KARE (TV)
KARE is a television station licensed to Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, serving as the NBC affiliate for the Twin Cities area. Owned by Tegna Inc., the station maintains studios on Olson Memorial Highway in Golden Valley and a transmitter at the Telefarm Towers in Shoreview, Minnesota.
Channel 11 began broadcasting on September 1, 1953. It was originally shared by WMIN-TV in St. Paul and WTCN-TV in Minneapolis; the two stations shared an affiliation with ABC and alternated presenting local programs. In 1955, Consolidated Television and Radio bought both stations and merged them as WTCN-TV from the Minneapolis studios in the Calhoun Beach Hotel. The station presented several regionally and nationally notable children's shows in its early years as well as local cooking, news, and sports programs. Time Inc. purchased the station in 1957. Under its ownership, ABC switched its affiliation to KMSP-TV, leaving channel 11 to become an independent station that broadcast games of the Minnesota Twins baseball team, movies, and syndicated programs. This continued under two successive owners: Chris-Craft Industries and Metromedia. By the late 1970s, WTCN was one of the nation's most financially successful independent stations.
In 1978, NBC's Twin Cities affiliate, KSTP-TV, announced it would switch its affiliation to ABC. This forced NBC to select between KMSP and WTCN for its new local outlet. It chose WTCN on the strength of its facilities, ownership, and promise to build a first-class news operation, for which KMSP had never been known as an ABC station. On March 5, 1979, channel 11 became an NBC affiliate and began broadcasting NewsCenter 11 newscasts. In spite of a major promotional campaign, the news product was a high-profile commercial failure, beaten by entertainment shows on KMSP in the ratings, as viewers rejected the new news team and continued to prefer market leaders WCCO-TV and KSTP-TV.
Metromedia agreed to buy Chicago independent station WFLD in 1982 and sold WTCN to Gannett to raise capital and make room in its station group. Gannett engineered a comprehensive overhaul of the station's news programming. Between 1983 and 1987, the station moved from last to first in late news ratings, battling WCCO for two decades. It changed call signs twice in that period, to WUSA in 1985 and KARE in 1986, when Gannett moved the WUSA call sign to its Washington, D.C., station. More recently, as of 2022, the station has been a second-place finisher in local news.
History
Early years
WMIN-TV and WTCN-TV: The shared-time era
The WMIN Broadcasting Company of St. Paul applied in February 1948 for a new station licensed to that city on channel 2. The application was frozen when the Federal Communications Commission halted all grants of new TV stations in 1948.In February 1952—two months before the FCC lifted the freeze—the Minnesota Television Public Service Corporation, a company headed by former ambassador Robert Butler and headquartered in St. Paul, filed for television channel 11 in Minneapolis. Weeks later, Mid Continent Radio Television, which owned station WTCN-TV on channel 4 as well as WTCN, announced it would take over WCCO radio, combine its operations with channel 4, and divest WTCN radio. Minnesota Television Public Service then acquired WTCN radio, which had to be sold to allow Mid Continent to purchase WCCO. The transactions were approved in August 1952, at which time channel 4 changed from WTCN-TV to WCCO-TV.
After the freeze was lifted, WMIN refiled its pre-freeze application in July to specify channel 11, as channel 2 had been set aside for educational broadcasting by the FCC. Later that month, Meredith Publishing filed for channel 11 in Minneapolis alongside stations in Rochester, New York, and St. Louis. Meredith owned three stations and had three pending station applications when the FCC ruled that companies could only have as many applications as additional stations it could own—the limit being five—in February 1953. With six stations and applications for stations, the company was one over the limit; it then dropped out of the channel 11 fight. WMIN and WTCN—each seeking to avoid a lengthy comparative hearing—proposed to share time on channel 11, which the FCC accepted in April 1953.
On September 1, 1953, channel 11 began broadcasting. At 2 p.m., the first WMIN-TV programs aired: a news show, the women's program Talk About the Town, and a movie. Two hours later, WTCN-TV greeted viewers with a dedication, the cooking show Man Around the House, and a teen music bandstand program, Corner Drug. Channel 11's signal originated from the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis; the tower had a master antenna inspired by the Empire State Building in New York and designed to broadcast multiple stations, including the antenna for WCCO-TV and provision for antennas for channels 9 and 11 before any applicant had a construction permit for them.
The transmitter and antenna were the only physical facilities shared by the stations. While WMIN-TV and WTCN-TV were affiliates of ABC, in keeping with WTCN radio, their programs and even network shows during each station's airtime originated from separate facilities. WMIN-TV set up in the former WMIN radio studios in the Hamm Building in St. Paul, the radio station having relocated to its transmitter site; it had no film developing equipment, so films had to be airmailed to and from sister station KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. WTCN-TV established itself in the Calhoun Beach Hotel in Minneapolis. The hotel offered the station the use of its ballroom; its former gymnasium, left unfinished when the former beach club converted to a hotel, became the largest TV studio to that time in the Twin Cities.
Each station offered its own local programs. WMIN had the children's show Captain 11, featuring host Jim Lange in a space-themed outfit. It also featured Wrangler Steve, a host of Westerns played by WMIN radio disc jockey Steve Cannon. For kids, WTCN had the clown J. P. Patches, originally played by Daryl Laub and then by Chris Wedes. Wedes left for the new KIRO-TV in Seattle in 1958; Patches aired on the Seattle station until 1981. For 19 years, Roger Awsumb played Casey Jones on WTCN's Lunch with Casey.
By 1954, channel 11 was offering some programming from the DuMont Television Network, though the network's shows moved to new station KEYD-TV when it launched in January 1955.
Consolidated consolidation and purchase by Time, Inc.
In January 1955, Consolidated Television and Radio Broadcasters of Indianapolis, a company owned by the Bitner family, agreed to acquire WTCN radio and television and WMIN-TV for about $3 million. Bitner believed that the channel 11 stations made for an attractive purchase because their values were artificially lowered by confusion stemming from the shared-station setup. It announced that it would keep the WTCN call letters. When Consolidated completed the purchase in April, WMIN left the air and merged into the full-time WTCN. At that time, the new owner consolidated the station's activities at WTCN's Minneapolis studios and closed WMIN's St. Paul facilities, with only a handful of WMIN technical employees not continuing with channel 11. During this time, the station affiliated with the NTA Film Network, which began in 1956.The Bitner group had owned the WTCN stations for less than two years when it announced the sale of three of its broadcasting properties—the WTCN stations, WFBM radio and television in Indianapolis, and WLAV radio and television in Grand Rapids, Michigan—to Time, Inc. in December 1956. The $15.75 million deal came after the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company backed out of a transaction for the stations plus WFDF in Flint, Michigan. FCC approval followed in April 1957. Time improved station revenues by expanding its movie library and sharpening its promotion of feature films. It offered a large schedule of local sports, including select games of Minneapolis Millers minor league baseball, which WTCN radio broadcast all season long; the station cut back its sports broadcasts on radio and TV due to difficulty selling advertising time and intense competition, particularly for the radio broadcasts of Minnesota Golden Gophers football.
As an independent station
Loss of ABC affiliation
By the start of the 1960s, Time's relationship with ABC had become strained. Variety reported in March 1960 that station management was insisting on a protection clause, a guarantee that ABC would not go to KMSP-TV, an independent station then owned by 20th Century Fox. KMSP was already carrying some ABC shows that were not seen on channel 11's schedule. Channel 11's fears were well-founded; in January 1961, ABC announced it would move its programs to KMSP effective April 16.The newly independent channel 11 became the market's first station to telecast major league baseball with the newly relocated Minnesota Twins; WCCO-TV had agreed to broadcast the games, but CBS refused to allow the station to preempt prime-time network programs for baseball, forcing channel 4 to back out. The station agreed to telecast 50 night and weekend games, simulcast with WCCO radio, with Bob Wolff and Ray Scott as announcers. The Twins, movies, and feature programs became the station's top program draws, as well as newscasts timed to air just before the network affiliates, including hourly news breaks and a 9 p.m. newscast. To support its new local programming, the station expanded its footprint in the Calhoun Beach Hotel to include space on the lower level and acquired new equipment. Despite this, Time noted in its annual report that losing ABC was "forcing a re-adjustment to the economies of independent television station operations" at channel 11.
The Twins proved key to channel 11's survival without a network affiliation. Telecasts reached audience shares averaging 58 percent and as high as 79 percent in 1962. A major advertising contract with Hamm's beer for the baseball games helped the station acquire programming and get on steadier footing—its first profitable footing in its ten-year history. An American Research Bureau report found that the station had the largest relative audience share of any independent in the country, even in months without baseball. Twins games earned channel 11 placement on cable systems far from the Twin Cities, including Mankato and Rochester, Minnesota, and Eau Claire and La Crosse, Wisconsin. Building on the success of the Twins telecasts, the station sought to broaden its image as a sports outlet by adding wrestling and college sports to its lineup.