KMSB

Tucson gained its first independent station when KZAZ signed on the air February 1, 1967.[1] It was licensed to Nogales, but had its main studios in Tucson.[2] The station aired movies in both English and Spanish, dramas, sitcoms, bull fights, cartoons and other general entertainment fare. It had a local news department and newscast.

The station was owned and operated by IBC Limited Partnership, which was composed of out of town investors, including Danny Thomas and Monty Hall,[3] and had its facilities in a former Safeway supermarket on Tucson Blvd., just north of Grant Road. Gene Adelstein, a Tucson resident, put together a group of investors as "Roadrunner Television" and bought KZAZ on November 19, 1976.[4] As Bonnie Henry wrote in the Arizona Daily Star: "They held live wrestling matches in the studio, organized a paint-the-station day and ran a 24-hour Star Trek marathon that sparked a run on blank videotape."[5] The sales manager, Hank Lominac, hosted the prime time movies. The sports anchor, Bill Roemer, anchored live sports from the University of Arizona. The hour-long newscast at 9 p.m. was anchored by former KOLD news director George Borozan and co-starred John Scott Ulm. It featured long interview segments, and its field reports were captured on one field camera/recorder.

In 1978, KZAZ bought a satellite downlink and started carrying the first half-hour of WPIX/New York's newscast, which was rebranded as Independent Network News on June 9, 1980. Borozan was cut to a half hour and either followed or led into (at various times) the tape-delayed INN report. From 1981 until 1985, the station carried business news programming from the Financial News Network each weeknight before sign-off, and also carried programming from the network during the daytime hours, making it the only VHF station in the United States to do so.[6]

In 1984, the station was sold to Mountain States Broadcasting, a division of the Providence Journal Company, who changed the call letters to KMSB-TV on September 12, 1985. To cut costs, Providence Journal axed the station's news broadcasts once it took over. The station became a charter Fox affiliate when the network signed on October 9, 1986, and is the longest-lived Fox affiliate in the state.

In the early 1990s, KMSB began operating KTTU, which had been owned by Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia), and was allowed to move its city of license from Nogales to Tucson in 1991. Belo Corp. became the owner of KMSB after the company purchased Providence Journal's holdings in 1997, at which time Fox's children's programming was transferred to KTTU.

In November 2011, Belo announced that it would enter into a shared services agreement with Raycom Media beginning in February 2012. This outsourcing arrangement resulted in CBS affiliate KOLD-TV taking over daily operations of KMSB and KTTU and moving their advertising sales department into the KOLD studios (however, they remained employees of Belo). All remaining positions at the two stations were eliminated and master control moved from KTVK in Phoenix to KOLD.[7] The transfer of KMSB's operations occurred in several stages, with newscasts moving to KOLD's studios on February 1 and other operations being taken over by KOLD in the following weeks.[8][9]

On June 13, 2013, the Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Belo. However, as Gannett holds a partial ownership stake in the publisher of the Arizona Daily Star, the KMSB license was instead sold to Sander Media, LLC, operated by a former Belo executive, Jack Sander. While the other Belo stations acquired by Sander in the deal have various shared services agreements with Gannett, Raycom Media continues to operate the two stations, and the Belo employees handling advertising sales became Gannett employees.[9][10] The sale was completed on December 23.[11] On June 29, 2015, Gannett's publishing operations were spun off, with the remainder renamed Tegna[12] After the spin-out, Sander filed to transfer the licenses of its stations back to Tegna—a deal completed December 3, 2015.[13][14]

On August 2, 2019, Tegna exercised its option to acquire KTTU outright for $296,000.[15] The sale was completed on October 1.[16]

KMSB produces an hour-long 9 o'clock newscast each night. After not having a newscast for nearly 20 years, KMSB began a 9 p.m. newscast in 2003.[23] From the newscast's inception until August 2008, it was produced by sister station KTVK in Phoenix using KTVK news anchors and meteorologists, with live reports from KMSB reporters and NBC affiliate KVOA. Sports began originating entirely from the KMSB studios in Tucson in 2006.

In August 2008, the news portion of 9 p.m. newscast began originating out of the KMSB studios as well with Lou Raguse as anchor. In January 2009, the newscast expanded from 30 minutes to one hour nightly and began locally produced weathercasts, thus completing the transition of the newscast from Phoenix to Tucson. The station was one of the last top-100 market Fox affiliates to air late-evening news.

In March 2010, it was announced that KMSB's news partnership of seven years with KVOA would be ending.[24] KMSB's news staff, operating out of KVOA's building since 2003, would relocate to KMSB's studios. This move would unite the news staff with the sports department and weather announcers, both of whom have been working out of KMSB's building.

On February 1, 2012, KOLD-TV took over the operations of KMSB—taking over production responsibilities of KMSB's nightly prime time newscast at 9, as well as launching a two-hour weekday morning show (from 7 until 9), Fox 11 Daybreak, on the station. In addition, KMSB dropped its simulcast of KTVK's Good Morning Arizona (the 5–7 a.m. portion was replaced by syndicated programming), and Fox 11 Sports Force was canceled (with the Sunday 9 p.m. newscast now airing for an hour).[8][25][26] The same day, KMSB and KOLD introduced a shared website, Tucson News Now.[27] As a result, the newscasts on KMSB are now in high definition (prior to the beginning of the SSA, KMSB was the only Belo station that continued to air its late night newscast in pillarboxed 4:3 standard definition because its then in-house news production lacked widescreen- or high-definition-capable cameras).

In 2020, KMSB began simulcasting the 4:30 a.m. (Today in Arizona), 12 p.m., 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts from Phoenix sister station KPNX.[28]

• KOLD Website
• KMSB in the FCC's TV station database
• Query TV Fool's coverage map for KMSB
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on KMSB-TV