St. Louis has five commercial TV stations. The one on the UHF side, KDNL-TV, does not get much press, largely because it has never been a significant contender for the St. Louis television audience.
When Atlanta-based Cox Broadcasting Co. acquired Channel 30 in early 1982, they immediately announced plans to initiate subscription TV in hope of capturing the non-cabled city audience. That experiment with “Preview,” Cox Communications own pay-TV service, flopped in February 1983, for a variety of reasons.
For the past year, KDNL-TV has been trying to reposition itself as a serious contender in St. Louis TV. Much of the responsibility for exorcizing KDNL-TV’s step-child image rests on the shoulders of William Viands, vice president and general manager. Viands arrived in St. Louis 15 months ago, after managing two Cox radio stations in Miami. He is a 22-year Cox veteran.
KDNL-TV ad 1983
One of the more dramatic steps undertaken by Cox to upgrade its St. Louis television property has been contracting for a major overhaul of the station’s studios at Tucker and Cole Streets. Cox is spending $750,000 to remodel the station’s entrance and lobby, lay new carpeting, [add] new walls, ceilings and lighting in the 35-year-old building that once housed KMOX-TV, Channel 4. Cox has spent a cool half-million on equipment and $200,000 for new furniture.
One of the more notable achievements of the remodeling is that the building is being rid of its ugly green “emergency room” tile.
Remodeled studios are no guarantee of higher ratings. Good ratings come from a revamped programing schedule, and Viands shared some thoughts on the sort of fare KDNL will be pushing during its 24-hour broadcasting day.
Nostalgia is every independent station’s staple fare – KDNL is no exception.
“It’s just amazing. I gave my secretary a stack of letters today from people saying ‘Thank you for the Lucy Show’ or ‘Why did we move Perry Mason?’ or ‘We really enjoy watching the Andy Griffith Show,’” says Viands.
Adding to the hockey, soccer, and wrestling, Viands plans to re-acquire the “Whitey Herzog Show” in the near future.
One of KDNL’s big disappointments is the late night talk and entertainment program “Thicke of the Night.” Mediocre ratings forced KDNL to shift time slots for the show, says Viands, because Alan Thicke was no competitor to Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.”
“Thicke isn’t as funny and durable as we hoped,” says Viands. “Some of the people on with him are great, but they’re overworked . The show would fly a lot better if it was 60 minutes, I think. Coming up with 90 minutes, five days a week with original material is difficult.”
Viands thinks “Thicke” producer Fred Silverman could do the show – and KDNL’s ratings – a big favor by taking the Thicke out of “Thicke” and putting someone in like Bill Cosby.
“We have to go out and negotiate a separate deal for every single program we have on the air, 24 hours a day,” says Viands. All-day programing also means selling advertising for wee morning time slots in which the audience largely consists of insomniacs.
KDNL added radio-television personality Otis Thomas as the station’s news director in 1983. Thomas provides one-minute local news updates throughout the day, plus an entertainment feature, “Otis Thomas on the Town” which is couples with Cable News Network’s “The Hollywood Minute.”
KDNL also carried an hour CNN newscast weekdays at 5:30 p.m. KDNL carries three community affairs programs: Viands is especially proud of one: “KDNL Capitol Report,” taped at Cox Communications Center in Washington, D.C., featuring weekly interviews with Missouri and Illinois legislators.
On March 1, KDNL celebrates one year of returning to full-time service. “Our programing is worth looking at,” says Viands. If viewers agree, KDNL will be the fastest growing St. Louis station in 1984 – maybe even a contender.
By Elizabeth Freeman
(Originally published in the St. Louis Journalism Review 2/1984).
NewsCorp, Owned by Rupert Murdoch, Purchased KTVI in 1996
Rupert Murdoch Buys Channel 2
The new owner of KTVI (Channel 2) is Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp., which owns Fox Network, 20th Century Fox Film Studios as well as countless other media outlets around the world. Murdoch bought New World Communications, Channel 2’s owner and the owner of nine other television stations around the country. Murdoch has owned 20 percent of New World and bought the other 80 percent of the company for $3 billion.
Murdoch’s company is the fourth owner of Channel 2 in the past four years. Times Mirror sold Channel 2 along with its other television stations to San Antonio-based Argyle Communications back in 1993 for a little more than $300 million. Argyle then sold its stations to New World for more than $700 million in a deal that took effect in the spring of 1995. As part of its ownership deal with Murdoch, New World converted all of its television stations to Fox Network affiliates. The affiliation change in St. Louis, which moved Channel 2 from ABC to Fox, happened last August.
The biggest impact of a change in ownership at a television station – or any other media outlet, for that matter – is among the employees at that station. It can be very unsettling. It can mean a new general manager, a new news director and the different visions these people bring to their jobs.
For now that doesn’t seem to be an issue. The news department leadership at Channel 2 has been stable, but the station has had four general managers over the past several years. Current KTVI-TV President and General Manager Spencer Koch has been in the job since July 1995. Industry observers expect him to continue in the roll under Murdoch’s ownership.
(Originally published in the St. Louis Journalism Review 9/1996).
At St. Louis’ First Station, the Earliest Days Were Anything But Smooth
TV, and How It Grew – Managing the electronic wonder-child brings a whole new set of skills into play, including the ability to duck, squat, ad lib and find the mike.
Whether television has become adult had best be left to debate between the man who won’t leave his receiver to come to dinner and the man who wouldn’t have one of the things in his house. But for those of us who have been around it since its birth in St. Louis, there’s no question that television has passed its infancy. That infancy left scars on everyone who had anything to do with the child.
KSD-TV went on the air February 8, 1947, with the latest equipment money could buy and a crew competent to operate the equipment. But it turned out that one other factor was required – experience in producing television shows. And the only way to gain such experience was for us to go ahead and produce them, learning the hard way.
One of our first shocks was the discovery that our cameras, those magnificent $15,000 objects, built by RCA’s finest brains, had no view finders. In its eagerness to get on the air, KSD-TV had badgered RCA into selling and lending equipment that was, in this respect at least, incomplete. There was no way for a cameraman to see the picture he was taking, to frame it properly and get into focus.
TK-30 Camera
For those first few weeks, until view finders were obtained, the operators blindly pushed their cameras forward and backward, swung them from side to side, changed lenses and turned their focusing knobs, completely in the hands of the director, who could see what they were getting on the monitor screens in the control room.
During those early days, the company that made ad slides had trouble centering them properly, so that often part of the message did not appear on the screen. One night announcer Carl McIntire was reading a beer commercial behind a series of slides. The first slide read “It’s dry!” The second read “It’s smooth!” The third one read “It’s goo.” McIntire, choked with laughter, never did finish the commercial.
It was about that time that McIntire became known as the Range Rider. He was serving as announcer at a performance of a hillbilly band which called itself “The Range Riders,” and decided to move from one microphone to another, across the path of the camera. To avoid being seen by the audience, he squatted and proceeded across the floor in a series of little leaps. But he had miscalculated the range of the camera, and as he passed the lens, the audience saw him jogging up and down for all the world like Hopalong Cassidy.
KSD-TV began operations with modern lighting equipment, so that its performers never suffered the broiling administered by the lights of the pre-war television stations. But even up-to-date lights put out a certain amount of heat. In a production called “Vodvil Varieties,” there was a shot of Bob Ingham reading a theater program. The camera was supposed to peer over Ingham’s shoulder and pick up the program page, and to make the words legible a thousand watt spot was mounted about 18 inches behind him. Bob smelled something burning. Sure enough, it was his hair.
On another occasion, Ingham was conducting a sports program in the studio, first sitting at a desk, then getting up and walking over to a blackboard. Since he was using a microphone suspended from a boom, it was necessary for the engineer to loosen the boom arm and follow him across the studio with the mike. But the engineer, whose name was Arthur, turned the wrong knob, and Bob glanced up to see the microphone descending toward his head – fast. He ducked just in time, and remained huddled in his chair while Arthur wrestled with the boom counterweight and finally hauled the mike out of the way. This incident, trivial in itself, has been immortalized in a poem written by another engineer, entitled, naturally, “When Arthur Lowered the Boom.”
John Roedel
More embarrassing was John Roedel’s microphone hunt at Kiel Auditorium. John was going to interview some prominent individual or other, between matches on a wrestling program. The KSD-TV microphone was under the ring, in easy reach – but nobody had told him that. And as he began to speak, he became suddenly aware of the mike’s absence. He looked around uncertainly, reached for the microphone attached to the public address system, backed away in response to wild signals from engineers, and finally discovered the right one – all in full view of the television audience, because the ring was the only lighted spot in the big convention hall, and there was no place else to swing the camera during the search.
But if inanimate things such as microphones caused trouble, it was nothing [compared] to the anguish created by live animals. Horses, dogs, mules, even Elsie the cow, appeared on KSD-TV at one time or another. And entering the studio seemed to stimulate their natural functions, with untidy effects. After Elsie’s visit, a stagehand spent an hour furiously sawing wood to make sawdust.
The stagehands finally became so irked at doubling as stable-boys that one of them, learning that a dog show was in prospect, decided to anticipate matters. He obtained a quantity of dog-repellent powder and sprinkled it liberally on the floor and the equipment used in the show. The effect exceeded his expectations somewhat. The puzzled dogs, sniffing the repellent as they approached the hurdles they were supposed leap and ladders they were supposed to climb, shied away in bewilderment. The show was a flop.
A debacle on another and, to the audience, much funnier type occurred during a live commercial for one of those new phonographs that plays without a needle. The demonstrator, Rush Hughes, inserted a record in a sort of drawer and closed it. Music flowed out smoothly – from a transcription on a studio turntable. Hughes, continuing to extol the virtues of the phonograph, pulled out the drawer and removed the record. But he found himself holding only a fragment of it. The record had crumpled when he closed the drawer.
The advertising agency in charge of another phonograph commercial was understandably incensed when, after the thing had been on the air for four or five weeks, it developed that the script, all the time, had included this enlightening sentence: “No tone from radio or phonograph.”
Sometimes, even when everything went completely according to plan, the result was amusing to certain listeners. As when, after a Romeo-and-Juliet balcony scene involving love-making that, even at the distance was somewhat torrid, [Russ] Severin stepped to the microphone and said: “And now – a timely message from U.S. Rubber.”
Probably the most elaborate fiasco in KSD-TV history was the Little Henry incident. Little Henry, of course, is the stripped-down 90-pound helicopter that is the pride of McDonnell Aircraft. NBC had just launched its nightly news network show and was anxious to demonstrate how it could pick up live features from any of its member cities. So it was determined that the St. Louis contribution, on this particular evening, would be a performance by Little Henry. Engineers worked for hours stringing cables and mounting lights at McDonnell’s airport plant. Little Henry was in fine shape, circling and hovering over the scene. Then, just as Frank Eschen received his NBC cue and launched into his account of the helicopter’s remarkable abilities, Little Henry faltered. Perhaps it was too much to expect him to escape stage-fright, with the eyes of television audiences in eight cities trained on him. At any rate, Little Henry dropped to the ground and crouched there stubbornly, while Eschen improvised an account of what he could do – if he wanted to.
KSD-TV has been on the air for some two-and-a-half years now, and the roughness has pretty well worn off. No longer do programs run fantastically off schedule; the network requires split-second timing. No longer do sets topple over and props turn up missing. But there is still so much in television that depends on human eyes and ears, minds and muscles, that funny things are going to go on happening. And no matter how machine-perfect everything else may run, it will still be possible for an announcer to say, as one said not long ago:
“This is KSD-TV, the St. Louis Past-Dispatch.”
By Jean Winkler
(Originally published in Page One in 1949. Jean Winkler began writing news for KSD-TV when the station went on the air.)
In a Large Newspaper Advertisement, the New UHF Station Addresses Viewers’ Frustrations
WTVI – Channel 54 – went on the air August 10th, only a month ago. Since then we have been flooded with questions about UHF television – questions from people who have converters and from people who don’t but are thinking of buying them, questions from servicemen making UHF conversions; questions from our advertisers.
We have bought the space for this advertisement to answer those questions. We want to tell you what we have done and how we overcame some serious problems.
Frankly, our signal strength – and thus, the picture on your TV screens – was not what it should have been during our first days on the air. We had to cut down our power on a number of occasions. Then we ran into a shortage of vital power tubes.
But today we are operating with rated power output from the antenna of 20,000 watts. Our pictures are coming in strong on television set screens in more than 95% of the Greater St. Louis area. Then, too, many of the early UHF installations were, we realize, hard to make. UHF was new to everybody concerned. By now, the television installers have gained experience. Competent installers, making careful installations with good equipment, are getting good pictures for their customers. Conversions are taking less time and costs are down.
Recently, we asked the nation’s largest service company to find out how WTVI was doing. Here is a report, dated September 3, from the manager of that company’s St. Louis district:
“We immediately made arrangements to have a truck equipped with tower and signal checking facilities to conduct a survey which would encompass the entire St. Louis and Belleville area. The results of that survey were, as you know, very gratifying, to say the least. There was no longer any doubt that WTVI had lived up to their obligation, and were providing the area with a very good UHF signal.
“Since that time we have completed many UHF conversions and installations with excellent results, with the percentage of failure being a small one indeed.”
We also hired the firm of George C. Davis of Washington, D.C., prominent consulting radio engineers, to examine WTVI and UHF in the Greater St. Louis area. The Davis firm has acted as consultants for dozens of television stations. Here is their report, in part:
“The results of a field intensity survey on Television Station WTVI indicate that for operation with rated power output from the transmitter, excellent television signals are provided over the entire St. Louis metropolitan area and environs except in areas receiving immediate shadowing from hills, buildings or other obstructions which receive lower field intensities. Satisfactory pictures are obtainable in these areas where normal care is exercised in the receiver installation, such as the employment of a good and properly located outdoor antenna, the use of a high quality transmission line, and the use of well designed and carefully tuned receiver or converter.”
To sum up, at first, WTVI had the technical difficulties that probably were inevitable with anything as new as UHF. Today we are putting out a first-class television picture with first-class programs.
If you don’t have UHF conversion yourself, look at the set of someone who does. You’ll see what we mean.
There is one vitally important point to remember about UHF television. You must have a proper conversion. In most cases, a proper conversion must include an outside UHF antenna for your set.
Here is what one of the largest service organizations in St. Louis has to say:
“There are very few locations in the 25-mile area surrounding your station where a satisfactory signal cannot be obtained. These specific locations where the signal is weak are usually down in ravines with heavy foliage, hills or buildings obstructing the signal.”
And here is a large electronics distributor talking:
“For the first two weeks of operation, more cuss words were expelled by the TV installers of St. Louis than the Navy personnel emits in a year. But gradually the installers have learned that a careful installation, using good equipment, will produce the finest pictures ever seen in St. Louis in well over 95 per cent of the area.”
You may still have questions about conversion. Any competent service company will, we are sure, be able to answer them.
This, in brief, is our story – a new enterprise, that had problems like any new enterprise. And it is the story of what we did about those problems.
WTVI provides entertainment for the whole family – fine network shows from Dumont and CBS, interesting local programs, top sporting events and feature-length movies.
