KOKI-TV

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KOKI-TV, virtual channel 23 (UHF digital channel 22), is a Fox-affiliated television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States. The station is owned by the Cox Media Group subsidiary of Cox Enterprises, and is part of a duopoly with MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV (channel 41). Both stations share studios on Memorial Drive and East 27th Street South (near Interstate 44) in the southeastern section of Tulsa, and its transmitter located between East 93rd Street South and the Muskogee Turnpike in southeastern Tulsa County (near Broken Arrow).

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Channel	Video	Aspect	PSIP Short Name	Programming
23.1	720p	16:9	KOKIDT	Main KOKI-TV programming / Fox
23.2	480i	4:3	MeTV	Me-TV

Analog-to-digital conversion

As part of the analog television shutdown and digital conversion, KOKI-TV shut down its analog transmitter on June 12, 2009, and continued to broadcast its digital signal on its selected pre-transition channel 23. However, through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display KOKI-TV's virtual channel as 23.

History

Prior history of channel 23 in Tulsa

Prior to KOKI's debut, the channel 23 allocation in Tulsa was originally occupied by KCEB, which debuted on March 13, 1954 as a primary ABC with secondary affiliations with NBC and the DuMont Television Network. The station operated from a studio facility on the Lookout Mountain section of west Tulsa; the second television station in Tulsa (after KOTV), KTVX acquired the market's ABC affiliation from KCEB, leaving that station as an affiliate of the DuMont Television Network.

KCEB lost ABC to KTVX (channel 8, now KTUL) when it signed on in September 1954 and briefly switched its primary affiliation to NBC until KVOO-TV (channel 2, now KJRH-TV) signed on in December of that year. KCEB became an exclusive DuMont affiliate until it shut down on December 10, 1954 (DuMont itself would soon fold in 1955). KCEB's Lookout Mountain studio facility was sold to John Toole Griffin, the original owner of KTVX; channel 8 moved its operations into that building the following year, where it remains to this day.

KOKI station history

As an independent station

KOKI-TV first hit the airwaves on channel 23 on October 23, 1980, as the first independent station in the Tulsa market and the first commercial television station to sign on in Tulsa in 26 years. KOKI, whose callsign stands for Oklahoma's Independent", was originally branded as "Tulsa 23". The station was founded by a group of prominent corporate executives and community leaders in the Tulsa area, known as "Tulsa 23, Ltd", which was awarded the new channel 23 license by the Federal Communications Commission. The partnership was led by managing partner Benjamin F. Boddie and investors also included John H. Williams and Charles P. Williams, two former CEOs of the Williams Companies who were also responsible for the redevelopment of over nine square blocks and one million square feet of new office and retail construction of downtown Tulsa including the establishment of the Williams Center, the Bank of Oklahoma Tower (the state's tallest office tower at the time, at 52 stories and 660 feet (200 m)) and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center.

As reported in the Tulsa World, the ownership team was a "who's who" of Tulsa leadership of the era that also included Robert E. Thomas, Walter H. Helmerich II, C.W. Flint, Robert V. Sellers and Jim Lavenstein, the latter serving as KOKI's original general manager. The station's studios were first located on 46th Place in southeast Tulsa and the initial programming featured a blend of cartoons, older movies, westerns, drama series and a few classic sitcoms; the station had fairly decent viewership, still, in terms of programming, the station was mediocre. It generally bought second and third-hand syndicated programs that the other stations passed on, and did not bid for any stronger shows. In fact, some sitcoms and other shows were not even airing in the market locally. Its main competitor, KCGT (channel 41, now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV), was even weaker and ran mostly network shows rejected by the local "Big Three" affiliates, religious shows and barter programming.

In 1983, Time-Life Inc. (now Time Warner), the parent company of premium cable channel Cinemax, filed a federal trademark infringement lawsuit against KOKI over the use of the slogan "We Are Your Movie Star" (which Cinemax had also used at that same time). That October, KOKI won its case in Tulsa Federal District Court.

As a Fox affiliate

The station affiliated with the fledgling Fox network on October 9, 1986, but it remained essentially an independent station since Fox only provided a couple of hours of network programming a day (and would not even expand to seven nights a week of programming until 1993), eventually becoming branded as "Fox 23". On March 6, 1989, Houston-based Clear Channel Television, Inc. entered into an agreement to buy KOKI from Tulsa 23, Ltd; the sale was finalized in early 1990. Clear Channel significantly upgraded channel 23's programming, adding more recent sitcoms, higher-quality movies, and some first-run talk shows.

KOKI logo, used from 2002 to 2011.

During the 1990s, KOKI's daytime schedule moved away from the classic sitcoms and more toward talk, reality and court shows. More recent sitcoms were added to the schedule during the evening hours. The station began managing channel 41, which by that time became KTFO, under a local marketing agreement in 1994, shortly before that station affiliated with UPN in January 1995. As the children's shows disappeared from syndication, KOKI increased its syndicated programming inventory with even more talk and reality shows.

In 2001, Clear Channel moved the operations of KOKI and KTFO from South Yale into a newly converted state-of-the-art building located at 2625 South Memorial Drive (formerly constructed and owned by the Oertle's Family Discount Store and later rented by a Burlington Coat Factory store), merging both television stations with Clear Channel's Tulsa radio station properties. On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to sell its entire television station group to private equity firm Providence Equity Partners, which placed the stations into a broadcast holding company called Newport Television.

KOKI was seen in a fictional sense in the 2000 Natalie Portman film Where the Heart Is. This was rather unusual since KOKI at the time only broadcast news from a small studio on an hourly basis, as opposed to the more developed news operation that the station has at present.

On August 11, 2011, 25-year-old William Boyd Sturdivant II (who had a history of mental issues and criminal activity including burglary and drug arrests, and also reportedly once walked 250 miles (400 km) from Tulsa to Dallas) was found wandering around outside the South Memorial Drive facility of KOKI/KMYT and the Clear Channel radio stations. Sturdivant was chased off onto the roof of the station, where he climbed the 300-foot (91 m) transmission tower, where he climbed up to 150 feet (46 m) on the tower and moved between 75 and 100 feet (30 m) at various points during the standoff. The standoff lasted for more than 150 hours (breaking the record for the longest standoff in the history of the Tulsa Police Department, originally set during a 32-hour standoff involving a murder suspect in 1993), ending at around 6:40 p.m. on August 16, after a retired police negotiator was sent up the tower on a crane to talk Sturdivant down. Local news media in the area nicknamed Sturdivant "Tower Man".

On July 19, 2012, Newport Television announced the sale of KOKI and KMYT (along with the Jacksonville sister duopoly of WAWS and WTEV-TV) to Cox Media Group. As Cox Media Group is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises, the purchase placed the station under common ownership with the area's major cable operator Cox Communications, likely creating the first instance of a company owning both a television station and a cable provider in the same market since the FCC repealed its ban on local television station/cable provider cross-ownership in 2003. The sale to Cox Media would also place KOKI and KMYT under common ownership with Cox's Tulsa radio station cluster (KRMG-AM/FM, KRAV-FM, KWEN and KJSR). The FCC approved the transaction to Cox on October 23, which was finalized on December 3, 2012.

News operation

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KOKI-TV's noon newscast title card.

KOKI-TV presently broadcasts 42 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 8 hours on weekdays and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays); in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the highest local newscast output among the broadcast television stations in the Tulsa market and the second-highest among Oklahoma's television stations overall (falling behind Oklahoma City NBC affiliate KFOR-TV's weekly news total by one hour).

KOKI is a relative newcomer to the field of local newscasts in Tulsa, though it has managed to make significant gains in news viewership since the inception of the station's news department in 2002. The station has also gained a reputation in the Tulsa area for its "Solving Problems" investigative reports, helping area residents that have been scammed by local businesses; the investigative unit was originally known as the "Fox 23 Problem Solvers" until 2007, when it was changed to its current name in order to avoid confusion with NBC affiliate KJRH's similarly named "2NEWS Problem Solvers" investigative unit.

From the mid-1980s until January 2002, KOKI produded three-minute news updates that aired daily during daytime and Fox primetime programming from a small studio. At the time, it was one of only a few Fox stations that were not owned by the network offering some local news prorgramming, albeit KOKI's news presence was relatively minor. On January 26, 1997 immediately following Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXI, KOKI premiered First Weather on Fox 23, a nightly weather forecast segment that ran interspersed within its syndicated programming; it featured a five-minute segment at 10 p.m., with two additional minute-long updates at 10:35 and 11:05 p.m.; First Weather ran on the station until shortly before KOKI's newscasts debuted.

Clear Channel Communications eventually decided to start a full-fledged news department for KOKI. On February 3, 2002 (following Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXVI), the station's debuted a nightly hour-long 9 p.m. newscast, becoming the first independently produced newscast to debut in the Tulsa market since KGCT's news department was shut down in the early 1980s. News programming on KOKI quickly expanded over the next few years. Five months later in June 2002, KOKI added an early evening newscast at 5:30 p.m. on weeknights, this was followed a year later by the debut of additional half-hour newscast at 5 p.m., creating an hour-long local news block from 5-6 p.m. weekdays. In April 2006, KOKI moved its syndicated children's program block to Sunday mornings with the launch of a four-hour weekday morning newscast (it is currently the only local morning newscast of that time length in the Tulsa market; although KOTV's morning newscast previously ran for four hours, until it moved the 8 a.m. hour of the program to sister station KQCW in 2008). Two months later in June 2006, the station launched an hour-long midday newscast at noon, this program solely competes against KOTV's own hour-long newscast in that timeslot (KJRH's midday newscast airs one hour earlier at 11 a.m., while KTUL does not produce a midday newscast at all). On January 18, 2010, KOKI began producing a half-hour 10 p.m. newscast on weeknights.

On January 16, 2011, starting with the 9 p.m. newscast, KOKI became the second station in the Tulsa market (behind KJRH-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. The station began using a logo and graphics package by Hothaus Creative based on the standardized look of Fox's owned-and-operated stations (this package is a variant of the graphics first used by San Diego Fox affiliate KSWB-TV upon resuming its in-house news department in August 2008, and was later adapted for use by other stations owned at the time by Newport Television, including WAWS and KLRT-TV). The Fox searchlights are noticeably absent from the station logo unlike other stations that use versions of the Fox O&O graphics. On September 23, 2013, KOKI debuted a half-hour weeknight 6:00 p.m. newscast.

News/station presentation

Newscast titles

• Tulsa 23 Newscheck (1980–1986)
• First Weather on FOX 23 (10 p.m. weathercast; 1997–2002)
• FOX 23 News (2002–present)

Station slogans

• "There's Only One, Tulsa 23" (1980–1983)
• "We Are Your Movie Star" (1981–1983; promotional slogan, also used as Cinemax's first slogan around same time frame)
• "Where the Stars Are" (1983–1985)
• "Tulsa 23, Oklahoma's Independent" (1985–1987)
• "First. Complete. Local." (2002–2004)
• "Breaking News. Breaking Weather. Solving Problems." (2004–2009)
• "Breaking News. Breaking Weather." (2009–present)
• "Accurate. Dependable." (2009–present; weather slogan)

News team

Current on-air staff

Anchors

• Michelle Linn - weekday mornings on Daybreak and This Morning (5:00-9:00 a.m.)
• Clay Loney - weeknights at 5:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.; also "Solving Problems" investigative reporter
• Shae Rozzi - weeknights at 5:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• Kristin Tallent - weekdays at noon; also weekday morning reporter
• Ron Terrell - weekday mornings on Daybreak and This Morning (5:00-9:00 a.m.)
• Frank Wiley - weekends at 9:00 p.m.; also weeknight reporter

Weather

• James Aydelott (AMS Seal of Approval) - chief meteorologist; weeknights at 5:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• Michael Haynes (AMS Seal of Approval) - meteorologist; weekends at 9:00 p.m.
• Phil Price - weekdays at noon
• Michael Seger (member, AMS) - weekday mornings on Daybreak and This Morning (5:00-9:00 a.m.)

Sports

• Nathan Thompson - sports director; weeknights at 5:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
• Martina Del Bonta - sports anchor; weekends at 9:00 p.m.; also general assignment and sports reporter
• Andrew Carter - sports reporter; fill-in anchor; also general assignment reporter

Reporters

• Abbie Alford (also crime reporter)
• Dontaye Carter
• Janna Clark
• Melissa Hawkes
• Brittany Jeffers - weekday morning reporter (5:00-9:00 a.m.)
• Danica Lawrence
• Price McKeon
• Adam Paluka
• Sharon Phillips
• Farron Salley
• Ian Silver
• Jeff Brucculeri - weekday morning traffic reporter (5:00-9:00 a.m.).

The local lifestyle and interview program Great Day Green Country is co-hosted by Lacey Lett and KC Lupp.

References

• Tulsa TV Memories: KOKI-TV

External links

• Fox23.com - Official website for KOKI-TV
• MeTVTulsa.com - Official website for KOKI-DT2 "Me-TV Tulsa"
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