KOLD-TV

KOLD-TV

Tucson, Arizona
United States
Branding KOLD News 13
Slogan Live, Local, Latebreaking
Channels Digital: 32 (UHF)
Virtual: 13 (PSIP)
Subchannels 13.1 CBS
13.2 MeTV
13.3 Grit TV
Translators 13 (VHF) Tucson
Affiliations CBS (Secondary through 1956)
Owner Raycom Media
(sale to Gray Television pending[1])
(KOLD License Subsidiary, LLC)
First air date January 13, 1953 (1953-01-13)
Call letters' meaning disambiguation from then-sister station KOOL-TV in Phoenix
Sister station(s) KMSB, KTTU
Former callsigns KOPO-TV (1953–1957)
Former channel number(s) Analog:
13 (VHF, 1953–2009)
Former affiliations Secondary:
DuMont (1953–1956)
DT3:
The Tube (until 2007)
Transmitter power 108 kW
Height 1,123 m (3,684 ft)
Facility ID 48663
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

KOLD-TV, virtual channel 13 (UHF digital channel 32), is a CBS-affiliated television station licensed to Tucson, Arizona, United States. The station is owned by Raycom Media, which also operates Fox affiliate KMSB (channel 11, owned by Tegna, Inc.) and MyNetworkTV affiliate KTTU (channel 18, owned by Tucker Broadcasting with advertising sales handled by Tegna) through separate shared services agreements. The three stations share studios on North Business Park Drive on the northwest side of Tucson (near the Casas Adobes neighborhood), which also house the Raycom Design Group,[2] an in-house firm that designs graphics packages for Raycom Media's television stations. KOLD's transmitter is located atop Mount Bigelow. The station also operates a fill-in translator on VHF channel 13, whose transmitter is located atop the Tucson Mountains west of Tucson.

History

On November 13, 1952, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a construction permit to country singer Gene Autry for VHF channel 13 in Tucson. Two months later, on January 13, 1953, the Old Pueblo Television Company, owned by Autry,[3] signed the station on the air as KOPO-TV, the second television station in Arizona, and first in Tucson. Known as "Lucky 13", KOPO played up the "13" angle, coming on the air at 1:13:13 p.m., the 13th second of the 13th minute of the 13th hour of the 13th day of the year.[4] It was a sister station to KOPO radio (AM 1450, now KTZR; and 98.3 FM, now KOHT). The station originally operated from studio facilities located on West Drachman Street close to downtown Tucson.

Channel 13 took the CBS affiliation due to its radio sisters' long affiliation with CBS radio. It also had a secondary DuMont affiliation.[5] In 1957, the station changed its call letters to KOLD-TV, playing off its sister station, KOOL-TV (now KSAZ-TV in Phoenix). KOOL and KOLD remained sister stations until Autry's Golden West Broadcasters sold off KOLD to Universal Communications, the broadcasting arm of the Detroit-based Evening News Association, in 1969.

Ownership changes

Universal Communications was acquired by the Gannett Company as part of Gannett's purchase of the Evening News Association in 1986. Gannett had owned the Tucson Citizen since 1977, and FCC regulations of the time forced Gannett to sell KOLD along with KTVY (now KFOR-TV) in Oklahoma City and WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama to Knight Ridder Broadcasting after just one month of ownership. The News-Press & Gazette Company acquired KOLD in 1989, when Knight Ridder bowed out of broadcasting.

KOLD-TV used this logo from 2004 to 2010.

In 1993, Atlanta-based New Vision Television bought NPG's entire television station group of the time, which included CBS affiliates KOLD, WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi and its semi-satellite WHLT in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, NBC affiliates WSAV-TV in Savannah, Georgia and WECT in Wilmington, North Carolina, and ABC affiliate KSFY-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In 1995, New Vision sold all of its stations to another Atlanta-based company, Ellis Communications (New Vision later rebuilt with smaller-market stations, and later resold the group to LIN TV). Ellis, in turn, was sold the next year to a media group funded by the Retirement Systems of Alabama, who purchased two additional broadcasting groups (AFLAC's broadcasting unit and Federal Broadcasting) several months later. That same year, KOLD relocated its longtime studios on West Drachman Street to their current location on North Business Park Drive on the northwest side of Tucson. The three groups merged in 1997 to form Raycom Media.

Raycom website reformatting

During 2011, the Raycom station Web sites were redesigned to a uniform format (previously, the Raycom station sites were a hodgepodge of different formats that were inherited from their previous owners). Raycom was once Worldnow's largest client in number of station Web sites, but was dwarfed in total market coverage in Spring 2012 by Fox Television Stations, which relaunched its Web sites during that time.

Shared services agreement with KMSB and KTTU

On November 15, 2011, Dallas-based broadcasting company Belo Corporation, then-owner of local Fox affiliate KMSB and MyNetworkTV affiliate KTTU, announced that it would enter into a shared services agreement with Raycom Media beginning in February 2012, resulting in KOLD taking over the two stations' operations and moving their advertising sales department to the KOLD studios. All remaining positions at KMSB and KTTU, including news, engineering and production, were eliminated and master control operations moved from Belo's Phoenix independent station KTVK to KOLD. KOLD also took over operations of KMSB's website. Though FCC rules disallow common ownership of more than two stations in the same market, combined SSA/duopoly operations are permissible (with such operations existing in Youngstown, Ohio, Topeka, Kansas, Duluth, Minnesota, Nashville and Honolulu).[6]

Pending sale to Gray Television

On June 25, 2018, yet another Atlanta-based business, Gray Television, announced it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's 63 existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including KOLD-TV), and Gray's 93 television stations) under the former's corporate umbrella. The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion – in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom – will result in KOLD-TV becoming the first station that Gray had ever acquired in Arizona.[7][1][8][9]

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming[10]
13.11080i16:9KOLD-DTMain KOLD-TV programming / CBS
13.2480i4:3Me TVMeTV[11]
13.316:9GritGrit

Analog-to-digital transition

KOLD-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 13, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[12] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 32, using PSIP to display KOLD-TV's virtual channel as 13 on digital television receivers.

Oddly, a 13.3 subchannel also exists which formerly carried until about April 2011 a message apologizing for the discontinuation of The Tube Music Network, which ended operations in late October 2007. On August 15, 2011, KOLD-TV added MeTV to subchannel 13.2 and moved its "News 13 Now" programming to the previous vacant 13.3.[13] In January 2012, KOLD-TV dropped the 13.3 subchannel, discontinuing the News 13 Now service.[14]

While KOLD's analog signal originated from a transmitter site in the Tucson Mountains west of downtown, KOLD's digital transmitter is at the Mount Bigelow transmitter site to the northeast of the city.

KOLD-TV has a construction permit for a fill-in digital translator on its pre-analog channel 13 which will benefit viewers who live in certain rugged terrain areas that are having difficulty receiving the signal on channel 32.[15]

Programming

As a CBS affiliate, it now clears the entire CBS lineup. The station also airs syndicated programming such as Fix It & Finish It, Flip My Food with Chef Jeff, Crime Watch Daily, RightThisMinute and Entertainment Tonight. It was formerly Tucson's home of The Jerry Springer Show, and in 1998, was one of numerous stations that refused to carry the episode "I Married a Horse", which led to it being pulled before airing.[16]

The station has had an arguably more confusing schedule than most CBS affiliates; as an example, it ran The Price Is Right on a one-day delay when it initially broadcast the current version of the show,[17] and at one point it ran many of CBS' daytime programs out of pattern.[18] In 1971, KOLD picked up the Tucson rights for the syndicated version of The Lawrence Welk Show, which ran on KGUN-TV from its launch in 1956 until ABC cancelled it late in the 1970-71 TV season. KOLD often pre-empted the 7:00 MT or even the 7:30 MT portion of the CBS Saturday night line-up in order to air the Welk show;[19] CBS pressured the station to air it at 6:00 p.m. in the later years of the Welk show's syndicated run.[20] Following Welk's retirement (and the subsequent cancellation of his show) in 1982 (ten years before his death at age 89), KOLD scrambled to find a replacement for his old program, finally settling on a then-new hour-long weekend edition of the increasingly popular syndicated entertainment newsmagazine Entertainment Tonight. (PBS' reruns of the show currently air locally on KUAT.)

News operation

Currently, KOLD-TV broadcasts a total of 29½ hours of local newscasts each week (with 5½ hours on weekdays and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays).

On August 30, 2010, KOLD became the second station in Tucson to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

On November 15, 2011, KMSB owner Belo Corporation announced that due to a lack of advertising revenue, that in February 2012, it will enter into a news share agreement with KOLD and shut down KMSB's in-house news department (KMSB had previously partnered with local NBC affiliate KVOA as well as with Phoenix independent station KTVK for its news operations). KOLD took over production of KMSB's nightly 9 p.m. newscast, as well as launched a two-hour 7-9 a.m. newscast on weekday mornings on that station.[21][22] The KMSB newscasts were upgraded to high definition at that time. KMSB and KOLD also introduced a shared website, Tucson News Now.[23]

References

  1. 1 2 Miller, Mark K. (June 25, 2018). "Gray To Buy Raycom For $3.6 Billion". TVNewsCheck. NewsCheckMedia. Retrieved June 25, 2018.
  2. ↑ Graphic Consolidation, Broadcasting & Cable, August 19, 2007.
  3. ↑ https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-YB/1953-54%20TV/TV-AL-MN-1953-54-TV-YB.pdf
  4. ↑ "KOPO-TV Airs First Telecast With No. 13 In Starring Role", Tucson Daily Citizen, p. 20, 1953-01-14
  5. ↑ "Cable Will Mean More Shows", Tucson Daily Citizen, p. 24, 1953-09-26
  6. ↑ Belo Turning Over KMSB, KTTU To KOLD, TVNewsCheck, November 15, 2011.
  7. ↑ "GRAY AND RAYCOM TO COMBINE IN A $3.6 BILLION TRANSACTION". Raycom Media (Press release). June 25, 2018.
  8. ↑ John Eggerton (June 25, 2018). "Gray Buying Raycom for $3.6B". Broadcasting & Cable. NewBay Media.
  9. ↑ Dade Hayes (June 25, 2018). "Gray Acquiring Raycom For $3.65B, Forming No. 3 Local TV Group". Deadline Hollywood. Penske Media Corporation.
  10. ↑ RabbitEars TV Query for KOLD
  11. ↑ Where to watch Me-TV
  12. ↑ http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-288530A2.pdf
  13. ↑ Where to watch Me-TV: KOLD
  14. ↑ UA Theatre presents...-KOLD News Now gone Retrieved January 20, 2012
  15. ↑ http://licensing.fcc.gov/prod/cdbs/pubacc/Auth_Files/1296902.pdf
  16. ↑ "Springer's latest: 'I Married a Horse'". Cincinnati Post. May 21, 1998. Archived from the original on December 18, 2007.
  17. ↑ http://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?602759-Retro-Tucson-and-Nogales-Arizona-Tuesday-April-29-1975
  18. ↑ http://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?594010-Retro-Tucson-and-Phoenix-December-8-1980&p=5325797&viewfull=1#post5325797
  19. ↑ http://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?602759-Retro-Tucson-and-Nogales-Arizona-Tuesday-April-29-1975&p=5416049&viewfull=1#post5416049
  20. ↑ http://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?602759-Retro-Tucson-and-Nogales-Arizona-Tuesday-April-29-1975&p=5416258&viewfull=1#post5416258
  21. ↑ Belo Shuts Down KMSB News Operations; Dozens of Layoffs Expected, TVSpy, November 15, 2011.
  22. ↑ Fox 11 to lay off news staff, cancel newscast in Feb.
  23. ↑ "Answering Your Questions about Tucson News Now". tucsonnewsnow.com. Raycom Media. Retrieved 3 February 2012.
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