KSTU

Eight applicants submitted bids; Mountain West Television, a consortium of mostly local partners, emerged with the construction permit after buying out its competitors' interests.In what the partners later described as coerced action coordinated by their legal counsel and financial backers, the company bought KSTU's intellectual property and moved it to channel 13 in November 1987 instead of building and staffing its own station.After Fox spun off its smaller owned-and-operated stations in 2007, KSTU has been owned in succession by Local TV LLC, Tribune Media, and Scripps.[5] During KOET's life, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked an attempt by the school board to sell the station back to a buyer to be reverted to commercial use because of the effects such a reclassification would have on the development of UHF, then an agency priority, and on educational broadcasting in northern Utah.[9] There had been a previous full-service UHF educational station in the state: KWCS-TV (channel 18) in Ogden, owned by the Weber County school system.[11] In March 1978, the FCC granted a construction permit to Springfield Television, which had previously announced that channel 20 would be Utah's only independent station and only commercial UHF outlet."[17] Almost immediately, Springfield Television also began building translators of its own in order to match the total coverage area of the existing local stations.[33][34] The approval came even though KSTU and KSL-TV had expressed renewed concern over a high-power channel 13 in Salt Lake City causing problems for the translator system.David and Deanna Williams, owners of a paging service and an AM station in Bountiful, submitted a bid on March 10, 1981, under the name Intermountain Broadcasting.American Television had already won the channel 14 construction permit (which eventually materialized as KXIV in 1989), and Rocky Mountain Broadcasting was no longer in contention by the time the hearing designation order was issued.[37] FCC administrative law judge Edward Kuhlmann issued an initial decision in May 1985 that looked toward granting Salt Lake City Family TV the permit because of its superior proposal for the integration of ownership and management.[44] The Mountain West partners later said that Northstar had refused to provide the financing to outfit a new station, essentially forcing the company to buy KSTU for relocation.[49] While multiple bidders, including Meredith Broadcasting and a group led by then-Fox executive Jamie Kellner,[50] inspected the station, the Fox network itself purchased KSTU.[58] On June 13, 2007, Fox announced the sale of KSTU and seven other owned-and-operated stations to Local TV LLC, a subsidiary of Oak Hill Capital Partners.[59] Under Local TV LLC, KSTU bought the adjacent building to double its studio footprint to 26,000 square feet (2,400 m2), part of a construction project that also outfitted the station for high-definition news production.[75] In the 2023–24 NHL season, during Vegas Golden Knights conflicts on KUPX-TV, select Arizona Coyotes hockey games aired on KSTU's second digital subchannel, which usually carries Antenna TV.[85] Gregorisch-Dempsey then left Salt Lake in 1994 to start a newsroom at KDAF in Dallas, which was eventually scrapped when Fox announced its plans to sell the station and move its affiliation.