KSDK (channel 5) is a television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group; Nexstar also owns Fox affiliate KTVI (channel 2) and CW station KPLR-TV (channel 11). KSDK's studios are located on Highlands Plaza Drive in the Cheltenham neighborhood of St. Louis, with transmitter facilities in Shrewsbury, Missouri.
History
The station first signed on the air as KSD-TV on February 8, 1947. It was owned by the Pulitzer Publishing Company, publishers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and owners of KSD radio (550 AM, now KTRS). It was the ninth television station to sign on in the United States and the first television station in Missouri. The station's original studios were located adjacent to the Post-Dispatch building on Olive Street. It was the second commercial station located west of the Mississippi River, following KTLA in Los Angeles, which had signed on just 17 days earlier. In the early days, KSD produced much of its own programming and developed its own talent pool. Many St. Louis television pioneers from KSD-TV came from radio, including Frank Eschen, Kay Morton, Russ Severin and Dave Russell."St. Louis Television, the early years" , Doug Quick Online, Doug Quick, August 14, 2013. Retrieved on 3, June 2014.
Because of a freeze on new television station licenses imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), KSD-TV was the only television station in the St. Louis market, until WTVI (channel 54, now KTVI channel 2, a Fox affiliate) signed on in August 1953. Often known as simply "Channel 5", the station has always been an NBC affiliate, owing to KSD radio's longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network. The station is currently the longest-tenured affiliate in the market of any major broadcast television network. In its early years, Channel 5 also carried secondary affiliations with CBS, DuMont and ABC. In the early 1960s, Channel 5 became the first St. Louis television station to broadcast in color.
After Pulitzer sold KSD radio to Combined Communications Corporation in 1979 (prior to Combined's merger into the Gannett Company that same year), KSD-TV, in order to comply with an FCC regulation in place then that stated that TV and radio stations in the same market, but different ownership had to use different call signs, modified theirs to the current KSDK on September 10, 1979. (Guide to reading History Cards) In 1982, the station relocated its studios from its original location on Olive Street to Market Street in Downtown St. Louis. In 1983, Pulitzer traded channel 5 to Multimedia, Inc. in return for WFBC (now WYFF) in Greenville, South Carolina, and WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in what was a rare instance of one company's flagship station being traded for another. Pulitzer earned a handsome return on its original investment in KSD radio in 1922. During the 1980s and 1990s, KSDK was the highest-rated NBC affiliate in the country.
In 1990, KSDK dropped the longtime Eyewitness News branding and rebranded its newscasts as NewsChannel 5; the station also began to operate on a 24-hour-a-day schedule. On July 24, 1995, Multimedia was purchased by the Gannett Company, with the acquisition finalized on December 4.THE MEDIA BUSINESS; Expanding in TV, Gannett Agrees to Buy Multimedia, The New York Times, July 25, 1995.Gannett, Multimedia announce merger agreement , Gannett press release, December 4, 1995. In 1998, KSDK debuted the "Window on St. Louis", a street-side studio located in the same downtown St. Louis building that also houses KSDK's other studios. The local program Show Me St. Louis used this studio for broadcasts for nearly 20 years. The Window on St. Louis was modeled on Todays "Window on the World".
In an attempt to provide St. Louisans with local and national election results during the 2004 elections, KSDK partnered with PBS member station KETC (channel 9) to simulcast election coverage. The KSDK/KETC partnership continued through September 2005, when, along with radio partners KYKY (98.1 FM) and KEZK (102.5 FM), a telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief was simulcast.
KSDK produced the first broadcast of any local program in St. Louis in high definition, when it broadcast the St. Louis Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 24, 2005. Incidentally, the 2005 parade also marked the final year that the event, which had been a Thanksgiving Day tradition on KSDK, would be broadcast on the station, as the parade moved to CBS affiliate KMOV (channel 4) in 2006.
On June 29, 2015, the Gannett Company split in two, with one side specializing in print media and the other side specializing in broadcast and digital media. KSDK was retained by the latter company, named Tegna.
In 2017, the station re-branded as "5 On Your Side".
In January 2026, the station moved its studios to a building in the Highlands development on the site of the old St. Louis Arena in the city's Cheltenham section. KSDK was the last St. Louis-area television station to have its studios in downtown and is the only station with studios in the city itself; KMOV had previously moved from its One Memorial Drive studios to Maryland Heights in 2023, KDNL-TV (who had long abandoned local news) moved production from Cole Street to the University Club Tower in Richmond Heights the year prior, and KPLR left their Chase Park Plaza Hotel studios for a new purpose-built facility in Maryland Heights in 2003, joined five years later by KTVI. Incidentally KSDK's new location is not far from the site of KTVI's old studios at the corner of Oakland and Hampton Avenues (now a Mercedes-Benz dealership).
Nexstar Media Group, owner of KTVI and KPLR-TV (channel 11) in St. Louis, acquired Tegna in a deal announced in August 2025 and completed on March 19, 2026. Nexstar was permitted by the FCC to hold three TV station licenses in markets such as St. Louis.
Local programming
News operation
KSDK presently broadcasts 37 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with six hours each weekday and hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). The station also produces five half-hour episodes of Show Me St. Louis each week.
KSDK dominated the news ratings in St. Louis for the better part of its first six decades on the air. KMOX-TV (now KMOV) took the lead in the late 1960s, but KSDK regained the #1 spot in the early 1980s and kept it for most of the next two decades, with some of the highest (and by some measures, the highest) rated newscasts in the nation. For much of that time, its main anchors stayed at the station for 10 years or more. At one point, its 6 p.m. newscast ended with local elementary schoolchildren flashing the hand signs for "5" and "1", signifying that, as a promo featuring the kids said, "Even a second grader could tell you that Channel 5 is number 1."
During the spring 2004 sweeps, it lost its first-place position at 10 p.m. to KMOV, and the two stations have traded the ratings crown in that timeslot several times since then. KMOV has also closed its ratings gap in several other timeslots, due in part to NBC's overall weaker ratings since 2004. KSDK's ratings dominance began to slip dramatically in 2009, first losing late news to KMOV, and then morning news to KTVI. In 2013, its ratings went into free fall. The November 2013 ratings book saw KSDK tumble into last place for the first time in its history. KTVI easily won the morning news and KMOV swept the rest.
A sports wrap-up program previously aired on Sunday evenings after the 10 p.m. newscast called Sports Plus. It was originally hosted by Mike Bush until he moved from sports director to news anchor in 2004, and then hosted by sports director Rene Knott, who became the news co-anchor of Today in St. Louis, KSDK's weekday morning newscast, in 2017.
From August 1989 until September 2011, Today in St. Louis co-anchors Jennifer Blome and Art Holliday had one of the longest anchor pairings in U.S. local television history. In 2011, Holliday was reassigned to co-anchor a new half-hour 4 p.m. newscast alongside Kay Quinn that debuted on September 12, 2011, while Blome was paired with Pat McGonigle (formerly of WHEC-TV in Rochester) on the morning newscast.KSDK splitting up Jennifer and Art after 22 years, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 29, 2011.
On September 12, 2005, KSDK debuted a half-hour weekday newscast at 10 a.m., following the third hour of NBC's Today; the newscast was discontinued in September 2009, but returned on September 12, 2011, as an hour-long program (as a result, the fourth hour of Today airs on a one-hour delay at 11 a.m.). On February 6, 2006, KSDK became the first television station in St. Louis, and the seventh station in the United States, to broadcast all newscasts and locally produced programming in high definition; it also became the first St. Louis area station to stream all of its newscasts online. On August 13, 2007, KSDK debuted Online @ 9, a 10-minute news webcast on the station's website that was tailored to an online audience. That online newscast has been discontinued.
On November 11, 2010, KSDK entered into a news share agreement with Sinclair Broadcast Group–owned ABC affiliate KDNL-TV, to produce two pre-recorded half-hour newscasts at 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. weeknights for that station starting on January 3, 2011 (prior to the agreement, KDNL had not run any local newscasts since it shut down its news department in October 2001); in addition, KDNL also aired weekend rebroadcasts of KSDK's entertainment/features program Show Me St. Louis. KDNL general manager Tom Tipton stated that the station did not want to run simulcast or repurposed newscasts in its efforts to return daily newscasts to channel 30. The arrangement was unusual given that KSDK and KDNL are both "Big Three" network affiliates, and the fact that the newscasts on both stations competed against one another. The agreement with KDNL was to have ended on December 31, 2013; however, it was extended for another month until January 31, 2014.
On September 12, 2011, along with the relaunch of its 10 a.m. newscast and the addition of a 4 p.m. newscast, Today in St. Louis expanded from to three hours on weekday mornings, now running from 4 to 7 a.m.; while the noon newscast was reduced to a half-hour with Show Me St. Louis being moved to fill the remaining half-hour. With these additions, KSDK was reduced to only three hours of syndicated daytime shows to back up its newscasts outside of NBC network programming.
By 2014, KSDK had canceled its 10 a.m. newscast, with a now hour-long Show Me St. Louis taking up the 10 a.m. hour, with the noon newscast also expanding back to 60 minutes in length. By 2017, Show Me St. Louis was again only 30 minutes, with infomercials filling the 10:30 half hour. The noon news was typically 30 minutes long with occasional extensions to 60 minutes, with another infomercial filling the 12:30 slot. In 2017, KSDK's noon news was discontinued, and replaced with a second run of Jeopardy! In 2018, Today in St. Louis was reduced to two hours on weekday mornings, running from 5 to 7 a.m. In 2020, KSDK expanded Today in St. Louis back to hours, running from 4:30 to 7 a.m. In addition, KSDK revived its 10 a.m. newscast for a third time and has moved Show Me St. Louis to 10:30 a.m.
In October 2021, KSDK revived its noon newscast and moved their first of 2 Jeopardy! slots to 12:30 where it remained until The Ellen DeGeneres Show ended in May 2022. After which, Inside Edition moved to 3 p.m. on KSDK from 4:30 on KMOV and Jeopardy! reruns moved to 3:30 while new episodes continue to air at 4:30.