KNAZ-TV

KNAZ-TV (channel 2) is a television station licensed to Flagstaff, Arizona, United States, affiliated with NBC. Owned by Tegna Inc., the station maintains a news bureau on the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and its transmitter is located southeast of the city in rural Coconino County.

KNAZ-TV operates as a full-time satellite of Phoenix-based KPNX (channel 12, licensed to Mesa), whose studios are located at the Republic Media building on Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix. KNAZ covers areas of northern Arizona that receive a marginal to non-existent over-the-air signal from KPNX. KNAZ is a straight simulcast of KPNX; on-air references to KNAZ are limited to Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-mandated hourly station identifications during newscasts and other programming.

KNAZ is the only full-power television station in northern Arizona broadcasting one of the major English-language television networks. It was established as a full originating station in 1970 and continued to produce local newscasts until 2008. After a succession of owners, it came into common ownership with KPNX in 1997.

History

KOAI

As early as July 1967, plans were beginning to crystallize for the construction of a new television station in Flagstaff, the area's first high-power station; the area was only served by two UHF translators of KTVK and KOOL-TV from Phoenix. The primary promoter of the proposed station was Wendell Elliott Sr., who had managed radio station KGNO in Dodge City, Kansas, and had founded associated television station KTVC in nearby Ensign in the 1950s; he also was a founder of the Kansas Association of Broadcasters in 1951. Other stockholders included former Flagstaff mayor Charles L. Saunders, who owned radio station KCLS and had once sought to build a Flagstaff TV station himself. Elliott originally sought to build a tower atop Mount Elden and downtown studios, raising $85,000 by selling stock in the venture.

Flagstaff had originally been assigned channels 9 and 13 for television use. However, when the Elliott group—incorporated in 1968 as Grand Canyon Television Company—was forced by the United States Forest Service to switch proposed transmitter sites from Mount Elden to Mormon Mountain, southeast of Flagstaff, it asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to change out channel 9 for channel 2 in order to avoid potential spacing problems to Tucson's channel 9 station, KGUN-TV. From the start, Grand Canyon planned to obtain NBC affiliation for its station.

Grand Canyon officially filed an application for construction permit on March 26, 1969, the FCC having approved the change to channel 2 earlier in the month, and the commission granted the application on September 10. With the permit approved, construction commenced nearly immediately; in January 1970, power lines were buried under Mormon Mountain to provide electrical service to the summit. The transmitter facility was complete by early April, when the first test patterns went out, and KOAI began broadcasting on May 2, 1970. It was some time before the station began producing local programming, as the studios at 528 W. Aspen were not yet completed.

KOAI was among the first stations seen on much of the Navajo Nation when a tribe-owned translator was completed atop Navajo Mountain in 1973. At the time, the station produced and aired a daily Navajo-language news program hosted by Chester Yazzie; the program was aired the next day on KIVA-TV in Farmington, New Mexico, and later also on KOAT-TV in Albuquerque. It was the only Navajo-language television program in the world at the time.

Wendell Elliott Sr. died in 1974 of an apparent heart attack. His son, Wendell Elliott Jr., took over the operation of the business, which was claimed to be the fourth-smallest TV station in the United States.

KNAZ-TV

In 1980, the Grand Canyon Television Company approved the sale of KOAI to Capitol Broadcasting Company of Jackson, Mississippi, which owned radio and television stations in the Mississippi city and KKTV in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Capitol closed on the sale in February 1981 and immediately sought to improve all aspects of the operation. On March 23, 1981, the call sign was changed to KNAZ-TV to represent the station's service area. (Kevin McCabe, a longtime Phoenix sports journalist who worked for channel 2 at the time, noted that people had "laughed" at KOAI for the preceding decade and that the station had set a "bad precedent".) A new maximum-power transmitter at 100,000 watts was installed; the news department was expanded; and Capitol also moved the station into a new building on Vickey Street in 1982. With the upgraded building came much-needed technical updates, notably a conversion to electronic news gathering on videotape from film.

While Capitol Broadcasting, owned by the Hederman family as well as Standard Life Insurance, put all of its properties up for sale in late 1982, they continued to own the station for nearly six more years. During that time, Grand Canyon Television built KMOH-TV, a satellite station of KNAZ at Kingman that began broadcasting on February 29, 1988. It was not until July of that year that KNAZ-TV found a buyer, Peter J. Klein of Indiana; Klein beat out Sunbelt Communications Company of Las Vegas for the station.

Klein's ownership of the television station would end with his ouster in 1991 after four investors who owned 72.5 percent of the business petitioned a court to place Grand Canyon Television into receivership. There had been signs of possible financial trouble earlier in the year when KNAZ-TV was listed as delinquent on its county property taxes; radio station KAFF reported the station was behind on payroll, charges that its financial manager denied. The investors also claimed that Klein, an Indianapolis resident, was an absentee owner and that the firm had lost $3.8 million. The stations emerged from receivership after a year, with W. A. Franke, one of the investors who filed the original motion, as the leader of the business. By this time, KNAZ-TV was airing daily 5, 6, and 10 p.m. newscasts that beat the Phoenix stations within the Flagstaff area.

Gannett/Tegna ownership

In January 1997, Grand Canyon announced that it had sold KNAZ-TV and KMOH, by that point disconnected from the Flagstaff station, to the Gannett

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