| KWTV-DT | |
|---|---|
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| Oklahoma City, Oklahoma | |
| Branding | News 9 (general/news) OkBlitz.com Sports (sports) |
| Slogan | Making A Difference |
| Channels | Digital: 9 (VHF) 39 (UHF; STA; physical RF), 9.1 (via PSIP) |
| Affiliations | CBS |
| Owner | Griffin Communications, LLC (Griffin Licensing, LLC) |
| First air date | December 20, 1953 |
| Call letters’ meaning | World's Tallest Video |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: 9 (VHF, 1953-2009) Digital: 39 (UHF, 2003-2009) |
| Transmitter Power | 62.2 kW |
| Height | 465 m |
| Facility ID | 25382 |
| Transmitter Coordinates | 35°32′58″N 97°29′49″W / 35.54944°N 97.49694°W |
| Website | www.news9.com |
KWTV-DT, commonly referred to as "News 9" is the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. During the May 2006 sweeps period KWTV was the highest-rated late newscast in the United States. It has long been one of the strongest CBS affiliates in the country. KWTV is owned by Griffin Communications of Oklahoma City.
KWTV has two buildings in the Oklahoma City Metro: one, which houses its main news studio, master control, sales office and its transmitter, located at North Kelley Avenue in Oklahoma City; the other, which houses a secondary studio, located in the Bricktown district of downtown Oklahoma City.
The station broadcasts its digital signal on VHF channel 9 and under Special Temporary Authority on UHF channel 39. KWTV can be seen on cable channel 10 in standard definition and channel 709 in high definition on Cox Oklahoma City, and on cable channel 9 on other Cox systems in Central Oklahoma. The station is also available to customers on DirecTV and Dish Network within the Oklahoma City market.
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KWTV went on the air December 20, 1953. It was owned by grocery magnate John Griffin and his brother-in-law Jimmy Leake along with KOMA (now KOKC. According to Griffin Communications' president David Griffin, his father John noticed while driving around Oklahoma City that all the homes in the area had outdoor television antennas in order to receive the city's (and state's) first television station, WKY-TV (channel 4, now KFOR-TV). It was then that Griffin decided to expand into television and decided to apply for a television license with the FCC. According to longtime employee Spec Hart, the first thing broadcast on KWTV were employees mentioning their name and which department they were in at the station.
The station has been Oklahoma City's CBS affiliate throughout its history, owing to KOMA's long affiliation with CBS radio. The Griffins could have called their station KOMA-TV, but opted instead to call it KWTV (for World's Tallest Video) after its then under-construction tower, which was to be the tallest in the world at 1,577 feet. Channel 9 activated its current tower in early 1954.
Griffin and Leake bought out their minority partners in 1963; Leake sold his interest to Griffin in the early 1970s. Griffin retired in 1990, and turned over control to his son David. It is on eof the few stations in the country that has had the same call letters, owner, primary network affiliation and channel number throughout its history.
On January 26, 2001, KWTV sports anchor Bill Teegins along with nine members of the Oklahoma State University basketball team were killed when their plane went down in Colorado after a basketball game against the University of Colorado. Teegins long doubled as the radio voice of Oklahoma State football and basketball. A memorial has been erected at the crash site, along with a statue of a kneeling cowboy on the Stillwater OSU campus.
In 2001, the station embarked on a media partnership with The Oklahoman newspaper which included the merger of both their websites. That collaboration ended in early 2008. Incidentally, The Oklahoma Publishing Company, owner of The Oklahoman, put rival station KFOR-TV on the air in 1949 as WKY-TV and owned it until 1976. KWTV also partners with Tulsa station KOTV, also owned by Griffin since their acquisition of the station in 1999 from A.H. Belo Corporation. The two stations are the only locally-owned stations in Oklahoma, and often share news stories. They also collaborate on Sunday night extended sports coverage branded as the "Oklahoma Sports Blitz."
In Early November 2006, KWTV began using a brand-new, state-of-the-art news set, specially designed for high-definition broadcasting that could be implemented in the future. The set was designed and built by FX Group (the same group that built KOCO's set three years earlier).
KWTV-DT broadcasts on digital channel 9.
Digital channels
| Channel | Name | Programming |
|---|---|---|
| 9.1 | KWTV-DT | main KWTV/CBS programming |
| 9.2 | KWTV-DT2 | simulcast of KWTV programming |
KWTV and KOTV have requested to transmit only digitally, effective February 17, 2009.[1]
After the analog television shutdown has completed, KWTV-DT returned to channel 9. In October 2009, due to reception problems in certain areas of Central Oklahoma, the station was granted permission via special temporary authorization by the FCC to operate an alternate signal on its former digital channel assignment of channel 39, using the virtual channel "9.2".
On March 9, 2010, the FCC issued a Report & Order, approving KWTV's channel change from channel 9 to channel 39.[2] The station would now file a minor change application, stating the channel move. Once this filing gets the grant from the FCC, plus a License to Cover, then KWTV can terminate operations on channel 9 and operate solely on channel 39 permanently.
KWTV "firsts" in the Oklahoma City market and/or nationwide:
KWTV currently carries all CBS network programming, with the exception of The Saturday Early Show, one of a handful of CBS stations that carries The Early Show only on weekdays (KWTV airs a Saturday morning newscast instead). Current syndicated programming on KWTV includes Live with Regis and Kelly, Entertainment Tonight, Seinfeld, and The Doctors, and it is also the longtime Oklahoma City home for the syndicated agricultural newscast AgDay. KWTV has the distinction of being one of the few stations running entertainment news shows after late night network shows (The Insider and Extra air after The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, followed by an encore run of Entertainment Tonight, which also airs after the 6PM newscast).
KWTV (along with Tulsa sister station KOTV) also airs the state tourism program Integris Health's Discover Oklahoma on Saturday evenings before primetime. The station aired Jeopardy! until 1998 (it has since moved to KFOR-TV), but ironically it acquired Live with Regis and Kelly (then Live with Regis and Kathie Lee) from KFOR-TV in 1995.
Since 2000, KWTV has broadcast three Oklahoma State Cowboys basketball games per season, usually airing on a Wednesday or Saturday, in addition to airing CBS' coverage of NCAA basketball.
KWTV currently broadcasts 35.5 hours of news per week, more than any station in the Oklahoma City market. KWTV has a partnership with Tulsa sister station KOTV (also a CBS affiliate, owned by Griffin), showing news stories from KOTV during evening newscasts, as well as a KOTV-produced news insert during KWTV's 4PM newscast.
In 1971, after the FCC issued the Prime Time Access Rule that cut the three broadcast networks at the time (CBS, NBC and ABC) prime time schedules by 30 minutes each night from 3.5 hours to 3 hours, KWTV's 6 p.m. broadcast of Newsroom 9 debuted as the first 60-minute newscast in the Oklahoma City market, broadcast from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. (a format similar to KFOR-TV's current 6:00 p.m. news block). The newscast was split into two separate 30 minute broadcasts at 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in 1976, with the CBS Evening News sandwiched in between at 5:30 p.m. From 1966 to 1971, KWTV's newscast was titled Eyewitness News, a moniker later used by rival ABC affiliate KOCO.
While the Ogle family is a staple of KFOR-TV dating back to the 1950s with Jack Ogle (and continuing to this day with Kent and Kevin Ogle), KWTV's co-anchor of the 5, 6 and 10PM newscasts is Kelly Ogle, whom since 2003 has also had his own op-ed segment titled My Two Cents, similar to the aforementioned commentaries from Duane Harm, airing weeknights during the 10PM newscast. Chief meteorologist Gary England, morning and noon anchor and former sports reporter/anchor Ed Murray and reporter Gan Matthews have had the longest tenures of any of the station's on-air news staff, with England having been with the station since 1972 and the latter two having been with the station since the early 1980s. In the 1990s, KWTV attempted its own investigative unit called "The Investigators", in the form of the investigative reports on many CBS and Fox affiliates. These segments had included reports highlighting unsafe conditions at Metro-area restaurants and area doctors who have committed malpractice. The station continues to do periodic investigative reports to this day; and also features an investigative segment called "Consumer Watch", reported by 5PM anchor Amanda Taylor, which is similar to KFOR's longtime consumer/investigative segment "In Your Corner".
KWTV has gone through several different on-air branding schemes including Newsscope, Eyewitness News, Big 9 News and Newsline 9, and finally the present NEWS9, retaining the current logo despite several graphics package changes. KWTV has used Image News by Gari Communications as its news music package since 1997 and currently uses the "Series 2" version (ironically, some stations owned by Hearst-Argyle Television, owner of KOCO-TV, had used Image News (with others using Gari's The B Package) for their news package until 2004, but because KWTV had used Image News, KOCO did not use it).
KWTV was the first Oklahoma television station to use a helicopter for daily news-gathering (launched one day before KOCO's Sky5), Ranger 9 (replaced in 2006 by SkyNews9 HD, a Bell 407 helicopter), which became installed with a camera below the nose of the helicopter dubbed as EagleVision in 2000 and the first to use one equipped with a High-Definition Video camera as of early 2006. However, images from the helicopter are not currently broadcast in HD, as the station's newscasts have yet to make the transition.
In 2001, the station embarked on a media partnership with The Oklahoman newspaper which included the merger of both their websites. That collaboration ended in early 2008. Incidentally, The Oklahoma Publishing Company, owner of The Oklahoman, put rival station KFOR-TV on the air in 1949 as WKY-TV and owned it until 1976. KWTV also partners with Tulsa station KOTV-DT, also owned by Griffin since their acquisition of the station in 1999 from A.H. Belo Corporation. The two stations collaborate on Sunday night extended sports coverage branded as the "Oklahoma Sports Blitz."
In early November 2006, KWTV began using a brand-new, state-of-the-art news set, specially designed for high-definition broadcasting that could be implemented in the future. The set was designed and built by FX Group (the same group that built KOCO's set three years earlier).
During the February 2010 sweeps period, KWTV brought in anchors who formerly worked at the station to anchor the 4 p.m. newscast while regular anchor Melissa Maynarich is on maternity leave, with former weeknight anchors Jenifer Reynolds, Jennifer Eve, Angela Buckelew and Tammy Payne substituting.
The station is well known for placing a significant emphasis on weather. Famous for its severe weather coverage with chief meteorologist Gary England, KWTV is known for having the top technology in the country for storm coverage. Previously working as a hydrologist in Louisiana before joining the station, Oklahoma born-and-raised England is Oklahoma's longest-serving local television meteorologist, having worked at the station since 1972 (he assumed the mantle of the longest-serving meteorologist in the state—previously held by former WKY-TV/KTVY/KFOR-TV meteorologist Jim Williams, who worked at that station from 1958 to 1990—in 2004, when he reached the 32-year mark at the station).
In 1973, KWTV installed the first weather radar in the country for television. Shortly after it was installed, the radar was utilized by Chief Meteorlogist Gary England on May 24 of that year during a televised severe weather alert of a tornado warning for Canadian County following the sighting of a damaging F4 tornado near the small town of Union City which resulted in extensive damage.[5] An original film of that televised warning from 1973 is often still used today in Channel 9's promos of England and its severe weather coverage.
In 1981, the first commercial Doppler radar in the nation was installed at KWTV at the recommendation of meteorologist Gary England.[6] England believed the radar would help him better forecast the severe weather that often affects Oklahoma. Shortly after KWTV introduced its first Doppler radar, a tornado located in Caddo County near the town of Binger was indicated on Doppler radar during a live cut-in by Chief Meteorologist Gary England and at the same time, a live shot of that tornado was broadcast during that cut-in from a cameraman stationed inside KWTV's news helicopter, Ranger 9, which was flown to the scene. In 1986, England helped develop the first weather alert system in the country for broadcast television called First Warning, and in 2000, KWTV was among the first to introduce software for the PC that alerted the user to both severe weather alerts and breaking news in the form of I-News.
Famous for its severe weather coverage with meteorologist Gary England, KWTV is known for having the top technology in the country for storm coverage. In 1986, when a devastating tornado tore through the northern Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond, Channel 9 and England were credited for their advanced warning efforts resulting in relatively few injuries and no casualties despite the millions of dollars in damage. On May 3, 1999, Gary England went on the air to cover the F5 Tornado that damaged much of central Oklahoma from Chickasha to the southeastern portion of the Oklahoma City metro, including the suburbs of Moore, Del City, and Midwest City. There were many other storms that day as well, the final death toll was 44, though it is believed that it would have been much higher without the advance warning provided by Gary and the rest of the KWTV weather staff.
KWTV was the first station to produce tornado documentaries of the June 13th, 1998 Oklahoma City tornadoes, the 1998 October Tornado Outbreak and the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak.
From the 1980s until 2006, England and the NEWS9 weather team had presented a series of programs each spring and summer season titled "Those Terrible Twisters" to local communities throughout Oklahoma in which they visit with viewers and provide lots of information regarding tornado safety precautions and promote the station's efforts in providing up-to-date severe weather coverage to Oklahoma. The station also produced half-hour "Those Terrible Twisters" specials airing each spring on KWTV, featuring tornado footage shot by KWTV Storm Trackers (interspersed with behind-the-scenes video of KWTV storm coverage) along with tornado safety information. In 1998, KWTV was one of the first stations in the country to introduce a computer system (originally known as MAX until 2003) to display future weather conditions in exact hour-by-hour detail. KWTV was the first station to produce tornado documentaries of the June 13th, 1998 Oklahoma City tornadoes, the October 1998 Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak and the May 1999 Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak. During the first of the three tornado events, a camera on the station's transmission tower caught live on the air, the collapse of an auxiliary tower belonging to KFOR-TV and its former radio sister WKY-AM.
On May 8, 2003, when an F3 tornado hit northern Oklahoma City, KWTV tested a new Doppler radar titled MOAR (for Massive Output Arrayed Radar; though Gary England colloquially referred to it as the "Mother of All Radars"). The radar has the ability to detect a tornado's path down to street-level. After the radar was put into regular use the following year, GPS tracking was added to display the location of the Storm Tracker units. In February 2007, KWTV launched another radar named "Storm Monitor" (now known by its standard brand name of ESP (Early Storm Protection)). The "MesoStrengthIndex" determines the strength of a mesocyclone in a severe storm and its potential of producing a tornado. If the "MesoStrengthIndex" level is over 5,000 and the "ProbabilityofTornado" percentage is over 30%, there is a significant chance of a tornado eventually occurring. The station also operates two other radars: VIPIR, which has been in use since 1999, and Doppler 9000XL, which has been in use since 1985.
KWTV has long held a rivalry with KFOR-TV for the highest-rated newscast in the Oklahoma City area. ABC affiliate KOCO (channel 5) has become dominant with its newscasts in the 5 and 6 pm timeslots. As of May 2007, the station's 10:00 pm newscast was currently the top-rated newscast (per Nielsen Media Research) in the nation and tied with KFOR in the mornings. In late 2008 Nielsen Media Research came forward to admit a mistake in KFOR's numbers as they were not recording the digital feed correctly. This placed KFOR back ahead of KWTV eventually leading morning, noon and night broadcasts.
(as of March 16, 2010)
Current Anchors
Reporters/Contributors
NEWS9 Weather Team
In addition to providing forecasts on KWTV, the NEWS9 Weather Team also provides forecasts for KOKC, KOMA, KMGL, and KRXO radio, and the Oklahoma News Network family of radio stations.
NEWS9 StormTracker Spotter Unit
NEWS9 Sports
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^[D] - Deceased
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This film, television or video-related list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it with reliably sourced additions.KWTV's studios and transmitter are located at 7401 North Kelley Avenue, just across the street from the studios of the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority. KWTV's studio was revamped in 2006 and fitted with a new set built by the FX Group.
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