Koki Shimoinaba

KOKI-TV (channel 23) is a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Imagicomm Communications alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV (channel 41). The two stations share studios on East 27th Street and South Memorial Drive (near W. G. Skelly Park) in the Audubon neighborhood of southeast Tulsa; KOKI-TV's transmitter is located on South 273rd East Avenue (between 91st Street South and 101st Street South, next to the Muskogee Turnpike) in the western city limits of Coweta.

History

As an independent station

The UHF channel 23 allocation—which had been dormant since a short-lived attempt to revive its original occupant, KCEB, by original licensee Elfred Beck foundered in September 1967—was contested between two groups that vied to hold the construction permit to build a new television station on the frequency. The first prospective permittee was Wilson Communications, owned by Detroit businessman and Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson, which filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 7, 1978. The second applicant, Tulsa 23, Ltd. (originally Channel 23 Tulsa, Ltd.), filed on September 5; that group—led by managing partner Benjamin F. Boddie, Corporate Vice President, Williams Companies. James Lavenstein would go on to serve as KOKI-TV's original general manager—primarily consisted of prominent local corporate executives and community leaders that included Helmerich & Payne CEO Walter H. Helmerich II, and present and former Williams Companies CEOs John H. Williams and Charles P. Williams, respectively (the latter two of whom initiated the redevelopment of over nine square blocks and of new office and retail construction in downtown Tulsa, including the establishment of the Williams Center, the Bank of Oklahoma Tower and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, through Fox's broadcasting contract with Major League Baseball.

From 1989 to 1991, KOKI held the local broadcast rights to National Football League">NFL preseason games involving the Dallas Cowboys; the station, which assumed the local preseason telecast rights to the teams from KGCT as a result of that station's two-year operational cessation, carried six to eight prime time Cowboys game telecasts annually. In addition, for the 1990 season (the first year that the NFL allowed a live preseason game to air on a team's out-of-market station), the station carried preseason games involving the Kansas City Chiefs, running four prime time game telecasts during that season. The rights to both the Cowboys and Chiefs telecasts transferred to KGCT beginning with the 1991 NFL preseason. Since September 1994, most Cowboys telecasts carried on KOKI consist of those carried regionally or nationally by Fox, which through the network's contract with the NFL, holds primary broadcast rights to the National Football Conference (NFC). In addition to carrying Fox-televised games involving in-conference opponents, since 2014, Cowboys games carried on the station also include certain cross-flexed games against opponents in the American Football Conference (AFC) that were originally scheduled to air on CBS. (Most Cowboys preseason games not televised by Fox or by other broadcast or cable networks are carried over-the-air locally on CW affiliate KQCW hannel 19through that station's agreement with the team's syndication service.)

From 1989 to 1992, KOKI carried regular season and postseason college basketball games involving teams from the Big Eight Conference (distributed by Raycom Sports) and the Missouri Valley Conference (distributed by Creative Sports Marketing), which gave the station rights to select regular season games featuring the Oklahoma Sooners, the Oklahoma State Cowboys and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. Most college basketball telecasts aired on the station on Saturday afternoons, although it also occasionally carried prime time games on weeknights, specifically during the Big Eight and Missouri Valley men's tournaments. Under the Raycom agreement, KOKI also carried tape delayed broadcasts of Oklahoma Sooners football games in late night on the Sunday after the date the game was held. From 2005 to 2010, channel 23 also served as the official local broadcaster of OSU-produced analysis and magazine programs, including the weekly shows of the respective head coaches of the Cowboys' basketball, baseball and football teams. (All of the broadcasts were hosted by then- sports director Steve Layman, and were also syndicated on fellow Fox affiliate KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City.)

News operation

, KOKI-TV broadcasts 55½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with nine hours each weekday, 5½ hours on Saturdays and five hours on Sundays); in regards to the number of hours devoted to locally produced newscasts, it is the highest local newscast output of any television station overall in both the Tulsa market and the state of Oklahoma. In addition, the station produces the ten-minute sports highlight program ''Fox 23 Sports This Weekend'', which airs Saturdays and Sundays at 9:50 p.m. year-round, and ''High School Football Tonight'', a half-hour high school football highlight show that airs Fridays at 11:00 p.m. from August to November. KOKI may shift regularly scheduled newscasts that it must preempt to accommodate Fox Sports event telecasts – such as the weekend editions of the 5:00 p.m. newscast – to sister station KMYT (which had also carried a full simulcast of the weekday edition of ''Fox 23 News This Morning'' from September 2014 until December 2017).

News department history

Channel 23 has carried local news programming in various formats since its launch in October 1980. Starting at its sign-on, news programming on KOKI originally consisted mainly of 90-second newsbriefs (originally titled ''Newscheck 23'', renamed in September 1990 as ''Fox 23 Newsbreak'') – consisting of Associated Press wire reports and a short weather forecast read by the anchor on-call – that aired during select commercial breaks within daytime and evening programs. As Fox was urging many of its stations to begin producing their own newscasts around this time, in a May 1994 '' Tulsa World'' interview, then-general manager Hal Capron responded when asked whether KOKI might develop a news department that while the enormous cost of starting such an operation was an issue, it would format the newscast as a cutting-edge broadcast to differentiate itself from competitors KJRH, KOTV and KTUL if it went forward with such plans. In December 1995, Capron announced plans to establish a news department for KOKI. (Such plans would likely have necessitated the expansion of its existing studio facilities or the relocation to more sufficiently large building space, as its occupied space at the Fox Plaza building was not quite large enough to house a full news department.) Original estimates by Capron suggested that a half-hour prime time newscast at 9:00 p.m. would premiere on channel 23 by August 1997; however, in January 1997, Capron disclosed that the newscast's launch would be delayed to an undetermined later date. In lieu of a full-scale newscast, on January 26, 1997—immediately following Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXI—KOKI instead premiered ''First Weather on Fox 23'', a nightly weather forecast program (consisting of a five-minute-long lead segment at 10:00 that aired seven nights a week, and two 60-second updates at 10:35 and 11:05 p.m. exclusively seen on weeknights) that served as lead-ins to the station's late access syndicated and network program offerings. The news updates and ''First Weather'' were discontinued in December 2001.

In the fall of 2001, KOKI finally commenced development of a full-scale news department, and hired Sean McLaughlin—who oversaw the launch of the ow-defunctnews department at then-sister station WFTC in Minneapolis two years prior, and would later join KTUL to head its news operation in 2005—to serve as news director for the expanded operation. Clear Channel invested between $5 million and $10 million into the operation, which included the purchase and renovation of the Memorial Drive building (which was selected primarily because it was of sufficient size to house a news operation) and the acquisition of top-of-the-line production equipment (including nonlinear editing and content storage hardware from Leitch Technology Corporation). 54 full- and part-time employees were also hired to staff the new operation.

Long-form newscasts began on February 3, 2002, with the launch of ''Fox 23 News at 9:00'', the first local prime time news program ever attempted in the Tulsa market and the first attempt at a newscast produced independently from KJRH, KOTV and KTUL since channel 41 (as KGCT) shut down its news operation 20½ years earlier in June 1981. The 9:00 p.m. newscast – which has aired as an hour-long program since its premiere broadcast, which itself was delayed due to an hour-long episode of ''Malcolm in the Middle'' that followed Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXVI – was originally anchored by Chera Kimiko (who, prior to joining channel 23, served as weekend morning anchor at KVBC ow KSNV">KSNV.html" ;"title="ow KSNV">ow KSNVin Las Vegas">KSNV">ow_KSNV<_a>.html" ;"title="KSNV.html" ;"title="ow KSNV">ow KSNV">KSNV.html" ;"title="ow KSNV">ow KSNVin Las Vegas from 1999 to 2001) and Darren Dedo (who served as weekday morning anchor at WJTV in Jackson, Mississippi from 2000 to 2001), chief meteorologist Jon Slater (who had worked at KSHB-TV in Kansas City from 1999 to 2001, and had previous stints in Tulsa at KJRH and KTUL earlier in the 1990s) and sports director Vic Faust (who had served in that same position at KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Missouri from 1998 to 2001). (Kimiko would remain at KOKI until January 2013, and was replaced as co-anchor by Shae Rozzi, who was previously a reporter for Atlanta sister station WSB-TV; Dedo was replaced as primary co-anchor of KOKI's evening newscasts in December 2004 by former CBS Newspath Washington, D.C. reporter Clay Loney, who remains with the station , after Dedo's contract expired without renewal; Slater remained at KOKI until 2008, and was subsequently replaced by current chief James Aydelott.) The Friday and Saturday editions were initially anchored by Markova Reed (who joined the station from WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi), meteorologist George Flickinger (who was previously chief meteorologist at KTXS-TV in Abilene, Texas) and sports anchor Dave Briggs (previously with fellow Fox affiliate KEVN-TV in Rapid City, South Dakota). (Flickinger was fired without pay by KOKI management in January 2006, for cutting into Fox's November 27, 2005, broadcast of a Seattle Seahawks–New York Giants NFL game to relay an evacuation request from the Mayes County Emergency Management Agency for a major wildfire approaching residences near Chouteau.)

From the outset, the station maintained a commitment to consumer investigative reporting, with a focus on helping northeastern Oklahoma residents that have been scammed by local businesses as well as government issues. (The investigative unit—originally named the "Fox 23 Problem Solvers"—was rebranded as the "Solving Problems" unit – partly a reference to the "Breaking News, Breaking Weather, Solving Problems" slogan used by KOKI at the time – to avoid confusion with KJRH's "2NEWS Problem Solvers" unit in 2007, and later became known as "Fox 23 Investigates" in 2012.) Although legitimate competition for the newscast sprang up when KQCW became a CW charter affiliate on September 18, 2006, when it debuted the KOTV-produced ''News on 6 at 9:00'' (which Kimiko would co-anchor for two years after joining KOTV/KQCW in June 2013, following her departure from KOKI six months earlier), prime time news viewers largely remained loyal to KOKI, which had gradually become the ratings leader in the 9:00 p.m. timeslot.

News programming on KOKI expanded quickly over the next few years. Channel 23 offered news programming outside of the established 9:00 slot for the first time on June 17, 2002, when it premiered a 5:30 p.m. Monday-through-Friday-only newscast. Acting as a local alternative to national network newscasts aired on KJRH, KOTV and KTUL in that timeslot, it featured a mix of general and financial news in a faster-paced format targeted at viewers arriving home from their afternoon commute, along with full weather and abbreviated sports segments (with the sports segment initially consisting of a live cut-in featuring Faust sitting in with KTBZ afternoon drive radio hosts Rick Couri and Don King). The August 11, 2003 premiere of a more conventional half-hour broadcast at 5:00 p.m. – which would be extended to weekends on January 9, 2016 – expanded the early evening newscast to a full hour, albeit treated as two separate half-hour programs.

The station's morning newscast, ''Fox 23 News This Morning'' (alternately titled ''Fox 23 News Daybreak'' for the first two hours until 2014), debuted on April 24, 2006 as a four-hour broadcast from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m., displacing religious programs, infomercials and syndicated children's programs that had previously aired in that time period, the latter of which were relegated to Sunday mornings. (The program would expand to 4½ hours on October 6, 2014, then to five hours, starting at 4:00 a.m., on June 20, 2016.) Formatted as a mix of local and national news, weather and traffic updates and lifestyle features, it was initially co-anchored by Ron Terrell (who originally joined KOKI in June 2004, after a four-year tenure at KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, to succeed Faust as part of overhaul of the sports department that also saw the departures of Briggs and sports reporter/videographer Justin Holgate; Terrell remains anchor of the newscast ) and Ann Sterling (who served as one of the original anchors of the weekday morning newscast at KNXV-TV in Phoenix, and had previously worked as an evening anchor at fellow Fox affiliate and now-former sister station WXXA-TV in Albany). It was the second local newscast in the market to run after 7:00 a.m., debuting twelve years after KOTV's ''Six in the Morning'' (the 8:00 a.m. hour of which moved to KQCW in January 2008) had expanded into the slot. The station debuted an hour-long midday newscast at noon (which was originally scheduled to launch on the same date as the morning newscast) two months later on June 5, 2006; the program was moved up one hour to 11:00 a.m. on June 15, 2020.

On January 18, 2010, KOKI debuted a half-hour 10:00 p.m. newscast, which was formatted to feature a wrap-up of the day's headlines and a full weather segment during the first ten minutes, with national and world news, sports and feature reports filling the remainder of the broadcast. (The program, which originally aired only on Monday through Friday evenings, would add a Sunday edition on January 9, 2016.) On January 16, 2011, starting with the 9:00 p.m. newscast, KOKI became the second television station in the Tulsa market (behind KJRH-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, with studio segments and field video footage recorded and broadcast in true HD; with the change, the station adopted the logo, music (OSI Music's "Fox Affiliate News Theme") and graphic scheme (a modified version of the Hothaus Creative Design package originally commissioned for fellow Fox affiliate KSWB-TV in San Diego) that was based on the standardized branding of Fox's owned-and-operated stations. (This package was replaced in January 2014, with a modified version of the graphics package developed in 2009 for fellow Fox and former sister station KTVU in San Francisco Fox in 2014] as well as replacing its O&O-styled logo with a red and white variant of the secondary standard Fox affiliate logo design.)

The early evening news block would expand on September 23, 2013, when KOKI debuted a half-hour weeknight newscast at 6:00 p.m. KOKI subsequently debuted weekend morning newscasts on January 4, 2014, originally running for three hours from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. on Saturdays and 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. on Sundays, becoming the second station in the Tulsa market (after KJRH-TV) to carry a morning news program on weekends (both broadcasts were expanded to three hours with the Sunday edition being shifted one hour earlier on April 5, 2014; the Saturday edition followed suit with the addition of a fourth hour on January 9, 2016). On August 29, 2015, KOKI entered into a content partnership with the ''Tulsa World'' to collaborate on investigative reports, coverage of local high school football games and some special projects as well as to provide local forecasts from the "Fox 23 Severe Weather Team" for the newspaper. In March 2016, KOKI unveiled the "Fox 23 SkyView Drone", an unmanned quadcopter that is used to provide aerial newsgathering of news and weather events.

Since the news department's launch and its subsequent expansion, ratings for KOKI's newscasts have statistically ranked at a strong third to, at times, second place among the Tulsa market's television news outlets; the station has seen some slow growth in viewership for its newscasts since the late 2000s, amid continuing stagnant ratings for historical last place finisher KJRH and ratings declines for once-dominant KTUL in recent years. The 2000 comedy-drama film '' Where the Heart Is'', which was set in northeastern Oklahoma, featured a fictional depiction of KOKI incorporating live trucks and microphones with flags bearing the station's logo in a scene in which lead character Novalee Nation ( Natalie Portman) is interviewed by a channel 23 reporter after giving birth inside a Sequoyah-area Wal-Mart where she was abandoned by her baby's father, Willy Jack Pickens ( Dylan Bruno). However, at the time of the film's release, the station's only news programming consisted of hourly update segments (as its current news department would not be formed until a year-and-a-half after ''Where the Heart Is'' had its theatrical release).

Notable former on-air staff

* Dave Briggs – weekend evening sports anchor/sports reporter (2002–2004; now at CNN as co-anchor of '' Early Start'')
* Sheinelle Jones – weekend evening anchor/reporter (2002–2006; now at NBC News)
* Jeanne Tripplehorn (aka Jeanne Summers) – co-host of ''Creature Feature'' (1982–1983; now a film and television actress)

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion

KOKI-TV began transmitting a digital television signal on UHF channel 22 on October 1, 2002. The station shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 23, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 22. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 23. Newport Television's decision to delay KOKI's switch to digital-only transmissions by five months, while electing to turn off the KMYT analog signal on the original transition date of February 17, 2009, was done in order to enable viewers who were not prepared for the transition to continue receiving news and emergency weather information through the spring 2009 severe weather season.

References

Tulsa TV Memories: KOKI-TV

External links

www.fox23.com
- KOKI-TV official website
www.fox23.com/s/station/my41tulsa
- KMYT-TV official website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Koki-Tv
OKI-TV
Fox network affiliates
MeTV affiliates
Dabl affiliates
Television channels and stations established in 1980
1980 establishments in Oklahoma
Missouri Valley Conference broadcasters
Imagicomm Communications