KSTW
KSTW, branded as Seattle 11, is an independent television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, serving the Seattle area. Owned by the CBS News and Stations group, the station maintains its transmitter on East Madison Street in Seattle's Cherry Hill neighborhood, and its offices are located in the Westlake neighborhood, just north of downtown.
As the first station to sign on in Tacoma, KSTW initially signed on in March 1953 as KTNT-TV, the area's CBS affiliate under the ownership of the Tacoma News Tribune. The station lost the affiliation when Seattle-licensed KIRO-TV signed on in 1958; both stations shared the affiliation for two years after their owners agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit over the switch. The station became KSTW in 1974 when it was acquired by a forerunner of Gaylord Broadcasting; it subsequently became one of the strongest independent stations in the country over two decades, reaching regional superstation status with widespread carriage on cable television systems in Washington and neighboring states/provinces. KSTW rejoined CBS in 1995 during a nationwide affiliation shuffle; two years later, the station became a UPN affiliate via a three-way deal involving it and KIRO-TV, which led it to join The CW when UPN shut down in 2006, carrying the network's programming until 2023, when CBS withdrew its eight affiliates from the network after selling its ownership stake to Nexstar Media Group.
KSTW is available on Canadian cable systems in southwestern British Columbia and Vancouver Island, on providers such as Rogers Cable and Telus Optik TV in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, Kamloops, Kelowna and Penticton.
History
Early history
The construction permit for the station was issued by the Federal Communications Commission on December 10, 1952. Chief Engineer Max Bice immediately ordered equipment through General Electric, and the equipment was delivered within 45 days. The antenna was in Milan, Italy and it was shipped by rail car to Tacoma. The transmitter arrived in Tacoma from Syracuse, New York, on February 9, 1953. It was installed on the next day, and work progressed rapidly. The original studios and transmitter house were located at South 11th Street and South Grant Avenue. The station tested with a 30,000-watt signal and received reports of reception from up to away.The station began broadcasting March 1, 1953, in Tacoma as KTNT-TV, named after its founder, the Tacoma News Tribune. At the time, it was a primary CBS affiliate and sister station to KTNT radio. During the late 1950s, the station was briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. On February 21, 1954, KTNT received permission from the FCC to increase the transmitter's power to 316,000 watts, and to move the transmitter to a new tower near View Park, Washington just south of Harper on the Fragaria Access Road. Parts of the old transmitting equipment were loaned to Portland, Oregon's KGW-TV, due to the damage from the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
In February 1958, KIRO-TV took to the air as the Seattle–Tacoma market's exclusive CBS affiliate. After being informed by CBS that its affiliation would be discontinued, KTNT-TV filed an antitrust lawsuit against CBS and KIRO-TV, on claims the network had a pre-existing agreement to affiliate with KIRO-TV when and if it ever went on the air. CBS agreed to settle the suit in 1960 by taking on both KIRO-TV and KTNT-TV as primary affiliates. This arrangement lasted until September 1962, when channel 7 became the sole CBS station for western Washington. Channel 11 was left to once again become an independent station, the second in the market after KTVW.
During the late 1960s, the station also occasionally carried NBC prime time programs preempted by Seattle SuperSonics games on KING-TV. For one month, in May 1967, the station was also an affiliate of the United Network, a short-lived attempt to create a fourth commercial television network nationally. During the decade, KTNT also presented horror movies under the Nightmare! banner in the early 1960s on Saturday nights, airing around 10:30 p.m. before sign-off.
New ownership
Due to new newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership restrictions enacted by the FCC in the early 1970s, the Tacoma News Tribunes ownership of the KTNT stations were under threat of potential FCC divestiture. As a result, KTNT-TV was sold to the WKY Television System, forerunner of Gaylord Broadcasting, in 1974; the new ownership changed the station's call letters to KSTW on March 1. With the new ownership and call letters came a new slogan, "Good Lookin' 11", as well as a new logo—a stylized "circle 11" with the circle modified to accommodate the "11". Later in the decade, KSTW became a regional superstation. At its height, it was available on nearly every cable system in Washington, as well as parts of Oregon, northern Idaho, and much of British Columbia. The station also carried many daytime CBS programs preempted by KIRO-TV during the 1970s. From 1976 to 1979, John Lippman worked at KSTW, building a news department.During the late 1980s, KSTW branded on-air as "KSTWashington" and, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, ran the traditional fare of cartoons, off-network sitcoms, westerns, old movies, and a local 10 p.m. newscast. It was also the over-the-air home of the Seattle Mariners and SuperSonics. Although it was one of the strongest independent stations in the country, it passed on the Fox affiliation when that network launched in 1986; that affiliation was picked up by KCPQ. This was mainly because most of the smaller markets in KSTW's cable footprint had enough stations to provide a local Fox affiliate, making the prospect of KSTW as a multi-market Fox affiliate unattractive to Gaylord.
In 1993, Gaylord agreed to affiliate KSTW, and its sister stations KTVT in Fort Worth, WVTV in Milwaukee and KHTV in Houston, with the new WB Television Network, at that time projected to launch late in the summer of 1994. However, delays in the network's launch led to Gaylord suing to void the affiliation agreements in July 1994, which was followed a month later by a breach of contract countersuit by The WB. In the meantime, CBS found itself without an affiliate in Dallas–Fort Worth when its longtime affiliate there, KDFW, switched to Fox. CBS approached Gaylord for an affiliation with KTVT. Gaylord agreed, on condition that KSTW be included as part of the deal. CBS agreed, partly because at the time, KSTW was the only non-Big Three station in Seattle with a fully functioning news department.
As a result, CBS returned to channel 11 on March 13, 1995, in what was to have been a ten-year affiliation agreement. The WB ultimately signed with KTZZ-TV weeks before its eventual January 1995 launch. With the CBS affiliation, KSTW was dropped from cable systems in areas of Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho, due to the presence of Spokane's KREM-TV. Even as a CBS affiliate, KSTW still ran a number of off-network sitcoms, and initially only programmed two half-hour newscasts, at 6 and 11 p.m. Although it carried an 11 p.m. newscast throughout its run with the network, daytime newscasts aired in various timeslots during KSTW's third tenure with CBS, eventually settling at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. KSTW used the same vertically parallelogrammed "11" logo and on-air branding as its Dallas sister station KTVT during this time.
The station was put up for sale in October 1996, with Gaylord stating in its earnings report that "its financial results have not met expectations." On January 20, 1997, Gaylord announced that KSTW would be purchased by Cox Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises, for $160 million. The deal was finalized on May 30, 1997. Cox had plans to expand the news department at KSTW and make it more competitive with the other stations in the market. However, rival KIRO-TV had been put up for sale just weeks before KSTW, as the Belo Corporation's merger with the Providence Journal Company gave it ownership of KING-TV.
Paramount Stations Group, meanwhile, was in the process of selling off the non-UPN stations it had inherited from Viacom, including KMOV in St. Louis—Paramount and Chris-Craft Industries launched UPN in January 1995, the same month The WB went on the air. As a result, on February 20, 1997, a three-way station trade was arranged, in which Paramount/Viacom would swap KMOV to Belo for KIRO-TV, which would then be dealt to Cox in exchange for KSTW and $70 million—a deal that came as a shock to KSTW employees. The two Seattle stations retained their respective syndicated programming, but exchanged network affiliations once again, with KSTW becoming a UPN affiliate, and KIRO returning to CBS. The deal was finalized on June 2, 1997. About 50 people would lose their jobs at the station.
KSTW began to air UPN programming on June 30, 1997, along with sitcoms, movies, cartoons, a few first-run syndicated shows, and the return of the 10 p.m. newscast it had prior to the CBS switch. The station canceled the 10 p.m. newscast in December 1998. Viacom acquired CBS in 2000, bringing CBS and KSTW under common ownership, and making KSTW and the aforementioned KTVT sister stations once again. The cartoons on KSTW had disappeared, and more first-run syndicated talk and reality shows moved to KSTW. In July 2001, KSTW moved their studios from Tacoma to Renton; despite the move, KSTW remains licensed to Tacoma to this day.
CW affiliation
On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and KSTW parent CBS Corporation announced they would shut down The WB and UPN, and launch The CW Television Network, which would largely feature programming from both networks; KSTW was announced as the Seattle station for the new network; the station rebranded as "CW 11" on August 11, ahead of the network's launch on September 18, 2006. Tribune Company-owned WB station KTWB-TV became an affiliate of MyNetworkTV.In November 2006, after cost-cutting measures were put in place by CBS, it was announced that KSTW would become a "hosting station", with master control located at the facilities of the company's San Francisco duopoly of KPIX and KBCW.