KMGH-TV

As a CBS affiliate Channel 7 first signed on the air on November 1, 1953, as KLZ-TV. It was founded by the Oklahoma City-based Oklahoma Publishing Company (operated by Edward K. Gaylord), which also owned KLZ radio (560 AM and 106.7 FM, now KWBL). KLZ-TV immediately took the CBS affiliation from KBTV (channel 9, now KUSA), owing to KLZ radio's longtime affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. In 1954, Gaylord sold the KLZ television and radio stations to Time Inc., who later subordinated their acquisition under its in 1961 established subsidiary Time-Life, Inc. as Time–Life Broadcasting, Inc. The station's original studio facilities were housed in a renovated former auto dealership on the east side of the block at East 6th Avenue and Sherman Street. Channel 7 moved to an eight-sided, five-story building called "The Communications Center", on the intersection of Speer Boulevard and Lincoln Street in 1969. Time-Life sold the station on channel 7 to McGraw-Hill in late October 1970, in a group deal that also involved the company's other radio and television combinations in Indianapolis, San Diego, and Grand Rapids; and KERO-TV (channel 23) in Bakersfield, California. In order to comply with the Federal Communications Commission's new restrictions on concentration of media ownership that went into effect shortly afterward, McGraw-Hill was required to sell the KLZ radio stations as well as their sister radio properties in Indianapolis, San Diego, and Grand Rapids to other companies. Time-Life would later purchase WOTV (channel 8, now WOOD-TV) in Grand Rapids in the final deal. By the time the sale was finalized in June 1972, the purchase price for the entire group was just over $57 million. WFBM-TV (channel 6, now WRTV) in Indianapolis, KERO-TV in Bakersfield, and KOGO-TV (channel 10, now KGTV) in San Diego were retained by McGraw-Hill, along with KLZ-TV, which subsequently changed its call letters to KMGH-TV on the 1st (with the calls reflecting the new ownership), in order to comply with a now-repealed FCC rule in place then that forbade TV and radio stations in the same market, but with different ownership from sharing the same callsigns. The 1990s did not begin well for KMGH; the station saw significant overall financial losses in 1990 and 1991, as well as a decrease in viewership for its local newscasts. A new management team introduced in 1991 turned things around at KMGH; net profit soared 105.5% in 1992 as a result. ABC affiliation Although KMGH had been one of CBS' stronger affiliates, the station would end up disaffiliating from the network due to a series of events that were set in motion as a result of CBS' partnership with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in July 1994 (and the network's eventual merger with that company in August 1995). As part of the deal, the network moved its programming from its owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV (channel 10), to Westinghouse's KYW-TV (channel 3). In a complex ownership deal that was announced in November 1994, CBS traded WCAU to NBC in exchange for two of that network's O&Os (then longtime affiliates)—Denver's KCNC-TV (channel 4) (which had been an O&O since the station's then-owner General Electric purchased NBC in 1986) and Salt Lake City's KUTV (channel 2) (which the network had acquired less than one month earlier). CBS then formed a joint venture with Westinghouse that assumed ownership of KYW-TV, KCNC and KUTV, with Westinghouse serving as majority owner. Group W/CBS and NBC also swapped the transmitter facilities—and by association, channel frequencies—of their respective stations in Miami, WCIX (now WFOR-TV) and WTVJ. At the same time, McGraw-Hill had struck an affiliation agreement with ABC, due partly to the fact that its stations in San Diego and Indianapolis had already been aligned with the network (Bakersfield sister station KERO-TV was also involved in the deal between McGraw-Hill and ABC; however, that station had to wait for its affiliation contract with CBS to expire in March 1996, before it could finally switch to ABC). In keeping with all of this, each of the three major broadcast networks relocated their programming to different stations in the Denver market on September 10, 1995; ABC moved its programming to KMGH from KUSA, with KMGH's outgoing CBS affiliation going to KCNC and NBC moving from KCNC to KUSA. The final CBS program to air on KMGH-TV was a repeat of Walker, Texas Ranger, which began at 9 p.m. the previous day. On June 14, 2011, McGraw-Hill announced that it would exit from the broadcasting industry and put its entire television station group up for sale; on October 3 of that year, the company announced that it had entered into an agreement to sell the eight-station broadcasting division to the E. W. Scripps Company. The FCC approved the sale on November 29, 2011, and the deal was officially completed on December 30, 2011, resulting in McGraw-Hill's exit from broadcasting after 39 years. The deal marked a re-entry into the Denver market for Scripps; prior to its acquisition of KMGH, the company had owned the Rocky Mountain News from 1926 until the afternoon newspaper ceased publishing in 2009. On May 7, 2019, KMGH dropped Azteca América and replaced it with the Escape network (now Ion Mystery), which moved over from KTFD-TV. In July 2024, KMGH left its longtime home at The Communications Center on Speer Boulevard for a state-of-the-art facility located near Coors Field. ==Programming==