Early years

On November 4, 1966, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a construction permit to Monterey–Salinas Television, Inc., to build a new commercial television station on channel 46 in Monterey. The company was led by Stoddard P. Johnston, owner of KMBY AM and FM radio in Monterey,^[3] and also featured William H. Schuyler. Schuyler had been the president of KTVU in Oakland, California, and Johnston chaired its board of directors before it was sold to Cox Broadcasting. In 1968, a planned start date of September 1 was announced for the new KMBY-TV, which Johnston said would benefit from the recent addition of UHF tuning to all new televisions and from the widespread use of cable TV systems in Salinas, Monterey, and Santa Cruz.^[4] On June 1, 1968, the unbuilt station changed its call sign to KMST,^[5] and though the September start was missed, construction moved along and the station picked up the CBS affiliation; at the time, KSBW (channel 8) in Salinas, a primary NBC affiliate, aired some CBS programs.^[6] Schuyler would later note that one of the reasons the Central Coast was picked was because CBS had an interest in adding an affiliate in the area, with NBC already spoken for and KNTV in San Jose then serving the Salinas and Monterey area with ABC programming but no CBS outlet between KPIX-TV San Francisco and KCOY-TV in Santa Maria.^[7] KMST would remain on cable in San Jose until 1993, when the TCI system there demoted it and then dropped it altogether.^[8][9]

KMST intended to begin broadcasting on January 25, 1969,^[10] but bad weather kept the station off the air; the microwave link to receive KPIX-TV and CBS programming had not yet been installed.^[11] KMST made its debut on February 1, a week later than planned.^[12] Leased quarters off the Monterey–Salinas highway were used as an interim studio site, but the acoustics were poor; eventually, the station relocated to a purpose-built site near the Monterey Peninsular Airport.^[7] In December 1973, the Johnston-led group filed to sell KMST to a new company, also named Monterey–Salinas Television, which featured Johnston and other new owners.^[13] The new owners were brought in to provide additional needed capital for equipment improvements.^[7]

Retlaw Enterprises, a company owned by relatives of Walt Disney, purchased KMST for $8.25 million in 1979.^[14] The sale offer was chosen because it was all-cash; five different groups had sought to purchase the station.^[7] KMST was traditionally a training ground for broadcasters; one former reporter, Kathryn Pratt, noted that many staffers called it the "KMST School of Broadcasting".^[15]

The late 1980s and early 1990s would prove to be turbulent times for the station. Citing poor working conditions, KMST employees voted 43–2 to unionize with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 1989. Retlaw constantly fought the unionization effort; when it fired a production director who had been active in the organizing effort, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against ownership.^[16] The news department struggled; newscasts were cut, and six staffers defected to KCBA (channel 35), which started a news department in 1990.^[17] Union negotiations remained incomplete in 1991, with AFTRA blaming station management for stalling and stating that the two-year turnover rate at KMST had reached 80 percent.^[18] Meanwhile, the station experimented with an early prime time schedule, airing prime time from 7 to 10 p.m. instead of from 8 to 11, for a year in 1992; other Northern California stations also tried out the time change.^[19]

Harron, Ackerley, and Clear Channel ownership

In 1993, Retlaw sold KMST for $8.2 million to Harron-Smith Television Partnership,^[20] a joint venture of Harron Communications and Smith Broadcasting. Amid a major retooling of the station, the call letters were changed in October to KCCN-TV, representing the new title of its newscasts, "Central Coast News".^[21] The call letters were shared with two stations in Honolulu, Hawaii, KCCN AM and KCCN-FM.^[1]

A year into the partnership, Smith sold its half back to Harron; the next year, it bought KSBW-TV, channel 46's longtime competitor. Meanwhile, Harron began to realize it was in over its head with the task it confronted at KCCN-TV, having underestimated the dimensions of the challenge posed by turning it around.^[22] In late 1995, Harron began to shop KCCN-TV—or its assets—for sale. Smith then looked at buying back KCCN-TV's assets and programming the station under a local marketing agreement (LMA). A deal with Smith was far along enough that it was reported as confirmed by the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper.^[23] However, negotiations then stalled, and Harron sought another buyer.^[24]

At 3 p.m. on April 24, 1996, KCBA owner Ackerley Communications took over the operations of KCCN-TV. Harron immediately laid off 70 employees and shut the channel 46 newsroom down, though 25 employees would then be hired back by KCBA.^[24][25] News director Adrienne Laurent popped up three hours later as a fill-in anchor on KSBW's 6 p.m. newscast.^[24] KCBA promised to restore news to KCCN-TV on June 3 in what was just the second LMA of its type involving two news-producing stations.^[24][26] With the agreement, KCCN-TV operations moved from Monterey to Salinas.^[27] The move drew fire from the city councils of Salinas and Monterey and the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, as well as several private petitions to the FCC.^[25] The first KCCN-TV local newscasts from KCBA in Salinas were picketed by some of the employees that were not rehired.^[28] On February 23, 1997, KCCN changed its call letters again, this time to KION, after the rise of the World Wide Web brought new complaints from the Honolulu radio stations, who wanted to restrict channel 46 from using their call sign on their website.^[1]

Late in 1998, Ackerley bought KION outright from Harron and sold KCBA to Seal Rock Broadcasters, though Ackerley would continue to operate that station on Seal Rock's behalf.^[29] It took more than a year for this transaction to receive FCC approval, due to the then-pending license renewals for both stations; the deal was completed on January 12, 2000. Ackerley instituted three master control hubs in its group in 2000, one of them in Salinas and the others at KGET-TV in Bakersfield and WIXT in Syracuse, New York.^[30] The Salinas hub served KION and KCBA as well as KFTY in Santa Rosa, KVIQ-TV in Eureka, and KMTR in Eugene, Oregon.^[31]

Two years later, Ackerley merged with Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel already owned radio stations on the Central Coast, and one of them began to share KION's call sign: news/talk-formatted KTXX (1460 AM) became KION as part of a partnership that saw collaboration between the radio station and the TV newsroom.^[32]

Cowles and NPG ownership

On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to spin off its entire television stations group to Newport Television, a broadcasting holding company established by the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners.^[33] (Clear Channel retained KION radio.) However, Newport Television could not keep KION or Telemundo affiliate KMUV-LP; Providence Equity Partners owned a stake in Univision, whose radio division owned several overlapping radio stations in the San Jose area. Instead, KION and KMUV-LP, along with KCOY-TV and KKFX-CA, the Clear Channel TV stations on the southern Central Coast, were sold to the Cowles Publishing Company of Spokane, Washington, for $41 million.^[34]

On September 20, 2013, News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG) announced that it would purchase KION-TV and KMUV-LP, as well as KKFX-CA; NPG would also take over some of the operations of KCOY-TV, which it could not own directly as NPG's holdings in that area already included KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara.^[35] The sale was completed on December 13.^[36]

The existing LMA for KCBA was terminated on December 1, 2013, as Seal Rock entered into a new joint sales agreement with Entravision Communications; as a consequence, KION's 10 p.m. newscast moved from KCBA to its second subchannel, which was affiliated with The CW Plus.^[37] After Entravision opted not to exercise an existing option to purchase KCBA's non-license assets from Seal Rock, that company entered into a new shared services agreement with NPG in September 2021. NPG purchased the Fox affiliation and program stream, which moved to KION's 46.2 subchannel on January 1, 2022; simultaneously, the CW affiliation agreement was assigned to Seal Rock for use on KCBA. There was no change for cable or satellite viewers.^[38]

Notable former on-air staff

• Lois Hart (future first anchor for CNN, anchor for KCRA-TV in Sacramento)^[45]
• Kimberly Hunt, reporter (1984–1987)^[46]
• Pedram Javaheri, also known as P. J. Javaheri, weekend meteorologist; now at CNN International
• Sharon Tay, reporter (1990–1992)^[47]

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion

KION-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 46, on February 17, 2009, the original target date by which full-power television in the United States was to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 32.^[49][50]