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| City | Tacoma, Washington |
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| Programming | |
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| Ownership | |
| Owner | Fox Television Stations, LLC |
| KZJO | |
| History | |
First air date | August 2, 1953 |
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Former channel number(s) |
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Call sign meaning | Station was owned by the Clover Park School District |
| Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 33894 |
| ERP | 30 kW |
| HAAT | 610 m (2,001 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 47°32′52″N 122°48′27″W / 47.54778°N 122.80750°W |
| Translator(s) |
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| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | www |
KCPQ (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Tacoma, Washington, United States, serving as the Fox network outlet for the Seattle area. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside MyNetworkTV station KZJO (channel 22). The two stations share studios on Westlake Avenue in Seattle's Westlake neighborhood; KCPQ's main transmitter is located on Gold Mountain in Bremerton.
The station signed on in August 1953 as KMO-TV, the television outgrowth of Tacoma radio station KMO. It was briefly an NBC network affiliate until another Seattle station signed on; the next year, KMO radio and television were sold to separate owners. The Seattle broadcaster J. Elroy McCaw bought channel 13, changed the call letters to KTVW, and ran it as an independent station. While KTVW produced a number of local programs, McCaw, a famously parsimonious owner, never converted the station to broadcast in color, and its syndicated programming inventory was considered meager. McCaw died in August 1969; three years later, his estate sold the station to the Blaidon Mutual Investors Corporation. While Blaidon tried several new programs and began color telecasting, the station continued to underperform financially. Two attempts to sell KTVW to out-of-state buyers failed because of its high liabilities. After a walkout by employees in January and the appointment of a receiver in July, KTVW was ordered closed on December 12, 1974.
The Clover Park School District in Lakewood purchased KTVW at bankruptcy auction in 1975. The station returned to the air on a non-commercial basis as KCPQ in January 1976, serving as an effective replacement for Clover Park's UHF station, KPEC-TV (channel 56). Changes to the structure of school financing in Washington and the refusal of voters to approve bonds to rebuild Clover Park High School forced the school district to sell KCPQ back into commercial use. After being off the air for most of 1980 to relocate its transmitter, KCPQ returned under new owner Kelly Broadcasting, who rebuilt it as a more competitive independent station. During Kelly's 19-year ownership of KCPQ, the station became a Fox affiliate, relocated its studios from Lakewood to Seattle, and established its present local news department.
KCPQ was sold to Tribune Broadcasting in 1999 as part of Kelly's exit from the broadcasting industry. As Tribune expanded the station's news output, it also had to fend off overtures by Fox, which had sought to own KCPQ on several occasions since the 1990s and at one point threatened to buy another station to broadcast Fox programming. Tribune was purchased by Nexstar Media Group in 2019; Nexstar then traded KCPQ to Fox as part of an exchange of Fox affiliates in three cities.
- ^ "Facility Technical Data for KCPQ". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.