KGW (channel 8) is a television station in Portland, Oregon, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group; Nexstar also owns CBS affiliate KOIN (channel 6) and CW station KRCW-TV (channel 32). KGW's studios are located on Jefferson Street in southwestern Portland, and its transmitter is located in the city's Sylvan-Highlands section.
KGW-TV began broadcasting on December 15, 1956. It was built by a consortium of the Seattle-based King Broadcasting Company and Portland investors, owners of Portland radio station KGW (620 AM). It was the fourth television station on the air in Portland and took the ABC affiliation before switching to NBC in 1959. The present studios were completed in 1965 after the station's original facilities were placed in the path of Interstate 405. From the start, KGW-TV had a strong news team, with multiple on-air personnel who remained at the station for decades as well as commentator Tom McCall, who left the station in 1964 to run for public office and served two terms as Governor of Oregon. KGW's Evening show, introduced in 1975, was one of several weeknight feature magazines to predate the syndicated PM Magazine and aired in one form or another for 21 years. In news, KGW contended for number-one ratings through the 1970s but had inconsistent performances in the 1980s.
In 1990, the Providence Journal Company acquired King Broadcasting; the Belo Corporation in turn acquired Providence Journal in 1997. After several years of a slump in news ratings and a period of four news directors in the span of two years, the station found stability and ratings success in the mid- to late 1990s and reached number one in the 2000s and early 2010s, but news viewership began to decline as the station slipped to second place in the 2010s. For 25 years from 1992 to 2017, KGW was the broadcast television home of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team. Belo sold its television stations in 2013 to the Gannett Company, which reorganized as Tegna in 2015; Nexstar, which already owned KOIN and KRCW, acquired Tegna in 2026, though integration activities have been halted by a federal injunction. KGW produces local newscasts and non-news programming covering Oregon and southwest Washington.
History The scramble for channels Portland, Oregon, was one of the largest cities in the United States without a television station prior to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) freezing new station assignments in 1948. The freeze ended in 1952, and Portland was assigned three VHF channels for commercial use: 6, 8, and 12. Prior to the freeze, five groups had applied with the FCC for what were then four available commercial channels. Among the pre-freeze applicants were radio stations KGW (620 AM), which had sought channel 6, and KOIN, which was the only applicant for channel 8. Two groups had applied for channel 10, which became reserved non-commercial educational after the freeze lifted. KEX, owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting, shifted its application from channel 10 to channel 8. Three other groups sought channel 8. Portland Television, Inc., was formed by a group of local businessmen. John R. Latourette Sr. and his son John R. Latourette Jr., partners in a Portland law firm, formed Cascade Television Company. The fourth applicant to file for channel 8 was North Pacific Television, in which Seattle-based King Broadcasting was the majority stockholder. Portland interests also participated in North Pacific Television, including president Gordon Orput, an insurance executive, and men active in the real estate and oil industries. The applications were designated for comparative hearing in September 1952 as the commission prepared to hear applications for all of Portland's contested channels. With twelve applicants seeking the four channels, months of testimony were required.
Hearings on channel 8 began on January 26, 1953, as the third group of applicants to be analyzed. First to present its case was Portland Television, which had to explain similarities between program proposals in its bid and those of a sister company, Denver Television, for a station in Denver. Next was KEX, followed by North Pacific Television. North Pacific relied heavily on its experience as the only pre-freeze television broadcaster in the Pacific Northwest, operating Seattle's KING-TV. The last firm to present was Cascade Television; it refused to present new testimony, and FCC hearing examiner Elizabeth C. Smith held the firm in default.
Meanwhile, KGW and KOIN both sought channel 6. Their bids and one from KXL were in the last group to be heard, which was already delayed by the slow pace of the channel 8 hearings. KXL dropped its application, and on May 17, 1953, KGW and KOIN announced they would merge their television applications. Under the agreement, which averted a lengthy contest for channel 6 and promised to put the station on the air sooner, KOIN would win the permit, but the Newhouse family, publishers of The Oregonian and owners of KGW, would be allowed to buy half of KOIN's radio and television operation. That, in turn, required the divestiture of KGW to meet FCC radio ownership limits. On August 30, KGW radio found its buyer: the same investors involved in North Pacific Television.
Hearing examiner Smith issued an initial decision favoring North Pacific Television on June 22, 1954. The losing applicants appealed her decision to the FCC, which held a final round of arguments on the matter that December; by that time, Cascade was out of the running. Portland Television's lawyer alleged that Smith's decision was actively hostile to his firm, while Westinghouse decried the regional concentration of broadcast station ownership by King Broadcasting and its affiliates. The commission voted in June 1955 to uphold Smith's decision and award channel 8 to North Pacific Television.
Early years With the channel awarded, planning and construction began. In March 1956, North Pacific Television purchased a plot of land in the Sylvan area to house the station's transmitter facility, after having originally sought to build at Mt. Scott. At the time, the station was designated as KTLV. The site was near where KOIN-TV (channel 6) had already located. North Pacific Television merged with Pioneer Broadcasters that March, and the station was given the call sign KGW-TV in May. Construction began in May; the station began broadcasting color test patterns in early November, even though its studios on 13th Avenue between SW Main and Jefferson streets were not yet ready.
KGW-TV was officially dedicated and began broadcasting on December 15, 1956. Formal ceremonies were held in the completed studios, known as Broadcast House, with 120 guests. KGW-TV was an ABC affiliate; even though KGW radio had long been associated with NBC, it changed to ABC. The previous ABC affiliate, KLOR-TV (channel 12), became an independent station at that time. At its launch, KGW-TV was the first station in Portland to present live local programming in color, with two daily shows originating from its studios: Telarama and Pioneer Club. It also was the first station to telecast a basketball game in Portland when it aired a game between Portland and Fresno State.
The station remained an ABC affiliate until 1959, when King Broadcasting struck a group affiliation agreement with NBC covering the KGW stations in Portland and the KING stations in Seattle, also previously ABC affiliates. For KGW-TV, the new affiliation became effective on May 1, 1959. ABC programs moved to KPTV (channel 12).
The KGW-TV tower was toppled in the Columbus Day Storm on October 12, 1962. A tower from Spokane and an antenna previously used by KTNT-TV of Tacoma, Washington, were transported to Portland to put the station back on the air four days later. The outage occurred in the middle of the 1962 World Series; KOIN-TV broadcast two games of the series, including one game that both stations aired. After the collapse, the FCC granted KGW-TV permission to build a new tower, higher than the one lost in the storm, in July 1963, and it was completed and activated in early December. KATU (channel 2) and KPTV relocated to the Sylvan area around this time, clustering the four towers in the same general vicinity.
New studios and expansion The KGW studio facility built in 1956 was in the path of a new freeway, the Stadium Freeway (Interstate 405), running between SW 13th and 14th avenues. As a result, in 1964, the company began constructing a new building down the street at 1501 SW Jefferson, between 14th and 16th avenues. The new facility, designed by architect Fred Bassetti, was dedicated in July by NBC newsman Chet Huntley, who had worked at KGW radio in the 1930s. It featured two studios for production as well as a weather station on the roof. This facility was enlarged in 1981.
In 1971, Ed Godfrey arrived at KGW-TV from KHOU-TV in Houston. Under Godfrey, in September 1975, the station introduced a weeknight newsmagazine, Evening. It was the only local program aired by a Portland TV station in the prime access window of 7 to 8 p.m. and was originally hosted by Dick Klinger and Robin Chapman, with Paul Linnman replacing Klinger in 1978. It debuted three years after KCRA-TV in Sacramento, California, premiered the similar Weeknight and a year before KPIX-TV in San Francisco launched its version of the format, Evening Magazine. KPIX's owner, Group W, took the concept national as the syndicated PM Magazine in 1978, and KGW's Evening was replaced with PM the next year. In this incarnation, KGW continued to produce more than half the local segments, but the remainder came from the other stations that produced local versions of PM Magazine. Linnman remained as host until he departed for KATU in 1983. When Group W discontinued syndication of PM Magazine in 1990—with KGW as one of 13 stations carrying it at the end—channel 8 restored a local magazine program in the time slot. The successor, Good Evening, ran until March 1996. In the early 1980s, KGW produced a local children's show, Just Kidding, hosted by KGW radio disc jockey Dave Hood.
From 1985 to 1988, KGW produced a local game show, On the Spot, hosted by Larry Blackmar Born out of the idea that people would respond to local residents as contestants, the show featured multiple-choice questions and required contestants to remember how many questions have been asked in each category. The decision to produce a local game show in-house was seen as unusual. Ratings for On the Spot, which aired weeknights at 6:30 p.m., lagged for the first season, but a jump in February led to a renewal; despite running in third place in the time slot, it was renewed for its third season in 1987–88. However, when KGW acquired rights to syndicated reruns of The Cosby Show, On the Spot was canceled.
King Broadcasting Company put itself up for sale in 1990, citing the age of its majority owners, Patsy Bullitt Collins and Harriet Stimson Bullitt, the daughters of the late Dorothy Bullitt. It accepted an offer from the Providence Journal Company in 1991, and the transaction closed the following year. King Broadcasting retained KGW radio, a full-service Top 40 station that flipped to talk in 1988, but shut down its separate programming in 1991, simulcasting its FM sister KINK.
The Belo Corporation purchased the Providence Journal Company in 1996. From 2001 to 2005, as part of a national association between Pax and NBC, KGW managed the operations of KPXG-TV (channel 22), Portland's Pax station, via a sales agreement; operations moved into KGW's studios. In the 2000s, KGW also provided services to KPOU, Portland's Univision station.
Changes in ownership