KMGH-TV


KMGH-TV, virtual and VHF digital channel 7, is an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to Denver, Colorado, United States. The station is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. KMGH-TV's studios are located on East Speer Boulevard in Denver's Congress Park neighborhood, and its transmitter is located atop Lookout Mountain, near Golden. On cable, the station is available on Comcast Xfinity in standard definition on channel 7, and in high definition on digital channel 652. It is also carried on CenturyLink Prism channels 7 and 1007.
KMGH operates digital translators KZCO-LD in Denver and KZFC-LD in Windsor, which allow homes with issues receiving KMGH's VHF signal or only a UHF antenna to receive KMGH in some form. The station's second digital subchannel, which serves as a Court TV Mystery owned-and-operated station, is relayed on digital translator KZCS-LP in Colorado Springs.

History

As a CBS affiliate

The station first signed on the air on November 1, 1952 as KLZ-TV. It was founded by the Oklahoma City-based Oklahoma Publishing Company, which also owned KLZ radio. KLZ-TV immediately took the CBS affiliation from KBTV, owing to KLZ radio's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. In 1954, Gaylord sold the KLZ television and radio stations to Time-Life. The station's original studio facilities were housed in a renovated former auto dealership on the east side of the block at East 6th Avenue and Sherman Street. Channel 7 moved to its present studio facilities, an eight-sided, five-story building called "The Communications Center," on the intersection of Speer Boulevard and Lincoln Street in 1969.
Time-Life sold the station to McGraw-Hill in late October 1970, in a group deal that also involved the company's other radio and television combinations in Indianapolis, San Diego and Grand Rapids, Michigan; and KERO-TV in Bakersfield, California. In order to comply with the Federal Communications Commission's new restrictions on concentration of media ownership that went into effect shortly afterward, McGraw-Hill was required to sell the KLZ radio stations as well as their sister radio properties in Indianapolis, San Diego and Grand Rapids to other companies. Time-Life would later purchase WOTV in Grand Rapids in the final deal. By the time the sale was finalized in June 1972, the purchase price for the entire group was just over $57 million. WFBM-TV in Indianapolis, KERO-TV in Bakersfield and KOGO-TV in San Diego were retained by McGraw-Hill, along with KLZ-TV, which subsequently changed its call letters to KMGH-TV, in order to comply with a now-repealed FCC rule in place then that forbade TV and radio stations in the same market, but with different ownership from sharing the same callsigns. The 1990s did not begin well for KMGH; the station saw significant overall financial losses in 1990 and 1991, as well as a decrease in viewership for its local newscasts. A new management team introduced in 1991 turned things around at KMGH; net profit soared 105.5% in 1992 as a result.

Switch to ABC

Although KMGH had been one of CBS' stronger affiliates, the station would end up disaffiliating from the network due to a series of events that were set in motion as a result of CBS' partnership with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in July 1994. As part of the deal, the network moved its programming from its owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV, to Westinghouse's KYW-TV. In a complex ownership deal that was announced in November 1994, CBS traded WCAU to NBC in exchange for two of that network's O&Os —Denver's KCNC-TV and Salt Lake City's KUTV. CBS then formed a joint venture with Westinghouse that assumed ownership of KYW-TV, KCNC and KUTV, with Westinghouse serving as majority owner. Group W/CBS and NBC also swapped the transmitter facilities—and by association, channel frequencies—of their respective stations in Miami, WCIX and WTVJ.
At the same time, McGraw-Hill had struck an affiliation agreement with ABC, due partly to the fact that its stations in San Diego and Indianapolis had already been aligned with the network. In keeping with all of this, each of the three major broadcast networks relocated their programming to different stations in the Denver market on September 10, 1995; ABC moved its programming to KMGH from KUSA, with KMGH's outgoing CBS affiliation going to KCNC and NBC moving from KCNC to KUSA.
On June 14, 2011, McGraw-Hill announced that it would exit from the broadcasting industry and put its entire television station group up for sale; on October 3 of that year, the company announced that it had entered into an agreement to sell the eight-station broadcasting division to the E. W. Scripps Company. The FCC approved the sale on November 29, 2011, and the deal was officially completed on December 30, 2011. The deal marked a re-entry into the Denver market for Scripps; prior to its acquisition of KMGH, the company had owned the Rocky Mountain News from 1926 until the afternoon newspaper ceased publishing in 2009. On May 7, 2019 KMGH dropped Azteca América and replaced it with the Escape network, which moved over from KTFD-TV.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
7.1720pKMGH-DTMain KMGH-TV programming / ABC
7.2480iEscapeCourt TV Mystery
7.3480iLAFF-TV
7.4480i24/7Laff

Analog-to-digital conversion

KMGH-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 7, on April 16, 2009. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 17 to VHF channel 7 for post-transition operations.

Programming

KMGH-TV clears the entire ABC network schedule; however, it is one of the few ABC stations that airs the Saturday and Sunday editions of ABC World News Tonight a half-hour to one hour earlier than most affiliates due to its hour-long 5:00 p.m. newscast, and also airs the weekend editions of Good Morning America and This Week one hour earlier. Syndicated programs broadcast by KMGH-TV include Right This Minute and Inside Edition among others. KMGH was Denver's longtime home to hit game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, before removing both game shows in September 2014 in a move where Scripps removed both Sony game shows from their stations for lower-cost, internally produced programming; with the station adding a 6 p.m. newscast and Scripps' The List news magazine in their place. Both game shows ended up moving to Denver's Fox affiliate, KDVR.
During the 1950s, channel 7's staff included newscaster Starr Yelland, who came to the station from KOA-TV ; weatherman Warren Chandler, and Ed Scott, who hosted a children's program on the station as "Sheriff Scotty". In 1956, KLZ-TV presented the first remote television broadcast from a courtroom after general manager Hugh Terry won a court battle to allow cameras into the courtroom. In 1957, the station's weekly public affairs series Panorama, became the first locally produced program in the Denver market to earn a Peabody Award Starting in 1968 and running through 1983, KLZ-TV aired one of the most popular children's programs in the Denver market, the Noell and Andy Show, which aired weekdays at 8:00 a.m. The program's coloring contest drew hundreds of entries each week.
In 2012, KMGH acquired the broadcast rights to Denver Broncos head coach John Fox's weekly analysis show, The John Fox Show; the station aired the program until the team's 2013 season, losing the rights to KDVR on August 7, 2014.

News operation

KMGH-TV presently broadcasts 35 hours of locally produced newscasts each week. Unlike most stations affiliated with ABC or its competitors, KMGH did not broadcast a local newscast in the 6:00 p.m. timeslot on weeknights for eight years, opting to fill the hour with episodes of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. In addition, the station produces the sports highlight program Sports Xtra, which airs Saturdays during the final 15 minutes of the 10:00 p.m. newscast. As mentioned above, the 6 p.m. newscast was restored on September 8, 2014, due to the move of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune to KDVR; it will feature an 'express' format with more stories and weather coverage.
While KLZ-TV always had a strong line-up of local and syndicated programs during the station's early years, it was obviously helped by CBS's longtime dominance nationally. The station was the first in Denver to operate a news bureau in Washington, D.C., as well as the first Denver station to receive reports from its own radio and television correspondents in Europe and Asia. Channel 7 televised the first kidney transplant in the mid-1960s. It led the 10:00 p.m. news ratings from the early 1960s until 1977, when it was displaced from the #1 slot by KBTV, which benefited from ABC's ratings increases in primetime as well as an improved news product that took advantage of live electronic news-gathering technology. KMGH-TV was actually the first television station in the market to use ENG equipment in 1975, with its "Insta Cam", which was never promoted on-air. In 1970, Channel 7's newscasts had a 40% ratings share. KOA-TV and KBTV battled for second place, each pulling in about a 24 share for their newscasts. By the end of the decade, KBTV had a 54% ratings share at 10:00 p.m., more than all of the other stations combined.
The 10:00 p.m. news team during the 1960s was helmed by news anchor Carl Akers, weatherman Warren Chandler and sports anchor Starr Yelland. All three did live commercials during the program. John Rayburn joined the station as co-anchor of the 10:00 p.m. newscast in 1964, before departing for KBTV in 1967. In 1966, Akers took a short-lived retirement only to return to Denver television a year later at KBTV as that station's anchor and news director; he was replaced at channel 7 by KOA-TV anchor Bob Palmer. The team of Palmer, Chandler and Yelland continued until 1975, when Terry Phillips was added as a news co-anchor; Phillips was replaced by John Lindsey in 1976. Palmer returned to KOA-TV in 1982. From December 1994 to August 1997, the station operated a weather radar system known as "Doppler Max7", that was heavily promoted during the failed tabloid-formatted "Real Life, Real News" era; this period emphasized hard news and investigative reports, but was unable to beat KUSA and KCNC, the former of which had overtaken KMGH for first and the latter for second in most timeslots in the ratings by this point.
On July 15, 2002, KMGH-TV became the first major market television station in the world to broadcast fully automated newscasts. A computer system, known as ParkerVision, combines the work of several technical personnel in a program requiring just a single operator. Ten studio cameras, channels of audio, all art graphics and electronic titling along with tape operations are programmed and played back live by one person instead of seven people. KMGH-TV is the only Denver television station to have won two Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Awards: the first for the 2003 report, "Honor and Betrayal: Scandal at the Air Force Academy" and the second for the 2010 investigative documentary "33 Minutes to 34 Right".
On August 18, 2008, KMGH became the second television station in the Denver market to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. In 2011, KMGH was named "Station of the Year" by the Associated Press Television-Radio Association. On May 26, 2011, KMGH moved its hour-long 4:00 p.m. newscast 7 News Now to 3:00 p.m. and reduced the program to a half-hour ; the program ended after the September 7, 2012, broadcast, in order to accommodate the syndicated talk show Katie.
On June 28, 2013, KMGH entered into a partnership with The Denver Post to collaborate on investigative reports and weather coverage as well as providing additional Spanish-language news content.
On July 14, 2014, KMGH-TV launched a 4:00 p.m newscast, The Now, which features a mixture of local and national news segments.

Notable current on-air staff