Branding Telemundo St. Joseph | ||
Channels Digital: 30 (UHF)
Virtual: 30 (PSIP) Affiliations Telemundo
(to become a CBS affiliate June 1, 2017) Owner News-Press & Gazette Company
(News-Press TV, LLC) First air date January 1, 2014; 3 years ago (January 1, 2014) Call letters' meaning The WB St. JOseph
(original callsign of sister station KNPG-LD) | ||
KBJO-LD, formerly KNPG-LD, virtual and UHF digital channel 30, is a Telemundo-affiliated television station located in Saint Joseph, Missouri, United States. The station is owned by the News-Press & Gazette Company, and is a sister station to Fox affiliate (and the company's television flagship) KNPN-LD (channel 26) and NBC-CW affiliate KNPG-LD (channel 21). The three stations share studio facilities located in News-Press & Gazette's company headquarters (which also house operations for the St. Joseph News-Press and local news and weather channel News-Press NOW) on Edmond Street and Interstate 29 in downtown Saint Joseph; KBJO maintains transmitter facilities located between South 16th and Duncan Streets (adjacent to U.S. 36), just southeast of downtown Saint Joseph.
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History
The station traces its history back to June 2, 2012, when News-Press and Gazette Company signed on KNPN-LD as the St. Joseph market's Fox affiliate, the first broadcast television station to have been built and signed on by the locally based company. The station affiliated its fourth digital subchannel with Telemundo, which replaced the network's national feed on local cable providers as the Spanish-language network did not have an existing affiliate in Missouri.
On December 19, 2012, News-Press & Gazette acquired a low-power digital television license in St. Joseph, K30ND-D from DTV America 1, LLC of Sunrise, Florida; concurrent with the consummation of the purchase, the station's call letters were changed to KNPG-LD (in reference to its parent company).
The station signed on the air on January 1, 2014. In addition to carrying programming on its main signal in high definition, Telemundo programming continues to be simulcast in HD over KNPN's third digital subchannel (which replaced CW programming on that subchannel after KBJO-LD signed on in March 2013). Although both stations are low-power, the coverage area of KNPN is still significantly larger than that of KNPG. Low-powered television stations are exempt from the must-carry and retransmission consent regulations that full-powered stations enjoy, meaning that KNPG's carriage on other area cable systems besides Suddenlink and satellite providers is not guaranteed.
On August 18, 2016, News-Press and Gazette Company announced that it would transfer the KNPG-LD callsign to its CW-affiliated sister station on channel 21, then KBJO-LD, as part of that station's conversion into the market's first locally based NBC affiliate (channel 21 joined the network on November 1 of that year, with The CW Plus feed moving to a newly created digital subchannel). The CW affiliation was moved to subchannel 21.2 and KBJO-LD's callsign was relocated to channel 30, which remains a Telemundo affiliate.
Pending CBS affiliation
On February 24, 2017, News-Press & Gazette Company announced that KBJO would switch its primary affiliation to CBS on June 1. The move will return the network to the area for the first time since June 1967, when KFEQ-TV (channel 2, now KQTV) – which had been affiliated with CBS since its sign-on in September 1953 – became a full-time ABC affiliate; the network's Kansas City affiliate, KCTV (channel 5), which provides city-grade signal coverage in Saint Joseph proper, has served as the area's default CBS station since that point. It is unclear how this would affect KBJO-LD's existing Telemundo affiliation, although given that NPG carries Telemundo on its stations in other markets, it is likely to move to a digital subchannel, likely a new LD2 subchannel on KBJO-LD.
As NPG already controls the market's Fox, NBC and CW affiliations respectively through KNPN and KNPG, the move will give the St. Joseph area in-market affiliates of all five major English-language commercial broadcast networks; the MyNetworkTV programming service – which is received in the area through KCTV's Meredith Corporation-owned sister station KSMO-TV (channel 62) – will become the outlier among the country's conventional broadcast networks without a local affiliate in St. Joseph (KCTV's MyNetworkTV-affiliated sister station, KSMO-TV, is receivable over-the-air and is also carried on Suddenlink Communications, Dish Network and DirecTV in the St. Joseph market).
News operation
Although the station is co-owned with KNPN-LD, which produces its own newscasts, KBJO-LD does not broadcast any of them.