KSWB-TV


KSWB-TV, virtual channel 69, is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to San Diego, California, United States. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group. KSWB-TV's studios are located on Engineer Road in the city's Kearny Mesa section, and its transmitter is located southeast of Spring Valley.
KSWB-TV is branded as Fox 5 San Diego, in reference to its primary cable channel position in the market on most local cable providers. Until 2011, the logo bug shown during the station's newscasts rotated between its common cable channel position and its over-the-air virtual channel number, 69.

History

Early years

The station first signed on the air on October 1, 1984 as KTTY. The station originally operated from studios located on Frontage Road in Chula Vista. Originally locally owned by San Diego Television, it operated as an independent station; it maintained a general entertainment format featuring a mix of dramas, classic movies, cartoons and religious programming that the other stations in the market declined to air. KTTY also aired a significant amount of paid programming. The station suffered from low ratings throughout its run as an independent station, struggling to compete with established independents XETV-TV and KUSI-TV. On January 11, 1995, KTTY became the San Diego charter affiliate of The WB, an upstart broadcast network that was majority owned by the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner.
The station fell into bankruptcy, and Tribune Broadcasting, whose corporate parent—the Tribune Company—owned the remaining stake in The WB that Time Warner did not maintain, purchased the station at a bankruptcy auction in 1995, and took control of it in 1996; on August 16 of that year, the company changed the station's call letters to KSWB-TV. After Tribune took ownership of channel 69, the station added many off-network sitcoms to its schedule, with talk and court shows being mixed in as well throughout the remainder of the 1990s.

Transition to The CW

On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down the broadcast networks that they had respectively owned, The WB and UPN. In their place, the companies would combine The WB and UPN's respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW, which would also include newer series developed for the network. With the announcement, The CW signed a ten-year affiliation agreement with Tribune Broadcasting for 16 of the group's 19 WB affiliates, with KSWB-TV named as the network's San Diego affiliate.
The CW officially launched on September 18, 2006. Unlike many other former WB affiliates that also had call letters relating to its former affiliation, KSWB chose to retain the callsign that references the now-defunct network. The station also served as the local broadcaster of games from the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers until it switched to Fox, which were produced by Los Angeles sister station KTLA.

Affiliation swap with XETV

During a seminar by Sam Zell on March 25, 2008, it was revealed that Tribune Broadcasting had signed an affiliation agreement with Fox to make KSWB the network's new San Diego affiliate. This caught station management at Tijuana-licensed XETV off guard as there was no knowledge about the impending loss of its Fox affiliation until the announcement was made public. Fox later cited concerns with having its programming airing on a Mexican-licensed station, even though XETV had broadcast its programming almost entirely in English for over half a century and was Fox's charter affiliate in the market since the network's October 1986 inception.
At first, there was speculation that CW network programming in the San Diego market would be brought in out-of-market from KSWB's Los Angeles sister station KTLA, which was carried on cable locally at the time on Cox Communications channel 14. Two other scenarios were also being entertained, including speculation that KUSI-TV would pick up the CW affiliation or that KSWB would re-activate its second digital subchannel and move the network's programming there. On July 2, 2008, Bay City Television/Grupo Televisa signed an affiliation agreement to bring The CW's programming over to XETV. With the Fox affiliation agreement, KSWB-TV's ten-year contract with The CW was rendered void, ending the station's two-year association with the network as it joined Fox on August 1, 2008, directly swapping affiliations with XETV as the CW affiliation for the market was moved over to that station. In turn, XETV replaced KSWB as the default CW affiliate for DirecTV subscribers in the few areas of the western United States where a CW-affiliated station is not receivable over-the-air or through cable television.

Aborted sale to Sinclair Broadcast Group

On May 8, 2017, Hunt Valley, Maryland-based Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it would acquire Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in debt held by Tribune. Had the deal received regulatory approval, the proposed sale would have put KSWB-TV under common ownership with Sinclair's two existing California-based duopolies: CBS affiliate KBAK-TV and Fox affiliate KBFX-CD in Bakersfield, and Fox affiliate KMPH-TV and CW affiliate KFRE-TV in Fresno, California, plus pending acquisitions KRCR-TV and KAEF-TV in Redding and Eureka, respectively.
On December 15, 2017, it was speculated that Sinclair would resell KSWB-TV to Fox Television Stations upon approval of the Tribune deal. On April 24, 2018, Sinclair announced that KSWB-TV would be one of 23 stations sold to obtain approval for the merger, though it was one of seven stations for which a buyer was not disclosed. On May 9, 2018, it was officially announced that Fox Television Stations would buy KSWB-TV, as part of a $910-million deal that also involved six other Tribune-owned stations. If the sale is approved, it would make KSWB-TV a Fox owned-and-operated station and sister to KTVU in Oakland/San Francisco and KTTV in Los Angeles. It would also be the third O&O station in San Diego.
Three weeks after the FCC's July 18 vote to have the deal reviewed by an administrative law judge amid "serious concerns" about Sinclair's forthrightness in its applications to sell certain conflict properties, on August 9, 2018, Tribune announced it would terminate the Sinclair deal, intending to seek other M&A opportunities. Tribune also filed a breach of contract lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court, alleging that Sinclair engaged in protracted negotiations with the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division over regulatory issues, refused to sell stations in markets where it already had properties, and proposed divestitures to parties with ties to Sinclair executive chair David D. Smith that were rejected or highly subject to rejection to maintain control over stations it was required to sell. The termination of the Sinclair sale agreement places uncertainty for the future of Fox's purchases of KSWB and the other six Tribune stations included in that deal, which were predicated on the closure of the Sinclair–Tribune merger.

Sale to Nexstar Media Group

On December 3, 2018, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Media Group announced it would acquire the assets of Tribune Media for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. In the case of KSWB, reports preceding the purchase announcement stated that, as it did during the group's failed purchase by Sinclair, Fox Television Stations would seek to acquire certain Fox-affiliated stations owned by Tribune from the eventual buyer of that group. The sale was approved by the FCC on September 16 and was completed on September 19, 2019.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
69.1720pKSWBMain KSWB-TV programming / Fox
69.2480iAntennaAntenna TV
69.3480iCourt TVCourt TV
69.4480i16:9IONIon Television

Upon receiving the Fox affiliation, KSWB surpassed Syracuse, New York affiliate WSYT as the highest channel allocation of any Fox station in the country. Since the digital transition, it retains the highest PSIP channel number out of Fox's stations.
On October 1, 2010, the station began to carry This TV on its second digital subchannel, the first time since a short-lived affiliation with The Tube Music Network prior to that service ending operations in October 2007 that KSWB had carried a digital subchannel. The station then added the Tribune-owned classic television service Antenna TV to a new 69.3 subchannel upon that network's January 1, 2011 debut. It moved to KSWB-DT2 on November 1, 2019 upon the launch of Court TV under a deal with Tribune on all their stations made before the Nexstar merger went into effect, with This TV being removed upon that date.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KSWB shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 69, on February 17, 2009, the original target date in which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 19. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 69, which was among the high band UHF channels that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.

Programming

Outside of the Fox network schedule, syndicated programming broadcast by KSWB-TV includes Rachael Ray, Two and a Half Men, Family Guy, Daily Mail TV, Modern Family, and Jerry Springer.

News operation

KSWB-TV presently broadcasts 59¾ hours of locally produced newscasts each week ; in addition, the station produces the 15-minute sports highlight program Fox 5 Sports Final, which airs every night at 10:45 p.m.
As a WB affiliate, KSWB launched its first news department on September 27, 1999 with the debut of a half-hour 10:00 p.m. newscast ; the news operation was formed as a result of a corporate request by Tribune for its WB-affiliated stations that did not already have news departments to begin producing their own local newscasts. This program was designed to compete against an established hour-long prime time newscast on KUSI and gained a competitor in XETV-TV's upstart news department when it launched its own newscast at 10:00 p.m. that December. On March 7, 2005, the station debuted The WB Morning Show, a simulcast of Los Angeles sister station KTLA's weekday morning newscast interspersed with half-hourly local news inserts presented by a solo anchor from KSWB's San Diego studios.
On September 22, 2005, KSWB announced that its news department would be shut down, laying off 29 of the department's 30 staffers. The final 10:00 p.m. newscast produced by KSWB aired on October 28, 2005. Production of the prime time newscast was turned over to NBC station KNSD through a news share agreement on October 31. The broadcast retained the WB News at Ten title and the 615 Music-composed music package Firepower News, but now originated from KNSD's then-facility at 225 Broadway in downtown San Diego. The agreement between KNSD and KSWB was similar to outsourced newscasts on other Tribune stations such as WPHL-TV in Philadelphia and KRCW-TV in Portland.
To correspond with KSWB's affiliation change to The CW, the KTLA morning news simulcast and the KNSD-produced 10:00 p.m. news were accordingly renamed as The CW Morning Show and CW News at Ten on September 18, 2006. KNSD reporter Anne State assumed co-anchoring duties until April 2008, when she left for Chicago CBS owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV. Vic Salazar then solo anchored the 10:00 p.m. broadcast for the final months of KNSD's production of the program, until he left that station. In addition, the station also produced a public affairs show called Take 5, that aired Sunday evenings at 10:30 p.m.
After the announcement that KSWB would become San Diego's new Fox affiliate, the station reassumed production responsibilities for its newscasts, with the KTLA simulcast and KNSD-produced 10:00 p.m. news airing for the last time on July 31, 2008. The second incarnation of the news department launched upon the August 1 affiliation switch with the debuts of a new weekday morning news program and a now hour-long 10:00 p.m. newscast, which have both been produced in high definition since the return of in-house news operations. The station also began using a logo and graphics package by Hothaus Creative based on the standardized look of Fox's owned-and-operated stations.
On September 14, 2009, KSWB debuted an hour-long 6:00 p.m. newscast that competes against local newscasts on KUSI-TV, KNSD and KGTV , KFMB-TV and evening network newscasts on the latter three stations. This was part of a companywide expansion of early evening and in some cases, midday newscasts on Tribune's Fox affiliates. This was followed two years later on September 26, 2011 by the launch of an hour-long 5:00 p.m. newscast on weeknights; that broadcast was quietly expanded to weekend evenings in May 2014. On September 8, 2014, KSWB debuted two one-hour newscasts at 1:00 and 4:00 p.m. on weekday afternoons.
KSWB-TV is described as a CNN affiliate by the cable news network. Both news operations conduct live shots, air packages, publish stories online, and more with each other. CNN has an "author" page on KSWB-TV's website.
The station has many elements to it that reflect Southern Californian culture. They frequently feature celebrities as guests on their morning news program, many of them San Diego natives. Past guests include The Black Eyed Peas, Bobby Lee, who starred in Mad TV which used to air on the station via the Fox network, and YouTube star brothers Brian, and Brandon Awadis. During the morning broadcast, some weather segments are branded as the "Surf Report". Some female KSWB-TV on-air personalities have been featured in annual "Hottest News Chick" contests. The morning show also features a recurring live interview segment with KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin. The top "water cooler talk" entertainment stories of the morning is the topic of discussion.

On-air staff

Notable current on-air staff