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KQTV

St. Joseph, Missouri United States
Channels	Digital: 7 (VHF) Virtual: 2
Branding	KQ2
Programming
Affiliations	2.1: ABC 2.2: Antenna TV 2.3: Ion Television
Ownership
Owner	Heartland Media (St. Joseph TV License Company, LLC)
History
First air date	September 27, 1953 (71 years ago) (1953-09-27)
Former call signs	KFEQ-TV (1953–1969)
Former channel number(s)	Analog: 2 (VHF; 1953–2009) Digital: 53 (UHF; 2003–2009)
Former affiliations	CBS (1953–1967) DuMont (secondary, 1953–1955) ABC (secondary, 1956–1967)
Call sign meaning	Variation of the Q from former KFEQ-TV call sign
Technical information
Licensing authority	FCC
Facility ID	20427
ERP	40 kW
HAAT	179 m (587 ft)
Transmitter coordinates	39°46′12″N 94°47′53.4″W / 39.77000°N 94.798167°W / 39.77000; -94.798167
Links
Public license information	Public file LMS
Website	www.kq2.com

KQTV (channel 2) is a television station in St. Joseph, Missouri, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Heartland Media. The station's studios and transmitter are located on Faraon Street in eastern St. Joseph.

KQTV went on the air as KFEQ-TV, the sister station to KFEQ radio, on September 27, 1953.

Although KQTV serves as the primary ABC affiliate for the St. Joseph market, the network's Kansas City affiliate KMBC-TV (channel 9) is considered an alternate ABC affiliate for the area as its transmitter provides a city-grade over-the-air signal in St. Joseph proper, and is carried alongside KQTV by some local cable providers.

History

Early years

St. Joseph radio station KFEQ applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on April 17, 1948, for permission to construct a new television station on channel 13. This application was still pending when the FCC, in October 1948, imposed a freeze on new TV station construction permits. In the shuffling of channel allocations during the freeze, St. Joseph lost channel 13 but picked up channel 2 from Kansas City. The FCC lifted the freeze beginning in April 1952, and KFEQ amended its application to specify the new channel. KFEQ-TV received its construction permit on October 15, 1952. By the start of 1953, construction was underway on the station's studios on a plot at 40th and Faraon streets in St. Joseph, which would also house a 750-foot (229 m) transmission tower. Tower work set back completion of the station because structural steel components were delayed; the tower sections did not make it to St. Joseph until the start of July, and work moved slower than anticipated, causing an August 15 projected start date to be missed.

KFEQ-TV began broadcasting on September 27, 1953. It was an affiliate of CBS and the DuMont Television Network. For viewers in the St. Joseph–Kansas City region, it was the second station to sign on that day, alongside KCMO-TV (now KCTV) on channel 5 from Kansas City. The DuMont network ceased distributing programming in 1955.

Barton Pitts, founder of KFEQ-TV and owner of the morning St. Joseph Gazette and afternoon St. Joseph News-Press newspapers, opted to exit broadcasting for health reasons in 1955. He sold the KFEQ stations to the Midland Broadcasting Company, whose owners included actor Bing Crosby and John Fetzer, for $700,000. During its ownership, the channel 2 studios were expanded in size. Midland owned the stations for less than two years before selling to the Fine family, a theater operator and former owner of WFIE in Evansville, Indiana, in 1957; the transaction was motivated by Midland's investors' recent acquisition of KCOP-TV in Los Angeles.

After a 1960 attempt to sell the KFEQ stations and KLIK in Jefferson City to music man Connie B. Gay fell through, the Fines sold the properties to Mid-States Broadcasting, headed by John P. McGoff, in 1963. In 1967, KFEQ-TV switched affiliations from CBS to ABC, with KCMO-TV serving as the nearest CBS affiliate to St. Joseph.

McGoff sold the KFEQ stations to separate owners over the course of 1968. Channel 2 went to ISC Industries for $3.1 million. ISC—a diversified firm based in Kansas City with interests ranging from truck manufacturing to pen production and securities—pledged to upgrade the station to allow it to broadcast local color programming. The sale required one or the other of KFEQ radio and television to change call signs; the radio station kept KFEQ and channel 2 became KQTV on February 1, 1969. As KFEQ-TV had been informally known as "The Q", the new call sign retained brand equity from the old. After ISC closed on the purchase in July 1969, the company expanded into radio by buying two radio stations in the Kansas City area.

Amaturo and Elba ownership and Topeka expansion attempts

After three years, ISC opted to exit broadcasting entirely and sold KQTV, plus FM radio stations KGRV in St. Louis and KLYX in Houston, to Amaturo Group in a sale completed in 1973.

In January 1976, Amaturo Group applied to build channel 43 in Topeka, Kansas, as a semi-satellite of KQTV. At the time, Topeka only had two commercial stations and no full-time ABC affiliate, a void that KQTV hoped to fill by combining its existing schedule with separate news programs for the Topeka area. The application was opposed by Topeka's NBC affiliate, KTSB, which believed that because Topeka had two full-line television stations, a satellite was not permissible and constituted unfair competition. The FCC concurred in May 1978 and dismissed the channel 43 application, finding there was too much signal overlap between the proposed Topeka station and KQTV, even with the proposed local program content for the new Topeka service. KQTV instead fell back on another application it had filed to construct a taller tower, which would bring Topeka and Kansas City into its primary coverage area but was protested by the Kansas City stations.

Amaturo Group sold KQTV in 1979 to Elba Development Corporation of Rochester, New York, owned by the Glazer family, so it could pursue larger station transactions without being at the limit of VHF television stations ownable by one group once it bought four other stations, revealed to be the Nebraska Television Network in central and western Nebraska. Elba refiled the tower application, which proposed a new, 2,000-foot (610 m) mast at Potter, Kansas. The relocation plan was denied by the FCC in 1983 because, in spite of adding 465,000 people to KQTV's coverage area, the move would have stripped slightly over 10,000 people of the only TV service they reliably received. In 1986, KQTV tried again to build a tall tower in Kansas.

In 1990, Elba sold KQTV, along with WRBL in Columbus, Georgia, and WTWO in Terre Haute, Indiana, to TCS Television Partners for $56 million. The managing general partner of TCS Television Partners, Martin Pompadur, decided to put the stations on the market in 1994; while the station was not sold then, TCS tried again in 1996.

Nexstar Broadcasting Group acquired KQTV and WTWO in 1997. At the time, Nexstar's only television property was WYOU in Scranton, Pennsylvania, but the firm had been founded by Perry Sook to acquire other mid-market TV stations.

Heartland Media ownership

Nexstar announced on June 13, 2016, that it would sell KQTV and four other stations to Heartland Media, through its USA Television MidAmerica Holdings joint venture with MSouth Equity Partners, for $115 million. The sale was required as part of Nexstar's planned merger with Media General to comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership caps. The sale was completed on January 17, 2017.

Aborted sale to News-Press & Gazette Company

On April 4, 2019, the St. Joseph-based News-Press & Gazette Company announced it would acquire KQTV from Heartland Media for an initially undisclosed price. Pending FCC approval, the purchase of KQTV would result in News-Press & Gazette maintaining a broadcasting and print monopoly in St. Joseph, as the company already owns the St. Joseph News-Press, three major-network-affiliated competitors of KQTV (Fox affiliate KNPN-LD (channel 26), NBC affiliate KNPG-LD (channel 21) and CBS affiliate KCJO-LD (channel 30), plus a 24-hour local news channel News-Press NOW).

While it would constitute a de facto quadropoly, the purchase may not violate FCC broadcast ownership rules as KQTV is a full-power station while KNPN, KNPG and KCJO are all low-power stations. (FCC local ownership rules restrict a single broadcasting company from owning more than two of the four highest-rated television stations in the same market, but applies the rule exclusively to full-power stations due to their broader signal reach.) However, the likelihood of concentrating St. Joseph's print and broadcast media outlets under one entity, given the DMA's small size, could subject the acquisition to potential antitrust issues once the deal undergoes review by the Justice Department. The FCC did not act on the sale application before the agreement's expiration on September 30, 2019, leading NPG to terminate its bid that October; the sale was dismissed on October 16, 2019. KQTV was not included in the subsequent sale of most of Heartland Media's other stations to Allen Media.

Market status

St. Joseph ranks 201st out of 210 media markets designated by Nielsen Media Research; it serves several rural portions of northeastern Kansas and northwestern Missouri. However, during the analog era, KQTV provided at least grade B signal coverage to much of Kansas City and Topeka; the channel 2 signal traveled a long distance under normal atmospheric conditions. Its digital signal still has considerable penetration in both cities despite operating on a short transmitter tower. In turn, stations from Kansas City, Topeka and Omaha are receivable over-the-air in portions of the St. Joseph market and are also available on some cable and satellite providers: Suddenlink, DirecTV and Dish Network carry Kansas City's KSMO-TV as the area's default MyNetworkTV affiliate and KCPT as the area's default PBS member station. Kansas City's WDAF-TV (channel 4), which was displaced as the default Fox affiliate by KNPN-LD on Suddenlink and Dish Network when that station signed on, continued to be available on DirecTV until June 30, 2012, when it was replaced by KNPN. As a result of the heavy signal overlap between the Kansas City and St. Joseph area stations, St. Joseph could be considered a sub-market of the adjacent Kansas City market.

TBN owned-and-operated station KTAJ-TV (channel 16), which mainly serves Kansas City, became the second television station licensed to St. Joseph when it signed-on in October 1986. However, KQTV remained the market's only local commercial station until June 2, 2012, when the News-Press & Gazette Company (owned by KQTV's one-time owners, the Bradley family) signed on KNPN-LD as the area's Fox affiliate. News-Press & Gazette (which also owns local news and weather channel News-Press NOW) later signed on KBJO-LD (now KNPG-LD) as the area's CW+ (now NBC) affiliate in March 2013 and KNPG-LD (now KCJO-LD) as a Telemundo (now CBS) affiliate in 2014.

Programming

KQTV runs the entire ABC network schedule. Previously, the station did not carry ABC's overnight news program World News Now; this was because it was one of the few remaining American television stations that signed off during overnight hours, from 1:35 to 5 a.m.

KFEQ-TV's early personalities included Grace Crawford and her pre-1963 predecessor Marge Miner, who had hosted daytime talk shows during the 1950s and 1960s that were aimed at a female audience, among which included Panorama. Marge Miner was a 1959 recipient of the McCall's magazine Golden Mike Award, a national award given to outstanding women in broadcasting, for her series of programs on cerebral palsy.

The station also broadcast live professional wrestling matches that were held in the KFEQ/KQTV studios for many years, which aired after the late newscast on Saturday nights. Originally named Wrestling with Bob, named for the host Bob Whyte. The program was later named Big 2 Wrestling, featured a recording of "The Wrestling Polka" at the start of every broadcast; local business owners would come to ringside and talk about their services between matches. Sometimes, the live commercial chats occurred between falls of matches, while losing wrestlers recovered in the background.

The station featured a live Saturday afternoon record-hop program, which debuted on April 14, 1957, Let's Dance which featured local high school or college students dancing in the TV studio with music provided the week's current Top 10 records and live performances from local bands. The popular show ran until 1971. The show hosts were local TV and radio personalities, Allen Shaw, Bill Foster, Danny Taylor and Jim Connors.

During its early years as an exclusive affiliate of ABC, the station occasionally preempted network programs; most notably, KQTV originally declined The Brady Bunch, airing a local country music program in its Friday night timeslot, before adding the sitcom halfway through its first season (KMBC in the nearby Kansas City market similarly preempted the first season of The Brady Bunch in its entirety); the program was carried instead on Kansas City–based independent station KCIT-TV (channel 50, now KPXE-TV).

News operation

KQTV presently broadcasts 18+1⁄2 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 3+1⁄2 hours each weekday and a half-hour each on Saturdays and Sundays); unlike most ABC affiliates in the Central Time Zone, it does not carry a midday newscast on weekdays or an early evening newscast on weekends. The station has a high turnover rate among its on-air anchoring and reporting staff, with most eventually moving on to larger markets. Gordie Hershiser, brother of former Cy Young Award winner Orel Hershiser, once served as a sports anchor at the station, succeeding longtime sports director John Baccala.

On August 24, 2007, KQTV marked long-time meteorologist Mike Bracciano's 20th anniversary with the station. Current and former station personnel paid tribute to Bracciano during an hour-long broadcast originating from East Hills Mall. Among those appearing in person or via taped message included Baccala, and former news anchors John Bassford and Nancy Lewis (the latter who, along with Bracciano, served as the original hosts of the station's Live at Five newscast, when it premiered in the early 1990s).

Notable former staff

• Kim Khazei, now with WHDH/WLVI in Boston
• Miles O'Brien, later with CNN and PBS
• Roseanne Tellez, now with WFLD in Chicago

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

On March 1, 2018, subchannel 2.2 went live and began carrying Antenna TV.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KQTV began broadcasting its digital signal at 1,000 kW on UHF channel 53 in 2003. Since that allocation was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, it seemed likely that KQTV would relocate its digital signal to VHF channel 2. However, low-band VHF signals are more prone to electromagnetic interference from atmospheric conditions than higher channel numbers. For these reasons when the station discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on February 18, 2009, the station's digital signal moved to VHF channel 7, using virtual channel 2.

References

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• TV Guide (1970–1972)

External links

• Official website

• Heartland Media
• 1953 establishments in Missouri
• American Broadcasting Company affiliates
• Antenna TV affiliates
• Ion Television affiliates
• Television channels and stations established in 1953
• Television stations in St. Joseph, Missouri