KRON-TV (channel 4) is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving as the CW network outlet for the San Francisco Bay Area. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, KRON-TV maintains studios at the ABC Broadcast Center on Front Street in the city's historic Northeast Waterfront district, immediately west of The Embarcadero, in the same building as ABC owned-and-operated station KGO-TV, channel 7 (but with completely separate operations from that station). The transmitting antenna is located atop Sutro Tower in San Francisco.
History
NBC affiliation (1949–2001)
In 1948, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorized a construction permit by the Chronicle Publishing Company, publishers of the San Francisco Chronicle daily newspaper, for a new television station in San Francisco, KRON-TV. Chronicle Publishing was founded by brothers Charles and Michael de Young. The company already owned radio station KRON-FM.
Managed by Michael de Young's grandson Charles de Young Thieriot, KRON-TV signed on the air on November 15, 1949, as a full-time NBC affiliate. Its opening night program schedule included a special about San Francisco entertainment followed by the usual NBC prime time lineup of the Texaco Star Theater with Milton Berle, The Life of Riley, Mohawk Showroom, and The Chesterfield Supper Club. KRON-TV was the third television outlet in the Bay Area behind KGO-TV (channel 7) and KPIX-TV (channel 5), all going on the air within a year, and the last license before the FCC placed a moratorium on new television station licenses that would last the next four years.
KRON-TV originally broadcast from studios located in the basement of the Chronicle Building at Fifth and Mission Streets. Newscasts benefited from the resources of the Chronicle and there was cooperation between KRON-TV and the newspaper. It originally maintained transmitter facilities, master control and a small insert studio on San Bruno Mountain. In August 1959, the Chronicle reported that the tower was severely damaged by an unusually strong thunderstorm, requiring major repairs before KRON-TV could return to the air. In 1960, NBC attempted to purchase its own station in the Bay Area, when they attempted to buy KTVU. The sale was canceled that October due to pre-existing concerns over the sale cited by the FCC that were related to NBC's ownership of radio and television stations in Philadelphia; as a result, NBC stayed with KRON-TV.
In the early 1960s, KRON-TV's profits were keeping the Chronicle Publishing Company financially solvent at a time when the San Francisco Chronicle was losing money, around $3 million from 1958 to 1965. In 1967, KRON-FM-TV moved to a new studio at 1001 Van Ness Avenue in the Western Addition neighborhood (a location that formerly served as the site of the Roman Catholic cathedral of San Francisco). The television transmitter was moved to Sutro Tower on July 4, 1973, while the FM transmitter remained on San Bruno Mountain.
Since the 1970s, KRON-TV's logo has incorporated a stylized number "4" design that is based on the Golden Gate Bridge. The vertical component is a bridge tower, the horizontal component is a portion of the bridge deck, and the curve is a portion of a suspension cable. This logo was used as early as April 1974, during coverage of a Symbionese Liberation Army bank robbery. By about 1991, this evolved into the "circle 4" logo in use to this day, with the "4" using a simpler bridge design.
In 1982, the deYoung family's Chronicle Publishing Company unit discussed a possible trade of KRON-TV to the Gannett Company (whose broadcasting division is now part of Tegna) in exchange for acquiring Gannett's Oklahoma City station KOCO-TV, plus an additional $100 million. The proposal ultimately fell apart by September 1983."In Brief," Broadcasting magazine, October 3, 1983, p. 61.
Sale to Young Broadcasting
On June 16, 1999, the deYoung family announced the liquidation of Chronicle Publishing's assets. By this point, the deYoungs owned three television stations (including KRON-TV) in large and mid-sized media markets around the country, two of which were sold off to LIN TV (which traded KAKE-TV in Wichita and WOWT in Omaha to Benedek Broadcasting in turn). The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, was acquired by the Hearst Corporation in a $295 million deal in October of that year.
NBC had made many offers for channel 4 over the years, but the deYoungs turned them down each time. It finally saw the opportunity to get an owned-and-operated station in what was then the United States' fifth-largest television market and quickly jumped into the bidding war for KRON-TV. NBC was seen as the frontrunner to buy the station, but it was outbid at the last minute on November 16, 1999. KRON-TV was bought by New York City-based Young Broadcasting, then-owner of Los Angeles independent station KCAL-TV and several other stations in medium to small markets. Young's purchase price for the station ($750 million at the outset, rising to $820 million by closing) was a record price for a single station that stands to this day. To help finance the down payment, Young was forced to sell La Crosse, Wisconsin, CBS affiliate WKBT to Morgan Murphy Media.
NBC president and chief executive officer Bob Wright had warned that if NBC did not succeed in buying KRON-TV, it would require any prospective buyer to uphold specific terms if it wanted to retain the NBC affiliation. Wright did not rule out moving NBC's Bay Area affiliation elsewhere. When Young closed on its purchase of channel 4, NBC made good on these threats by demanding that Young operate KRON-TV under the same conventions as an NBC owned-and-operated outlet. Among other things, it demanded that KRON-TV change its on-air name to "NBC 4" and run the network's entire schedule in pattern (reducing prime time preemptions due to local programming from 20 hours to five hours a year). Preemptions would only be permitted for extended breaking news or severe weather coverage. NBC also demanded yearly payments of $10 million from Young, a form of reverse compensation, flipping around the then-normal mode of networks paying their affiliates for their airtime. (In turn, NBC would stop making annual payments to KRON-TV of $7.5 million to carry the network's programming.) Young would also have to give NBC the first option on the programming of additional subchannels on the station's digital signal.
Rather than give in to NBC's demands, Young decided not to renew channel 4's affiliation contract, which was set to expire at the beginning of 2002. San Jose-based KNTV (channel 11) approached NBC with a proposal to pay $37 million annually for the rights to broadcast its programming. In 1999, KNTV joined The WB in conjunction with the network's existing Bay Area affiliate, then co-owned KBWB (channel 20, now KOFY-TV). KNTV agreed to drop its ABC affiliation at the behest of network-owned KGO-TV, the market's primary ABC station. NBC accepted KNTV's deal in February 2000. It did so primarily as a stopgap in case NBC failed in its bid to buy KRON-TV from Young.
However, Young's asking price for the station was $735 million, only slightly less than what it paid to buy the station from Chronicle. NBC felt that price was too high, and walked away from the deal when Young refused to lower it.
In December 2001, NBC purchased KNTV from Granite Broadcasting for a fraction of KRON-TV's sale price of $230 million. That made NBC the only major broadcast network to have switched from one Bay Area station to another. The last NBC program to be broadcast by channel 4 was a repeat episode of Crossing Jordan, at 10 p.m. on December 31, 2001. KNTV officially joined NBC later that evening at 11:35 p.m. with the regular broadcast of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That ended KRON-TV's 52-year affiliation with the NBC network.
Independent station (2001–2006) January 1, 2002, was KRON-TV's first full day as an independent station. That morning, KRON-TV broadcast the Rose Parade from the feed of Los Angeles station KTLA (then affiliated with The WB), with Bob Eubanks and Stephanie Edwards as co-hosts.
With ABC, CBS, UPN and now NBC carrying their programming locally on owned-and-operated stations (KGO-TV, KPIX-TV, KBHK—channel 44, now KPYX—and KNTV, respectively), and Fox and The WB under contract with KTVU and KBWB, respectively, KRON-TV became an independent station by default. The station filled time slots formerly occupied by NBC shows with syndicated programming and expanded newscasts. The NBC network was near the top of the ratings nationally at the time of the disaffiliation, due to strong shows such as Friends, Frasier, Law & Order and ER. Without those NBC shows, KRON's ratings started to decline. The viewership of its newscasts began to fall substantially by the time the station regained a network affiliation.
In 2005, KRON-TV downsized its news production staff to send teams of two people, specifically a reporter and camera operator, to generate news stories on scene. SF Weekly reported in 2006 that KRON-TV was the first major-market television station to make such a decision and commented, "the results at times are more akin to home movies than news programming broadcast to the nation's sixth-largest TV market."
MyNetworkTV affiliation (2006–2024)
On February 22, 2006, News Corporation announced the launch of MyNetworkTV. The network was created partly in response to CBS Corporation and Time Warner's January 24 announcement that UPN and The WB would be shut down and replaced with the jointly owned CW Television Network. (CBS-owned UPN affiliate KBHK, whose call sign became KBCW by the network's launch, was named The CW's Bay Area affiliate. WB affiliate KBWB became an independent station.) KRON-TV became a MyNetworkTV affiliate when it debuted on September 5, 2006. (It was one of the largest MyNetworkTV-affiliated stations not to previously have been an affiliate of either The WB or UPN, second only to the network's Dallas O&O KDFI.) KRON-TV began branding itself as "MyKRON 4" for MyNetworkTV programming, although it promoted itself as "KRON 4" outside of the service's programming hours. After joining MyNetworkTV, the station moved its hour-long 9p.m. newscast to 8p.m.TVWeek – Special Reports – Print Edition It chose to run the fledgling network's programming from 9 to 11p.m., one hour later than MyNetworkTV's standard 8 to 10p.m. scheduling in the Pacific Time Zone. As of December 2020, MyNetworkTV programming aired from midnight to 2 a.m. Upon affiliating with the CW on September 1, 2023, KRON-TV pushed MyNetworkTV programming back to 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. From July 2024 until its last airdate on September 14, 2024, MyNetworkTV programming aired from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. The programming service moved to Fox-owned KICU-TV effective September 16, 2024.
Young Broadcasting bankruptcy On January 10, 2008, Young Broadcasting announced it would sell KRON-TV. The company had been encountering difficulties in meeting interest payments on its outstanding debt. Young's stock, which had been trading for a few cents per share, was ultimately delisted from NASDAQ in January 2009, after failing to meet the minimum standards for being on the exchange. One month later on February 13, Young made a filing to place the company under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Debt incurred from its 1999 purchase of KRON-TV was believed to be one key factor behind the company's cash problems. Young originally hoped to close a sale of the station by the end of the first quarter of 2008, but no buyer emerged.