page_title: KNPN-LD
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: KNPN-LD / History
caption_attribution_description: News-Press &amp; Gazette Co. Home Office
context_page_description: KNPN-LD, virtual channel 26, is a low-powered Fox-affiliated television station licensed to St. Joseph, Missouri, United States. It is the television flagship of the News-Press & Gazette Company, and is a sister station to NBC/CW+/Telemundo affiliate KNPG-LD, CBS affiliate KCJO-LD and local news and weather channel News-Press NOW; this arrangement also places the four outlets under the same ownership as the St. Joseph News-Press newspaper.
  All five media properties are based out of NPG's corporate offices on Edmond Street in downtown St. Joseph; the low-power television stations share transmitter facilities on South 16th Street just southeast of downtown. There is no separate website for the three stations, instead they are integrated with that of the co-owned St. Joseph News-Press.
context_section_description: On March 14, 2012, News-Press & Gazette acquired two low-power digital television licenses in Saint Joseph, K16KF-D and K26LV-D from Sunrise, Florida-based DTV America 1, LLC for $72,000; two weeks earlier on February 29, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted the company's construction permit application to relocate the two stations' transmitter facilities from a tower near Mound City to the St. Joseph transmitter and upgrade the effective radiated power for both stations (the channel 16 license would not be activated until March 7, 2013 when it signed on as CW affiliate KBJO-LD). K26LV-D was assigned the call letters KNPN-LD on April 5, 2012, before reverting to the original K26LV-D callsign on May 8, 2012; the callsign reversion was deleted from FCC authorization records two weeks later on May 23, 2012, reverting to the KNPN-LD callsign.
  The station officially signed on the air at 6:00 a.m. on June 2, 2012, becoming the first broadcast television station to have been built and signed on by News-Press & Gazette Company and the third station in St. Joseph, after ABC affiliate KQTV (channel 2) – which signed on in September 1953 as primary CBS affiliate KFEQ-TV, and TBN owned-and-operated station KTAJ-TV (channel 16) – which launched in October 1986 and also serves the adjacent Kansas City market. KNPN-LD displaced Kansas City's WDAF-TV (channel 4) – which is among the seven full-power Kansas City stations that provide city-grade signal coverage in St. Joseph proper – as the area's default Fox station on Suddenlink Communications, DirecTV and Dish Network; however some providers continued to supply CW programming through out-of-market stations (Kansas City affiliate KCWE on some rural cable systems and Omaha affiliate KXVO – which provides rimshot signal coverage in the far northwestern tip of Missouri – on DirecTV; and WPIX/New York City, KTLA/Los Angeles and KWGN-TV/Denver on Dish Network through its superstation package) instead of KNPN's CW-affiliated third digital subchannel (News-Press & Gazette assumed promotional and advertising control of cable-only CW Plus station "WBJO" from Suddenlink with the sign-on of the subchannel); KNPN's Telemundo-affiliated fourth subchannel, meanwhile, only replaced the network's national feed on local cable providers, as Telemundo did not have an existing affiliate in Missouri.
  KNPN's launch marked News-Press & Gazette's return to a television presence in Saint Joseph as the company had formerly owned NPG Cable (which included St. Joseph as one of its service areas) until it sold its cable television holdings, including ownership of News-Press 3 NOW (which News-Press & Gazette would re-acquire in May 2012), to Suddenlink for $350 million in November 2010; News-Press & Gazette's ownership of KNPN and the St. Joseph News-Press does not violate FCC regulations preventing cross-ownership of a television station and a newspaper in the same market as FCC rules allow such joint ownership of a station if it is licensed as a low-power outlet.
  On October 9, 2013, KNPN was pulled from DirecTV due to a retransmission consent dispute involving News-Press & Gazette Company (that resulted in the removal of the company's 12 other stations throughout the country) and the satellite provider over carriage fees. KNPN and the other NPG stations were restored through an interim agreement reached on October 25, 2013.
  On August 17, 2016, the News-Press and Gazette Company announced it has signed an affiliation deal for sister station KNPG-LD with NBC, giving the St. Joseph market its first locally based NBC affiliate. The KNPG-LD call letters were moved from its Telemundo affiliate on channel 30 to the stronger channel 21 signal, while channel 21's existing CW network affiliation was moved to subchannel 21.2 and the KBJO-LD callsign on channel 21 was relocated to channel 30, which continued as a Telemundo affiliate.
caption: KNPN studios at News-Press headquarters in St. Joseph.
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