channel Event Center exhibition complex.)^[24][25]

Newport Television ownership

On April 20, 2007, following the completion of the company's $18.7-billion purchase by private equity firms Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to sell its television stations to Providence Equity Partners for $1.2 billion. The sale was approved by the FCC on December 1, 2007; after settling a lawsuit by Clear Channel ownership to force Providence to complete the acquisition, it was finalized on March 14, 2008, at which time Providence formed Newport Television as a holding company for 27 of Clear Channel's 35 television stations (including KOKI and KMYT) and began transferring the remaining nine stations (all in markets where conflicts with FCC ownership rules precluded a legal duopoly from continuing under Newport, but had their operations remain tied to the Newport-owned outlets through local marketing agreements) to High Plains Broadcasting.^{[26][27][28][29][30][31][32]}

Original version of current KOKI logo, used from January 16, 2011 to January 2014.

On August 11, 2011, William Sturdivant II—a then-25-year-old with a history of mental issues, including once reportedly being apprehended on such an event after walking 250 miles (400 km) from Tulsa to Dallas, and an arrest record that included charges for burglary and drug possession – was found wandering in an area outside the KOKI/KMYT/Clear Channel Radio facility on Memorial Drive that was not authorized for public access, where he was chased onto the building's roof by security guards and climbed up to the 150-foot (46 m) mark of an adjacent 287-foot (87 m) transmission tower owned by Clear Channel for use by its radio stations and as an auxiliary tower for KOKI. Sturdivant (who was nicknamed "Tower Man" by Tulsa-area and Oklahoma news outlets) moved between 75 and 100 feet (23 and 30 m) at various points during the standoff. After more than 150 hours (the longest standoff in the Tulsa Police Department's history, breaking the record set by a 1993 standoff involving a murder suspect that lasted for 32 hours), the standoff ended at around 6:40 p.m. on August 16, after retired Tulsa Police negotiator Tyrone Lynn was sent up the tower by crane to talk Sturdivant—who, after being lowered to the ground by a Tulsa Fire Department cherry picker, was transported to Hillcrest Medical Center to be treated for severe dehydration, heat exhaustion and burns sustained to his uncovered feet from navigating the tower beams in temperatures exceeding 90 °F (32 °C)—down from the tower.^{[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]}

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

Subchannel history

Analog-to-digital conversion

KOKI-TV began transmitting a digital television signal on UHF channel 22 on October 1, 2002. The station shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 23, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 22.^{[56][57][58][59][60][61]} Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 23. Newport Television's decision to delay KOKI's switch to digital-only transmissions by five months, while electing to turn off the KMYT analog signal on the original transition date of February 17, 2009, was done in order to enable viewers who were not prepared for the transition to continue receiving news and emergency weather information through the spring 2009 severe weather season.^[62]

Sports programming

From 1980 until 1987, after which the broadcast rights transferred to KGCT, KOKI-TV held the local syndication rights to broadcast Major League Baseball games from the Kansas City Royals produced by their flagship broadcaster at the time, WDAF-TV. Its relationship with the league expanded in 1985, when carried games involving the St. Louis Cardinals (which were distributed by Anheuser-Busch's sports syndication subsidiary, Bud Sports); after a two-year stint on KGCT, Cardinals telecasts returned to channel 23 for the 1988 season. (All Cardinals telecasts moved to Tulsa Cable Television channel 3 [now Cox-operated YurView Oklahoma], or on channel 20 in the event of conflicts with sporting events carried on the primary public access channel, for the 1990 season.)^[65][66] Both the Cardinals and the Royals have had select games carried on KOKI each season since 1996, through Fox's broadcasting contract with Major League Baseball.

From 1989 to 1991, KOKI held the local broadcast rights to NFL preseason games from the Dallas Cowboys; the station, which assumed the preseason telecast rights to both teams from KGCT as a result of that station's two-year operational cessation, carried six to eight prime time game telecasts annually.^[67] The rights to both the Cowboys and Chiefs telecasts were transferred to KGCT beginning with the 1991 preseason. Since September 1994, most Cowboys telecasts carried on KOKI consist of those carried regionally or nationally by Fox, which through the network's contract with the NFL, holds primary broadcast rights to the National Football Conference (NFC). In addition to carrying Fox-televised games involving in-conference opponents, since 2014, Cowboys games carried on the station also include certain cross-flexed games against opponents in the American Football Conference (AFC) that were originally scheduled to air on CBS. (Most Cowboys preseason games not televised by Fox or by other broadcast or cable networks are carried over-the-air locally on CW affiliate KQCW (channel 19) through that station's agreement with the team's syndication service.) In addition, for the 1990 season (the first year that the NFL allowed a live preseason game to air on a team's out-of-market station), the station carried preseason games involving the Kansas City Chiefs, running four prime time game telecasts during that season.^[67]

From 1989 to 1992, KOKI carried regular season and postseason college basketball games involving teams from the Big Eight Conference (distributed by Raycom Sports) and the Missouri Valley Conference (distributed by Creative Sports Marketing), which gave the station rights to select regular season games featuring the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. Most college basketball telecasts on aired on the station on Saturday afternoons, although it also occasionally carried prime time games on weeknights, specifically during the Big Eight and Missouri Valley men's tournaments. Under the Raycom agreement, KOKI also carried tape delayed broadcasts of Oklahoma Sooners football games in late night on the Sunday after the date the game was held.^[68] From 2005 to 2010, channel 23 also served as the official local broadcaster of OSU-produced analysis and magazine programs, including the weekly shows of the respective head coaches of the Cowboys' basketball, baseball and football teams (all of the broadcasts were hosted by then-sports director Steve Layman, and were also syndicated on fellow Fox affiliate KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City).

News department history

Channel 23 has carried local news programming in various formats since its launch in October 1980. From its sign-on until December 2001, news programming on KOKI consisted mainly of 90-second newsbriefs (originally titled Newscheck 23, renamed in 1990 as Fox 23 Newsbreak) – consisting of Associated Press wire reports and a short weather forecast read by the anchor on-call – that aired during select commercial breaks within daytime and evening programs. As Fox was urging many of its stations to begin producing their own newscasts around this time, in a May 1994 Tulsa World interview, then-general manager Hal Capron responded when asked whether KOKI might develop a news department that the enormous cost was an issue but it would format the newscast as a cutting-edge broadcast to differentiate itself from competitors KJRH, KOTV and KTUL if it went forward with such plans. In December 1995, Capron announced plans to establish a news department for KOKI (even though the space that it occupied at the Fox Plaza building was not quite large enough to house a full news department); Capron estimated that a half-hour prime time newscast at 9:00 p.m. would premiere by August 1997; in January 1997, Capron would later reveal that the newscast's launch would be delayed to an undetermined later date.^[70][71][72] Instead, on January 26, 1997 (immediately following Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXI), KOKI premiered First Weather on Fox 23, a nightly weather program consisting of a five-minute-long lead forecast segment at 10:00, and two weeknight-only 60-second updates at 10:35 and 11:05 p.m., all of which served as lead-ins to the station's late access syndicated and network program offerings. The news updates and First Weather were discontinued in December 2001.

In the fall of 2001, KOKI finally commenced development of a full-scale news department, and hired Sean McLaughlin (who oversaw the launch of the [now-defunct] news department at then-sister station WFTC in Minneapolis two years prior, and later moved to KTUL in the same position in 2005) to serve as news director for the expanded operation. Clear Channel invested between $5 million and $10 million into the operation, which included the purchase and renovation of the Memorial Drive building (which was selected primarily because it was of sufficient size to house a news operation) and the acquisition of top-of-the-line production equipment (including nonlinear editing and content storage hardware from Leitch Technology Corporation), along with the hiring of 54 full- and part-time employees.^{[25][73][74][75][76]}

Long-form newscasts began on February 3, 2002, with the launch of Fox 23 News at 9:00, the first local prime time news program ever attempted in the Tulsa market and the first attempt at a newscast produced independently from KJRH, KOTV and KTUL since channel 41 (as KGCT) shut down its news operation twenty years earlier. The 9:00 p.m. newscast – which has aired as an hour-long program since its premiere broadcast, which itself was delayed due to an hour-long episode of Malcolm in the Middle that followed Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXVI – was originally anchored by Chera Kimiko (who, prior to joining channel 23, served as weekend morning anchor at KVBC [now KSNV] in Las Vegas from 1999 to 2001) and Darren Dedo (who served as weekday morning anchor at WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi from 2000 to 2001), chief meteorologist Jon Slater (who had worked at KSHB-TV in Kansas City from 1999 to 2001, and had previous stints in Tulsa at KJRH and KTUL) and sports director Vic Faust (who had served in that same position at KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Missouri from 1998 to 2001).^[77][78] (Kimiko would remain at KOKI until January 2013, and was replaced as co-anchor by Shae Rozzi, who was previously a reporter for Atlanta sister station WSB-TV; Dedo was replaced as primary co-anchor of KOKI's evening newscasts in December 2004 by former CBS Newspath Washington D.C. reporter Clay Loney, who remains with the station as of 2017, after Dedo's contract expired without renewal; Slater remained at KOKI until 2008, and was subsequently replaced by current chief James Aydelott.)^{[79][80][81][82][83]} The Friday and Saturday editions were initially anchored by Markova Reed (who joined the station from WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi), meteorologist George Flickinger (who was previously chief meteorologist at KTXS-TV in Abilene, Texas) and sports anchor Dave Briggs (previously with fellow Fox affiliate KEVN-TV in Rapid City, South Dakota).^[84] (Flickinger was fired without pay by KOKI management in January 2006, for cutting into Fox's November 27, 2005 broadcast of a Seattle Seahawks-New York Giants NFL game to relay an evacuation request from the Mayes County Emergency Management Agency for a major wildfire approaching residences near Chouteau.)^[85]

From the outset, the station maintained a commitment to consumer investigative reporting, with a focus on helping northeastern Oklahoma residents that have been scammed by local businesses as well as government issues (the investigative unit, originally the "Fox 23 Problem Solvers," was rebranded as the "Solving Problems" unit to avoid confusion with KJRH's "2NEWS Problem Solvers" unit in 2007, and later as "Fox 23 Investigates" in 2012). Although legitimate competition for the newscast sprang up when CW affiliate KQCW debuted the KOTV-produced News on 6 at 9:00 on September 18, 2006 (which Kimiko would co-anchor for two years after she left KOKI-TV for KOTV/KQCW in January 2013), prime time news viewers largely remained loyal to KOKI, which had gradually become the ratings leader in the 9:00 p.m. timeslot.

News programming on KOKI expanded quickly over the next few years. Channel 23 offered news programming outside of the established 9:00 slot for the first time on June 17, 2002, when it premiered a 5:30 p.m. Monday-through-Friday-only newscast. Acting as a local alternative to national network newscasts aired on KJRH, KOTV and KTUL in that timeslot, it featured a mix of general and financial news in a faster-paced format targeted at viewers arriving home from their afternoon commute, along with full weather and abbreviated sports segments (with the sports segment initially consisting of a live cut-in featuring Faust sitting in KTBZ afternoon drive radio hosts Rick Couri and Don King). The August 11, 2003 premiere of a more conventional half-hour broadcast at 5:00 p.m. – which would be extended to weekends on January 9, 2016 – expanded the early evening newscast to a full hour, albeit treated as two separate half-hour programs.^{[86][87][88][89]}

The station's morning newscast, Fox 23 News This Morning (alternately titled Fox 23 News Daybreak for the first two hours until 2014), debuted on April 24, 2006 as a four-hour broadcast from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m., displacing religious programs, infomercials and syndicated children's programs that had previously aired in that time period, the latter of which were relegated to Sunday mornings (the program would expand to 4½ hours on October 6, 2014, then to five hours, starting at 4:00 a.m., on June 20, 2016). Formatted as a mix of local and national news, weather and traffic updates and lifestyle features, it was initially anchored by Ron Terrell (who originally joined KOKI in June 2004, after a four-year tenure at KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, to succeed Faust as part of overhaul of the sports department that also saw the departures of Briggs and sports reporter/videographer Justin Holgate) and Ann Sterling (who served as one of the original anchors of the weekday morning newscast at KNXV-TV in Phoenix), and was the second local newscast in the market to run after 7:00 a.m., debuting twelve years after KOTV's Six in the Morning (the 8:00 a.m. hour of which moved to KQCW in January 2008) had expanded into the slot.^{[90][91][92][93][94]} The station debuted an hour-long midday newscast at noon (which was originally scheduled to launch on the same date as the morning newscast) two months later in June 2006.^[95]

On January 18, 2010, KOKI debuted a half-hour 10:00 p.m. newscast, which was formatted to feature a wrap-up of the day's headlines and a full weather segment during the first ten minutes, with national and world news, sports and feature reports filling the remainder of the broadcast (the program, which originally aired only on Monday through Friday evenings, would add a Sunday edition on January 9, 2016).^[96][97][89] On January 16, 2011, starting with the 9:00 p.m. newscast, KOKI became the second television station in the Tulsa market (behind KJRH-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, with studio segments and field video footage recorded and broadcast in true HD; with the change, the station adopted the logo, music (OSI Music's "Fox Affiliate News Theme") and graphic scheme (a modified version of the Hothaus Creative Design package originally commissioned for fellow Fox affiliate KSWB-TV in San Diego) that was based on the standardized branding of Fox's owned-and-operated stations.

The early evening newscast would expand on September 23, 2013, when KOKI debuted a half-hour weeknight newscast at 6:00 p.m.^[98][99] KOKI subsequently debuted weekend morning newscasts on January 4, 2014, originally running for three hours from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. on Saturdays and 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. on Sundays, becoming the second station in the Tulsa market (after KJRH-TV) to carry a morning news program on weekends (both broadcasts were expanded to three hours with the Sunday edition shifted one hour earlier on April 5, 2014; the Saturday edition followed suit with the addition of a fourth hour on January 9, 2016).^{[100][101][89]} In January 2014, the station adopted a modified version of the graphics package used by former San Francisco sister station and fellow Fox affiliate KTVU (now owned by Fox), and dropped its O&O-styled logo coloring in favor of a silver and red logo. On August 29, 2015, KOKI entered into a content partnership with the Tulsa World to collaborate on investigative reports, coverage of local high school football games and some special projects as well as to provide local forecasts from the "Fox 23 Severe Weather Team" for the newspaper.^[102][103] In March 2016, KOKI launched the "Fox 23 SkyView Drone", an unmanned quadcopter that would be used to provide aerial newsgathering purposes.^[104][105]

Since the news department's launch and its subsequent expansion, ratings for KOKI's newscasts have statistically ranked at a strong third to, at times, second place among the Tulsa market's television news outlets; the station has seen some slow growth in viewership for its newscasts since the late 2000s, amid continuing stagnant ratings for historical last place finisher KJRH and ratings declines for once-dominant KTUL in recent years. The 2000 comedy-drama film Where the Heart Is, which was set in northeastern Oklahoma, featured a fictional depiction of KOKI incorporating live trucks and microphones with flags bearing the station's logo in a scene in which lead character (Natalie Portman) is interviewed by a reporter from the station after giving birth in a Wal-Mart. However at the time of the film's release, the station's only news programming consisted of hourly updates, as its news department would not be formed for another two years.

On-air staff