KAUZ-TV
KAUZ-TV is a television station licensed to Wichita Falls, Texas, United States, serving as the CBS affiliate for the western Texoma area. It is owned by American Spirit Media, which maintains a shared services agreement with Gray Media, owner of Lawton, Oklahoma–licensed dual ABC/Telemundo affiliate KSWO-TV, for the provision of certain services. KAUZ-TV's studios and transmitter are located near Seymour Highway and West Wenonah Boulevard in western Wichita Falls.
The station also operates a translator station, K29FR-D in Quanah, Texas, to relay its programming to areas of western north Texas and extreme southwestern Oklahoma that are located outside its primary signal coverage area.
History
Early history
The VHF channel 6 allocation was contested between two groups, both of which owned radio stations in the market, that competed for approval by the Federal Communications Commission to be the holder of the construction permit to build and license to operate a new television station on the second commercial VHF allocation to be assigned to the Wichita Falls–Lawton market. Texoma Broadcasting Co.—a consortium associated with Wichita Falls Times owner Times Publishing Co. and then-owner of local radio station KTRN, led by Rhea Howard, Boyd Kelley, Walter Cline, Houston Harte and Eva Mae Hanks—filed the initial permit application for the VHF channel 6 allocation on July 11, 1952.Rowley-Brown Broadcasting—a group founded in December 1947 by Edward H. Rowley, Kenyon Brown and H.J. Griffith, with Rowley United Theaters Vice President John H. Rowley and Agnes D. Rowley acting as fellow minority shareholders at the time of their submission—filed a separate license application for channel 6 on July 18, 1952. Rowley-Brown also owned the city's oldest radio station, KWFT. The FCC awarded the license to Rowley-Brown on January 6, 1953, and Rowley-Brown sought and was granted the call letters KWFT-TV, after the radio station.
KWFT-TV first signed on the air on March 1, 1953; it was the first television station to sign on in the Wichita Falls-Lawton market, debuting one week before the March 8 sign-on of ABC affiliate KSWO-TV in Lawton, and one month prior to the April 12 sign-on of its fellow Wichita Falls-based rival, NBC affiliate KFDX-TV. The station has been a primary CBS affiliate since it signed on, owing to KWFT radio's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. Initially, KWFT-TV held a secondary affiliation with the DuMont Television Network, carrying select programs from the network until it ceased operations in August 1956; during the late 1950s, the station was briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
On December 9, 1955, Rowley-Brown sold KWFT-TV to KSYD-TV Inc.—a consortium led by Sydney A. Grayson and Nat Levine, then-owners of Wichita Falls radio station KSYD, which ironically was co-owned with KFDX-TV under prior ownership two years earlier—for $75,000 plus $73,366.40 allocated for color and transmission equipment not yet in use; concurrently, Brown acquired John H. and E. H. Rowley's respective interests in KWFT radio. The sale was approved on January 11, 1956, at which time channel 6's call letters were changed to KSYD-TV. Like its radio sister, it took its calls from its parent company's principal owner. On December 1, 1962, Grayson sold the television station to Mid-New York Broadcasting—a company owned by Albany, New York businessman Paul F. Harron, which then owned primary NBC/secondary ABC affiliate WKTV in Utica, New York and the World Broadcasting System radio service—for $2.35 million; the sale received regulatory approval months later on March 13, 1963. On July 31 of that year, the station changed its call letters to KAUZ-TV, which were chosen as part of a contest held by the Harron group that was open to media agency and advertiser personnel.
Image:KAUZ.JPG|200px|right|thumb|KAUZ logo, used from 2004 to 2007; the stylized "6"—which was used by the station until 2008—is very similar in design to the numerical logo used since 1998 by fellow CBS affiliate WKMG-TV in Orlando.
In February 1966, KAUZ became the first television station in the Wichita Falls-Lawton market to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in color, making the transition just a few months after CBS began converting most of its network programming content from black-and-white to color. KFDX and KSWO followed in upgraded production of their respective newscasts to the color format in 1967. Also in 1967, KAUZ-TV was one of several stations nationwide to broadcast The Las Vegas Show, a short-lived late night program from the ill-fated Overmyer Network that ran for a few weeks. On November 3, 1967, Mid-New York Broadcasting sold KAUZ-TV to Bass Brothers Telecasters—led by investor/philanthropist Perry R. Bass, then-owner of fellow CBS affiliate KFDA-TV in Amarillo and satellites KFDW-TV in Clovis, New Mexico, and KFDO-TV in Sayre, Oklahoma, and 25% owner of KAAR-TV in San Diego—for $3.1 million; the sale was approved by the FCC on April 12 of that year.
In July 1970, two men who were hired to paint the mast on the station's transmitter tower—located on the premises of the KAUZ studio complex, which is said to be coordinated at one of the highest points within the city of Wichita Falls—lost their balance on the apparatus they were standing and fell several hundred feet to the ground; one man was killed, while another was seriously injured. In the late winter of early 1974, Bass Brothers Telecasters sold the station to Forward Communications—a locally based company owned by local beer distributor Ray Clymer and White Fuel Corp. executive W. Erle White—for $4.25 million; the sale was approved by the FCC on September 19.
On July 22, 1983, Wichita Falls Telecasters II sold KAUZ-TV to Adams Communications for $10.925 million; the sale was approved on January 5, 1984. Adams sold KAUZ, along with seven of its other television stations—WHOI in Peoria, Illinois, WWLP in Springfield, Massachusetts, WILX-TV in Lansing, KOSA-TV in Midland, WTRF-TV in Wheeling, West Virginia, WMTV in Madison, Wisconsin, and WSAW-TV in Wausau, Wisconsin—to Boca Raton, Florida–based Brissette Broadcasting for $257 million in late 1991; the sale, approved by the FCC on December 24 of that year, was completed in February 1992. In September 1995, Brissette sold KAUZ and its seven other television stations to Benedek Broadcasting for $270 million; the sale was finalized on June 7, 1996. The station signed off on a nightly basis until September 1998, when KAUZ-TV began maintaining a 24-hour programming schedule on Sunday through Thursday nights, initially filling overnight time periods following the CBS late night lineup with a mix of syndicated programs and the network's overnight newscast, Up to the Minute ; channel 6 expanded its 24-hour schedule to weekends in September 2001.
On April 2, 2002, Benedek—which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 22—announced it would sell off its 22 television stations, most of which were based in the Midwestern and Western United States, to Albany, Georgia-based Gray Communications Systems for $500 million. The purchase would have made KAUZ a sister station to fellow CBS affiliate KXII in the nearby Sherman–Ada market, which Gray had purchased from KXII Broadcasters, Inc. in April 1999. Benedek subsequently agreed to sell KAUZ to Chelsey Broadcasting in June 2002; the sale, completed on October 21, 2002, was part of a $30 million piecemeal group acquisition by Chelsey that also involved seven of KAUZ's sister stations that Gray had chosen not to acquire. In September 2003, Chelsey agreed to sell KAUZ to Hoak Media for $8.2 million.
JSA with KAUZ-TV
On July 31, 2009, Lawton-based Drewry Communications—then-owner of KSWO-TV—purchased the non-license assets of KAUZ from Hoak Media and assumed some operational responsibilities for KAUZ under joint sales and shared services agreements. The agreement, which took effect on August 3, allowed KSWO-TV to provide advertising and promotional services for KAUZ, while Hoak would retain responsibilities over channel 6's programming, master control operations and production services.The JSA/SSA arrangement resulted in all five of the market's major commercial television stations—as well as the affiliates of all six of the largest English-language networks—being placed under the operational control of two entities, as Nexstar Media Group already owns KFDX-TV, and operates Fox affiliate KJTL and MyNetworkTV affiliate KJBO-LP through a shared services agreement with the owner of the latter two stations, Mission Broadcasting. However, unlike the SSA formed in 1999 between KFDX and KJTL when the latter was purchased by Mission, the operations of KAUZ remained largely autonomous from those of KSWO; both stations maintain separate studio facilities, news departments and non-management staff. However, KAUZ-TV laid off four staffers following the formation of the JSA/SSA—general manager Mike deLier, news director Dan Garcia, sales manager Randy Stone and news photographer Jim Allen—with those positions being assumed by existing KSWO-TV staff.
In January 2012, KAUZ-TV became the third television station in the Wichita Falls-Lawton market to being carrying syndicated programming in high definition. The switch was part of a series of upgrades to KSWO and KAUZ's shared master control facility at the former's Lawton studio, which also allowed the seamless insertion of on-screen severe weather alert maps, news and school/event closing tickers, and Emergency Alert System tests during network and syndicated programming on both stations without downgrading HD content to standard definition.
In February 2014, Hoak reached an agreement to sell KAUZ's license assets to KAUZ Media, Inc., a company controlled by Bill W. Burgess, Jr.; the joint sales and shared services agreements with KSWO were to continue following the license transfer. The maneuver occurred after Hoak had sold its other television properties to Gray Television in November 2013.