| Oklahoma City, Oklahoma | |
|---|---|
| Branding | KOCO 5 (general) Eyewitness News 5 (newscasts) This TV Oklahoma City (KOCO-DT2 subchannel) |
| Slogan | Live. Local. Latebreaking. (newscasts) Start Here (general) |
| Channels | Digital: 7 (VHF) Virtual: 5 (PSIP) |
| Subchannels | (see article) |
| Affiliations | ABC This TV (DT2) |
| Owner | Hearst Television, Inc. (Ohio/Oklahoma Hearst Television) |
| First air date | July 2, 1954 (in Enid, Oklahoma; moved to Oklahoma City in 1958) |
| Call letters' meaning | Oklahoma City Oklahoma |
| Former callsigns | KGEO-TV (1954-1958) |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: 5 (VHF, 1954-2009) |
| Transmitter power | 65.7 kW |
| Height | 451 m |
| Facility ID | 12508 |
| Website | www.koco.com |
KOCO-TV, virtual channel 5 (digital channel 7), is the ABC affiliate in the Oklahoma City television market. The station is owned by Hearst Television, Inc., but uses "Ohio/Oklahoma Hearst Television, Inc." as their end tag during their newscasts, the same licensing purpose corporation as sister Cincinnati, Ohio station WLWT. KOCO's studios and transmitter are located at 1300 East Britton Road in northeast Oklahoma City, within a mile of competing stations; NBC affiliate KFOR-TV (channel 4) to the west, CBS affiliate KWTV (channel 9) to the southwest and Fox affiliate KOKH (channel 25) to the southeast.
The station broadcasts its digital signal on VHF channel 7, using its former analog channel assignment of 5 as its virtual channel via PSIP. On cable, KOCO-TV can be seen on channel 8 in standard definition and channel 705 in high definition on Cox Oklahoma City and on channel 5 on other Cox systems in Central Oklahoma. The station is also available to DirecTV and Dish Network customers within the Oklahoma City market.
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The station signed on July 2, 1954 as KGEO-TV, based in Enid, the only full-power VHF station in northern Oklahoma. The station was an ABC affiliate; during the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.[1]
The station's transmitter and studio location were moved to Oklahoma City in 1958, after northern Oklahoma was absorbed into the Oklahoma City market. KOCO's original Oklahoma City studio was located at NW 63rd and Portland Avenue but moved to its present location near the transmitter site on East Britton Road in the early 1980s. Channel 5's arrival returned a full ABC affiliate to the Oklahoma City market. Previously, ABC programming was seen in Oklahoma City on WKY-TV (now KFOR-TV) as a secondary affiliation until KTVQ (channel 25) signed on in 1953 (KTVQ went dark in 1956, signing on the air again as the present-day KOKH-TV in 1959).
In 1974, the station adopted the "Eyewitness News" branding for its newscast for the first time, this first period was during a time when the format was very popular in TV markets throughout the nation. Local CBS affiliate KWTV had previously used the Eyewitness News moniker from 1966 to 1971, but dropped it when the newscast was renamed Newsroom 9. Despite the use of the Eyewitness News concept and name, KOCO remained for many years a distant third place in local news ratings against dominant NBC affiliate WKY-TV (channel 4, later KTVY and now KFOR-TV) and KWTV. KOCO aired its evening newscast at 5:30 p.m. rather than the 6 p.m. time slot used by KTVY and KWTV until the early 1980s when it introduced an early evening newscast at 5 p.m. and a 6 p.m. broadcast with ABC's World News Tonight (now World News with Diane Sawyer) in the 5:30 p.m. timeslot. All three programs were top-rated in the market in November 2006.
KOCO had been the only local television station in Oklahoma that operated and maintained a bureau office elsewhere in the state. For several years after its move from Enid to Oklahoma City, KOCO continued to operate a second bureau in Enid. It was closed by KOCO in the mid-1990s for unknown reasons.
Combined Communications acquired KOCO in 1970 from Cimarron Television. Nine years later, Combined Communications merged with the Gannett Company. In 1977, Combined did a makeover of the station's image by adopting the "5 Alive" branding that was introduced at other Combined-owned stations. Although a number of Combined stations that adopted the practice of using the word "Alive" as part of their monikers ended the practice after Gannett purchased Combined in 1979, KOCO continued promoting itself as "5 Alive" until 1994.
During the "5 Alive" era, KOCO's local newscasts were branded as 5 Alive NewsCenter or 5 Alive News, and, thanks to Gannett's resources and investment in the station which included a new studio facility in the early 1980s along with news helicopters, KOCO improved its fortunes in local news ratings in the Oklahoma City market from 1980 to 1982 when the station briefly overtook KWTV for second place and even battled longtime powerhouse KTVY for first place. By 1983, KOCO settled into a solid second place as KWTV rose from a distant third all the way to first place, displacing KTVY from the top spot it held for decades. By the late 1980s, KOCO dropped back to third place, where it lingered for years.
In 1994, KOCO dropped the "5 Alive" branding and the newscast was renamed 5 News and the "5 Alive" logo was retired with a new logo (that was short-lived) that was a variant of the Circle 7 logo, that was replaced with the current version of the Circle 5 logo a few months later. In 1995, Gannett announced that the company would merge with Multimedia, Inc.; this created a conflict as Multimedia, Inc. owned area cable provider Multimedia Cablevision, which served most of Oklahoma City's surrounding suburbs (Multimedia Cablevision later sold its Oklahoma service area to Cox Communications, which already served areas within the city limits of Oklahoma City, in 2000). This created a conflict as at the time, Federal Communications Commission rules prohibited the cross-ownership of television stations and cable providers in the same market; Gannett received a temporary waiver by the FCC to operate both KOCO-TV and Multimedia Cablevision, which expired in December 1996.[2][3]
Gannett owned KOCO until January 1997 when it swapped it and NBC affiliate WLWT in Cincinnati to Argyle Television Holdings II in exchange for ABC affiliate WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan and NBC affiliate WGRZ in Buffalo, New York; the deal was made to resolve conflicts with the FCC's newspaper and cable cross-ownership rules.[4] Argyle merged with Hearst Broadcasting in August of that year, creating what was then known as Hearst-Argyle Television. The company renamed itself as Hearst Television in May 2009. In 1998, after the station was purchased by Hearst-Argyle Television, the newscasts were renamed Eyewitness News 5 - returning the "Eyewitness News" format the station previously used from 1974 to 1977.
On June 13, 1998, as tornadoes touched down in northern sections of Oklahoma City that evening; at 8:10PM, chief meteorologist Rick Mitchell, then-weekend meteorologist Mike LaPoint and a photojournalist had positioned a live shot outside the Channel 5 studios on Britton Road when the studio was hit by a tornado (or damaging straight-line winds). As it hit, LaPoint exclaimed "Rick, it's on the ground!", and both meteorologists and the photographer ran into the station to take shelter. Almost immediately as it happened, the station was knocked off the air until the following evening (although it was still able to feed its signal to cable). However, damage at the station was relatively minor as a fence was knocked down with the most significant damage being to its doppler weather radar dome which had been dented. Video of that tornado as it happened can be seen on Youtube.[5][6]
In recent years, the station boosted its commitment to news and weather coverage, adding newscasts and positioning itself as "Live. Local. Latebreaking." The efforts helped propel the station's 5:00 newscast into first place in the market in 2004. In November 2006, KOCO also registered its first-ever outright win at 6:00 p.m.
On February 10, 2009 KOCO was the only Oklahoma City television station offered wall-to-wall coverage of a devastating EF4 tornado that hit the town of Lone Grove that killed eight and injured 14, due to KOCO being the default ABC station for the Ada-Sherman television market that Lone Grove is located in. KOCO's coverage along with that of Ada-Sherman area stations KTEN and KXII undoubtedly saved many lives during the event.
KOCO-TV serves as a default ABC affiliate for the Sherman, Texas/Ada, Oklahoma market due to that market having lacked an ABC affiliate of its own, since KTEN (channel 10) dropped its secondary ABC affiliation to became a full-time affiliate of NBC in 1998. KOCO-TV is carried as the local ABC affiliate to DISH Network and DirecTV subscribers within that market and the sole ABC affiliate carried by cable operators in cities on the Oklahoma side of the Sherman-Ada market including Sherman and Denison in Texas; as well as Ada in Oklahoma. This has come to an end as KTEN has a subchannel affiliated with the ABC network that went up on May 9, 2010.
| Channel | Video | Aspect | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | 720p | 16:9 | Main KOCO-TV programming / ABC |
| 5.2 | 480i | 4:3 | This TV |
In April 2008, KOCO-TV launched a 24-hour digital weather channel, called First Alert Weather 24/7; an affiliate of The Local AccuWeather Channel (one of several ABC affiliates carrying the service on its digital signal), that gives up-to-the-minute weather information, as well as carrying local weather inserts from KOCO's First Alert Storm Team on digital subchannel 5.2 and is also available on Cox Digital Cable in the Oklahoma City area on cable channel 222. It also airs educational and informational children's programming mandated by the FCC for a half-hour every day at noon. The service may also take on the responsibility of airing ABC network programming when KOCO-DT 5.1 is not able to in a severe weather emergency. A feed of Advantage Doppler HD may appear on the subchannel as backup programming if technical difficulties occur, with audio from Oklahoma City's NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards station WXK85.
In early September 2008, coverage of Hurricane Gustav from NBC affiliate WDSU in New Orleans (also owned by Hearst), aired on digital subchannel 5.2 for the convenience of evacuees who came to Oklahoma City.
KOCO-TV discontinued regular analog programming on June 12, 2009.[7] The station remained on its pre-transition channel 7, using PSIP to display KOCO-TV's virtual channel as 5.
After the switch to digital-only broadcast, the station's broadcast range did not cover as much area as it did when broadcasting in analog, creating some gaps in reception in parts of southwest, south-central and north-central Oklahoma that were previously able to receive a fair to decent signal. In May 2010, the station uninstalled its former analog antenna and began installing a new digital antenna that once installed, would help to extend KOCO-TV's digital signal reception to areas unable to receive the station's signal since the station's switch to digital.[8]
On January 24, 2011 at 6 a.m., KOCO-DT digital subchannel 5.2 dropped Local AccuWeather Channel programming to become the Oklahoma City affiliate of This TV.
KOCO-TV clears all of the ABC schedule, although until the program was dropped by ABC on August 28, 2010, it preempted ABC Kids airings of Power Rangers on Saturday mornings due to lack of E/I content (which was also the reason all of Hearst-Argyle's ABC affiliates did not carry the program), the show was preempted by the station starting in the fall of 2006 (prior to this, said hour was shown six hours behind the network's recommended time slot of 11 a.m.). KOCO currently delays Jimmy Kimmel Live! by one hour, airing at 12:07 a.m., due to an encore presentation of Oprah and as of September 3, 2011, airs the Litton's Weekend Adventure lineup on Saturday mornings and This Week on Sunday mornings on a one-hour broadcast delay, due to the third hour of its weekend morning newscast. KOCO-TV is unusual as it is one of the few ABC affiliates that preempt the ABC News Briefs aired in-between One Life to Live and General Hospital.
Until January 2, 2008 it was one of several ABC stations to air All My Children weekdays at 11 a.m., instead of the network's recommended time of 12 p.m., due to their midday newscast airing at that time slot. However beginning on that date, All My Children moved to the noon timeslot formerly occupied by the now-defunct midday newscast (The Chew now airs in that timeslot, as of September 26, 2011). KOCO-TV also occasionally preempts a primetime ABC program due to special programming. This practice is nothing new, for they also have preempted or delayed some ABC programs during the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the station preempted ABC cartoons The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show and The All New Ewoks on Saturday mornings in order to air the locally-produced program Home Showcase in the spring of 1987.[9]
The station airs most of the highest-rated programs in syndication, with Dr. Phil after Good Morning America; Anderson after The View; The Dr. Oz Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show paired up in mid-afternoons together after ABC daytime programming and before the 5 p.m. newscast; and Wheel of Fortune airing before primetime. Other syndicated programming on KOCO includes Access Hollywood on weekdays, and House, Brothers and Sisters and The Closer on weekends. Currently, Wheel of Fortune airs on KOCO-TV, while Jeopardy! on the other hand, airs on rival NBC affiliate KFOR-TV (it had previously aired on KOCO during the 1980s and early 1990s, and on KWTV afterwards until 1999); Oklahoma City is one of the few media markets to carry Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on separate television stations. The station carries just over the minimum amount of E/I children's programming, as the Litton Weekend Aventure lineup features three hours of E/I shows, and the station airs Teen Kids News on Saturdays at noon after the Weekend Aventure block.
KOCO also makes the claim based on Nielsen Media Research numbers that it is one of the top-rated ABC affiliates in the nation, which is based on market size and household ratings percentages. In fact, the three highest-rated ABC affiliates in the nation are all Hearst stations (KOCO, along with WISN in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and KMBC in Kansas City, Missouri).
In December 2010, KOCO became the second station in the Oklahoma City market (after CBS affiliate KWTV) and the sixth television station in the state of Oklahoma to broadcast syndicated programming in high definition; originally only a limited amount of syndicated shows such as Wheel of Fortune, and reruns of The Closer and Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen were broadcast in HD, but since January 2011, all of KOCO's syndicated programming available in HD is broadcast in the format including Oprah, Dr. Phil and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.[10]
Currently, KOCO-TV airs 29 hours of local news each week (with four hours on weekdays and 4½ hours on weekends). The station's sports segments are titled Sports Xtra, which the station has used since the early 1990s under Gannett ownership under the similar title Sports Extra. From the early 1990s until 2004, the station had a 15-minute Friday night high school football wrap-up show called Prep Sports Extra; though the show continues to this day, the Prep Sports Extra name has since been dropped. KOCO-TV has the fastest-revolving doppler weather radar in the area, "Advantage Doppler HD", and employs the largest fleet of live trucks in the state of Oklahoma. There is a fairly significant turnover rate with most station personalities staying at the station for one to three years before moving on to another station in the area or another media market.
In 1992, KOCO launched a local Saturday morning newscast from 8-9 a.m., the newscast was later dropped but relaunched in 1996 in the later timeslot of 10 a.m.-noon. Also in 1996, KOCO expanded its morning newscast from one hour to an hour-and-a-half from 5:30-7 a.m. and the noon newscast was expanded to one hour (the noon news was cut back to a half-hour when Port Charles debuted and remained that way after Port Charles cancellation in 2003, while the morning news expanded to two hours in 1999). For a short period from 1998 to the fall of 1999, the station used a variant of the 24 Hour News Source format, offering hourly weather updates by the station's meteorologists, then known as the "24 Hour First Alert Weather" team (shortened to just "First Alert Weather" by 2001), near the top of every hour; KFOR-TV at the time used the traditional 24 Hour News Source format featuring round-the-clock news updates. In February 2006, the station added a two-hour Sunday morning newscast from 7-9 a.m.
Like some of its ABC-affiliated sister stations, KOCO has added more newscasts to their schedule over the last few years; on the week of January 2, 2008, the weekday noon newscast was dropped (a 30-second weather update now runs just before the noon slot), a 5 p.m. newscast was added on Saturday evenings and the Saturday and Sunday morning newscasts were moved from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. and 7-9 a.m., respectively to the earlier timeslot of 5-7 a.m. The cancellation of the noon newscast meant that for the first time none of the ABC affiliates in the state of Oklahoma had midday newscasts (KTUL in Tulsa and KSWO in Lawton do not carry midday newscasts either). The station is also unusual in programming an hour-long newscast on Sundays at 10 p.m., which expanded from 35 minutes in 2006; as a result, Sunday Sports Xtra was absorbed into the newscast and reduced to a 15-minute segment near the end of the newscast.
KOCO also has partnerships with The Enid News & Eagle (the station's only link to its former city of license) and The Norman Transcript. In the 1990s, during its final years under Gannett ownership, KOCO attempted to start its own investigative unit known as the I-Team (which is also the name of investigative units on several other stations including former sister station KSDK in St. Louis, Missouri). Rival KWTV also attempted an investigative unit around the same time.
Chief Meteorologist Rick Mitchell has had the longest tenure of the entire KOCO on-air staff; Mitchell joined the station in 1994 (he is the only on-air personality to work at Channel 5 under both Gannett and Hearst-Argyle ownership). In a market where many television personalities have been around for fifteen years or more, almost all of KOCO's on-air staff (except for Mitchell) have worked at the station for fewer than ten years. The current Mayor of Oklahoma City since 2005, Mick Cornett, was a former member of KOCO's news staff. He joined the station in the early 1980s as a sports anchor/reporter. He was later appointed morning and noon news anchor in the mid-1990s before leaving the station in 1998.
In October 2009, KOCO upgraded its news ticker shown during the weekday morning newscast and breaking news and the weather alert map shown during regular programming in advance of severe weather and had months earlier upgraded the school closings ticker to fit 16:9 widescreen televisions. From October 2009 until October 11, 2010 the newscasts were, however, broadcast with blue pillarboxing with the station's callsign angled vertically on the left and right thirds of the screen. On October 11, 2010, just one day after Hearst sister-station WISN began broadcasting local news in widescreen standard definition, KOCO began broadcasting their local newscasts in widescreen standard definition, however the station has yet to upgrade its newscasts to high definition. Not all of KOCO's cameras shoot in native widescreen, which results in much of KOCO's video footage being upconverted from the original 4:3 standard definition and stretched to widescreen dimensions in the control room for broadcast. On July 31, 2010 KOCO-TV added an hour-long extension of its weekend morning newscasts from 8-9 a.m.,[11] which competes against weekend morning newscasts on KFOR-TV. On September 22, 2010 KOCO expanded its weekday morning newscast to 2½ hours, with the start time moved to 4:30 a.m., becoming the first Oklahoma television station with a pre-5 a.m. morning newscast.[12]
Rick Mitchell has served as the evening chief meteorologist at KOCO-TV since 1994. Mitchell and the station's First Alert Storm Team also provide forecasts for The Edmond Sun and the Enid News & Eagle newspapers.[13] Mitchell is a member of the American Meteorological Society and is a recipient of their Television Seal of Approval. Mitchell has several awards, including "Best Weathercast" by the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters and the Oklahoma chapter of the Associated Press.[14][15]
Mitchell graduated with a bachelor of science degree in meteorology from the University of Nebraska in 1987, and afterwards began working with the State College, Pennsylvania-based weather forecasting company AccuWeather. In 1990, Mitchell entered into television meteorology with his first job at ABC affiliate WOI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa. By 1993, he was named the chief meteorologist. In 1994, Mitchell moved to Oklahoma City after being hired as the chief meteorologist at ABC affiliate KOCO-TV, where he has worked ever since.[16] His coverage of the Oklahoma Tornado Outbreak on May 3, 1999, including an F5 tornado that destroyed parts of the suburbs of Moore, Midwest City and Del City, earned Mitchell and the First Alert Storm Team a special award of recognition from then-governor Frank Keating.[17]
Mitchell had a cameo appearance (both in voice-only and on a television screen) during a scene in which a large tornado hits a drive-in theatre and served as one of three "weather announcers" (along with KWTV chief meteorologist Gary England and Jeff Lazalier, former chief meteorologist at NBC affiliate KJRH in Tulsa, Oklahoma) in the 1996 movie Twister.[18]
KOCO-TV designated the number one-rated ABC affiliate in the United States in the February 2007 sweeps period and is one of only two stations in the Oklahoma City market (#45, 2006–2007) to have been given the title of the number one network station, owned-and-operated or affiliated, in the United States. The only other is KOCB (channel 34, now a CW affiliate), was the number one WB affiliate in the nation for the 2005-2006 season, its final year as a WB affiliate.
The station's newscasts are currently the top-rated programs (per Nielsen Media Research) at both 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. KOCO-TV also features the market's highest-rated daytime programming and, as of November 2006, the most-watched network newscast in ABC's World News with Charles Gibson.
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Anchors
First Alert Weather
In addition to providing forecasts on KOCO-TV, the First Alert Storm Team also provides forecasts for KATT-FM, WWLS-AM, KQOB-FM, WWLS-FM, KKWD, KYIS-FM radio, and the Enid News and Eagle newspaper.
Sports Xtra
Reporters
Hearst Television Washington Bureau
First Alert Storm Team "FAST Unit" Storm Chasers
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