KARE (TV)


KARE, virtual and VHF digital channel 11, is an NBC-affiliated television station licensed to Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States and serving the Twin Cities television market. The station is owned by Tegna Inc. KARE's studios are located on Olson Memorial Highway in Golden Valley, and its transmitter is located at the Telefarm site in Shoreview, Minnesota.

History

Early years

Channel 11 signed on the air in 1953 with its broadcast hours split between WTCN-TV in Minneapolis and WMIN-TV in St. Paul; the WTCN-TV callsign was originally used by the Minneapolis-licensed channel 4 from that station's sign-on in 1949 to 1952; channel 4 changed to WCCO-TV when, in August 1952, Twin Cities Newspapers divested its broadcast properties. The television station was sold to a new company, Midwest Radio and Television, which was created for the purchase, with CBS as a minority partner. CBS at the time owned WCCO radio; with the purchase of the TV station, channel 4's calls were unified with the radio station. Meanwhile, the Twin Cities Newspapers radio properties, WTCN and WTCN-FM, were sold to the Minnesota Television Service Corporation headed by Saint Paul businessman Robert Butler, a former ambassador to Cuba and Australia. Soon afterward, Butler's group and the owners of WMIN radio both applied for the new channel 11 construction permit. Because the Federal Communications Commission had a backlog of contested licenses, the two stations worked out an agreement for a joint application.
The FCC approved this deal and WTCN-TV/WMIN-TV went on the air on September 1, 1953, as an ABC affiliate. The station also carried a secondary affiliation with DuMont. During the late 1950s, the station also was briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Under the agreement, the stations shared a transmitter mounted atop the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis, alternating use every two hours. WTCN-TV's studios were in the Calhoun Beach Hotel in Minneapolis near Lake Calhoun, while WMIN-TV was based in the Hamm Building in downtown Saint Paul. On April 3, 1955, with FCC approval, WMIN sold its share of channel 11 and WTCN-TV took over the frequency full-time. On the same day, the WTCN stations were sold to the Bitner Group. Two years later, the Bitner group merged with Time-Life.
The early draw of WTCN-TV was its children's programs that featured characters like J. P. Patches, Skipper Daryl, Captain 11, Sergeant Scotty, Wrangler Steve and the most popular of all, Casey Jones, a train engineer played by Roger Awsumb and accompanied by his sidekick, Joe the Cook, succeeded by Roundhouse Rodney. The Lunch With Casey show originated on WMIN-TV and was on the channel 11 schedule from 1954 until 1972.
On April 16, 1961, KMSP-TV took the ABC affiliation and WTCN-TV became an independent station. As a traditional general entertainment station, channel 11 offered cartoons, sitcoms, old movies, Minnesota Twins baseball, locally produced shows, news and drama series. It was also home to the Twin Cities' first prime-time newscast, with its 10:00 p.m. newscast moving to 9:00 p.m. Chris-Craft Industries bought WTCN-TV in 1964; WTCN radio was sold later that year by Time-Life to Buckley Broadcasting and became WWTC. Under Chris-Craft, channel 11 modernized its newscasts; up to that time, they were still shot on film.

Metromedia enters the picture

announced its purchase of WTCN-TV from Chris-Craft in July 1971. Upon taking control of the station's operations in June 1972 Metromedia made channel 11 its fourth independent outlet, falling in line with the company's stations in New York City, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.. The new owners announced plans to upgrade channel 11's lineup of acquired programming as well as make an investment in news and public affairs. WTCN-TV also began using a new tower at the Telefarm site in Shoreview, Minnesota; the new transmitter increased the station's broadcasting range significantly, boosting its secondary coverage to. In 1973, after 20 years at the Calhoun Beach Hotel, WTCN-TV moved to its current studio in Golden Valley. The address of the building was originally 441 Boone Avenue North, but is now known as 8811 Highway 55 —the 11 corresponding to the station's channel.

The switch to NBC

In the mid-1970s, ABC—then enjoying its first run as America's top-rated television network—began looking for stronger affiliates across the country, and largely did so at the expense of third-place NBC. ABC surprised the industry in August 1978 by announcing it had signed an affiliation deal with KSTP-TV, ending that station's 30-year relationship with NBC. NBC then chose to affiliate with WTCN-TV after rejecting an offer from former ABC affiliate KMSP-TV. The three-way switch occurred on March 5, 1979, making WTCN-TV Metromedia's first station affiliated with the NBC network.
As part of its new network affiliation status, Metromedia promised further upgrades to WTCN-TV's programming as well as a major investment in the news department. Channel 11's schedule in its first few weeks as an NBC outlet was a hodgepodge of network programs and syndicated fare the station was still obligated to run, such as Spider-Man, Tom and Jerry, I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The PTL Club; Metromedia also recently acquired for WTCN-TV the Twin Cities' rights to Happy Days, M*A*S*H, and The Waltons. But as NBC's struggles in primetime continued into the 1980s, channel 11 struggled also. The station fell to fourth place in the ratings–behind even KMSP-TV, which replaced WTCN-TV as the Twin Cities' largest independent station and one of the most prominent in the upper Midwest. Metromedia would later sell about half of WTCN's cartoons and syndicated programming inventory to KMSP-TV. The station's newscasts were an even bigger concern as they drew single-digit audience shares, far behind both WCCO-TV and KSTP-TV.
In August 1982, having grown tired of the sustained losses, Metromedia announced it was selling channel 11 to the then-Rochester, New York-based Gannett Company. Gannett took over WTCN-TV in March 1983 and made some immediate changes in the station's on-air look, and prominently made a significant investment in the station's news department. The anchor team of Paul Magers and Diana Pierce was hired that September and led the station's 10:00 p.m. newscasts for 20 years, which is a record among Twin Cities news anchors. The station's "Backyard" weather studio was also launched in 1983, coinciding with the arrival of meteorologist Paul Douglas in May.

KARE (1986–present)

On July 4, 1985, Gannett rebranded Channel 11 as WUSA, but after the company purchased WDVM-TV in Washington, D.C. the same year, it transferred the call letters to that station on July 4, 1986, and changed channel 11's call sign on the same day to the current KARE that sounds like "care".
, 2006.
On April 27, 2006, KARE became the first station in the Twin Cities to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition. As part of this transition, the station completely replaced its news set, originally built in 1986 and updated in the 1990s, with a new state-of-the-art backdrop. All newscasts continued to be presented in 4:3 as well as simulcast in 16:9 until the federally mandated digital transition on June 12, 2009.
Around the first week of October 2012, Gannett entered a dispute against Dish Network regarding compensation fees and Dish's AutoHop commercial-skip feature on its Hopper digital video recorders. Gannett ordered that Dish discontinue AutoHop on the account that it is affecting advertising revenues for KARE. Gannett threatened to suspend KARE's contract with the satellite provider should the skirmish continue beyond October 7 and Dish and Gannett fail to reach an agreement. The two parties eventually reached an agreement after extending the deadline for a few hours.
On June 29, 2015, the Gannett Company split in two, with one side specializing in print media and the other side specializing in broadcast and digital media. KARE was retained by the latter company, named Tegna.

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
11.11080iKARE-DTMain KARE programming / NBC
11.2480iCourtTVCourt TV
11.3480iCrimeTrue Crime Network
11.4480iQuestQuest
11.5480iCircleCircle

KARE's 11.2 digital subchannel, branded as KARE WX NOW, originally ran programming from NBC Weather Plus from 2005 until the network shut down in November 2008, and then ran an automated version of the network called NBC Plus until it became an affiliate of WeatherNation TV in 2011.

Programming

As the NBC affiliate for the Minneapolis–St. Paul market, KARE 11 clears NBC programming on its primary channel; however, in its early years with NBC, WTCN delayed The Tonight Show in order to carry back-to-back reruns of M*A*S*H and later Cheers. A locally produced children's program, Lunch with Casey, is remembered as being one of the unique contributions of the station. The show, featuring Roger Awsumb as Casey Jones, ran from 1954 until the end of 1972, with a brief reappearance in 1974. Sidekicks on the show included Joe the Cook, played by Chris Wedes, and Roundhouse Rodney, played by Lynn Dwyer. Wedes went on to play the clown J.P. Patches in Seattle, Washington, credited as partial inspiration for Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons.
The short-lived game show Let's Bowl had some episodes air on the station in the late '90s before it was remade for Comedy Central. In January 2005, a local public access cable television program debuted called The Show to Be Named Later...; it is described as "The first sports talk, comedy, and variety show", somewhat of a cross between Late Night with Conan O'Brien and Fox Sports Net's The Best Damn Sports Show Period. A weekly show for teenagers called The Whatever Show and an outdoors program known as Minnesota Bound have both aired on the station for about a decade. Former Minnesota Twin Kent Hrbek also has hosted his own outdoors show Kent Hrbek Outdoors on the station since 2004, but in the fall of 2008, Kent Hrbek Outdoors was moved over to rival Fox affiliate KMSP.

Syndicated programming

programs broadcast by KARE include Inside Edition, Rachael Ray, Entertainment Tonight and Jeopardy!. All of these programs are distributed by CBS Television Distribution; the latter is co-distributed by Sony Pictures Television.
For decades, both Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune aired on rival station WCCO-TV. However, in 1996, WCCO shifted Jeopardy! from 9:30 a.m. to an undesired 1:37 a.m. time slot, which prompted King World to move the game show to a 4:30 p.m. time slot at KARE in 1999 to replace the defunct syndicated newsmagazine Hard Copy, where it remains. During an episode of the show that aired early during the show's first season on the station, there was a category dedicated to the Twin Cities where host Alex Trebek says right after presenting the category name, "Where we are now airing on television station KARE in the daytime, I'm very happy to say!" The show now airs at 4:30 p.m. Wheel remains on WCCO-TV today, making the Twin Cities one of the few TV markets in which both Jeopardy! and Wheel are aired on separate stations, and not back-to-back on the same station as is the norm.

News operation

KARE presently broadcasts more than 30 hours of locally produced newscasts each week. Unlike most NBC affiliates in large and mid-sized markets, the station does not produce a Sunday morning newscast. The 10 p.m. newscast features a "KARE 11 News Extra", an extended in-depth news story, and the station produces special sports shows on a periodic basis. The National Press Photographers Association has awarded KARE its "Station of the Year" honor in 1985, 1995, 2000, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2015.
In the 1980s, the station experimented with a 40-minute newscast at 10 p.m., before 35-minute nightly newscasts—now the standard—became common. The station made weather history on July 18, 1986, when helicopter pilot Max Messmer was flying out to cover a news story and noticed a funnel cloud forming over the Springbrook Nature Center in Fridley. Photojournalist Tom Empey was on board the chopper and shot video of the twister. The images were broadcast live on that day's 5 p.m. newscast. The funnel soon formed into a full-fledged tornado as it touched the ground, and KARE broadcast images of the funnel for 30 minutes. In the years to come, this first aerial video of a tornado was heavily studied by meteorologists, and contributed significantly to what is known about tornado formation. It was moderate in intensity, with winds of , and caused $650,000 damage.
On January 10, 2011, Showcase Minnesota at 11 a.m. weekdays was replaced by KARE 11 Today, hosted by its 4 p.m. anchors Diana Pierce and Pat Evans. Besides news, KARE 11 Today includes lifestyle segments.
KARE ran a subchannel with NBC Weather Plus, which rebranded as NBC Plus after the announcement of its planned shutdown. In mid-June 2009, KARE launched its Weather Now subchannel on.2 using WeatherNation outsourcing company. KARE affiliated the subchannel in 2012 with the WeatherNation TV network and renewed in 2014.

Ratings

KARE has won the coveted demographic of viewers 25 to 54 years old in almost every Nielsen Ratings sweeps period since the late 1980s. The station has been able to build on NBC's primetime lead-ins, which are the lowest in the market. However, KARE has placed second overall in households at 5, 6, and 10 p.m since May 2006, trailing rival CBS affiliate WCCO. The station slipped from its top spot among women in 2007 for the first time in two decades, and factoring in KMSP-TV's 9 p.m. newscast, KARE tumbled to third place overall in February 2008.
In November 2010, KARE suffered its first loss in the target 25-54 demographic during its 10 p.m. newscast since 1986, with longtime runner-up WCCO-TV gaining the upper hand. However, WCCO likely benefited from a series of heavily-promoted newscasts to mark the retirement of the station's longtime evening anchor involving the return of former on-air personalities during the sweeps period, leading at least one media critic to question the durability of WCCO's edge. The November 2010 numbers also showed KARE had regained second place in overall viewership. In the May 2012 ratings KARE 11 was the most watched news station in the key demographic of Adults 25-54 throughout the day, finishing #1 at 10 p.m., 6 p.m., 5 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Notable current on-air staff

In addition to the main transmitter in Shoreview, KARE's signal is relayed to outlying parts of Minnesota through a network of translators. All stations PSIP to 11.1 except for Jackson, St. James and Frost which PSIP to 11.4 and K24KT, which PSIP to 24.1.
City of licenseCallsignChannel
Alexandria14
Frost31
Jackson19
Olivia20
Redwood Falls22
St. James
32
Walker24.1
Willmar17

KARE formerly had a translator serving Breezy Point and Brainerd, KLKS-LP. The repeater signed on in 1995 and operated until July 16, 2011, when its use as a repeater of KARE was discontinued due to a corporate decision made by Gannett management. The repeater was owned locally by the Lakes Broadcasting Group, owner of KLKS radio.

Coverage in Canada

KARE, along with WCCO-TV, is also carried in Canada on most cable systems in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. The stations do not make any attempt to cater to this audience, other than their inclusion on regional weather maps.