KGWN opens Northern Colorado bureau

FORT COLLINS – Cable or not, Cheyenne’s KGWN-TV will staff and equip a bureau in Old Town Fort Collins by October to provide news coverage and sales support for the Northern Colorado market.
KGWN’s hammer-and-nail entry into the region comes as the station wages a campaign to be added to Comcast cable television’s lineup in Fort Collins and Greeley. While prospects for that appear no better, nor worse, than when the CBS affiliate’s owners met with Fort Collins and Comcast officials early this year, the station’s management said the time was right to establish a foothold in the city.
“What we’re trying to communicate is that Northern Colorado is extremely significant for us,´ said Louis Wall, president of Atlanta-based Sagamore Hill Broadcasting LLC, owner of KGWN and television stations in Birmingham, Ala.; Laredo, Texas, and Rochester, Minn.
“It’s a strong statement that we are committed. A facility in Old Town, and the move to staff it, is not cheap. It means we’re serious about this, and we want to point that out to the cable guys.”
Channel 5 has leased a two-story, 1,300-square-foot storefront at 334 E. Mountain Ave., just west of The Melting Pot restaurant in Old Town. The bureau will open in early October with two sales representatives in first-floor offices and a reporter working from the second floor, equipped with video editing suites where local news stories will be produced.
“We’re taking baby steps, because we’re not yet at a point where we can have a full staff there,” KGWN General Manager Joan Turner said. “We see a point in the future when we will have multiple reporters and sales representatives.”

Hockey card
KGWN has not been part of local cable offerings for a decade. But the Cheyenne station is hoping to sweeten the deal for Comcast not just by beefing up local news coverage in Northern Colorado, but by negotiating a deal to broadcast Colorado Eagles hockey games, events that are routinely sold out at the Budweiser Events Center.
Turner and Eagles owner Ralph Backstrom have met several times to discuss the possibility, and she said she was optimistic about the chances.
“I think there is a lot of interest there on both sides,” Turner said.
The Eagles are entering the second year of a three-year contract with Altitude, the Denver-based sports cable network that also has contracts to broadcast games played by the Denver Nuggets of the National Basketball Association and the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League.
With the NHL back in gear during the coming season following a labor dispute that wiped out the 2004-2005 season, Backstrom said Altitude’s contract provided for coverage of just five Eagles games during the coming season.
“We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize our relationship with Altitude,” Backstrom said. “But we’re sure open to looking at anything Channel 5 has to offer us. There’s no question it would be a wonderful thing for us.”
That is if KGWN reaches a deal with Comcast. Without cable, Channel 5 relies on its strong Northern Colorado over-the-air broadcast signal that reaches all the way to Longmont. But since more than 85 percent of Northern Colorado television viewers are cable subscribers, the airwave market is a tiny slice.

City support
Fort Collins officials have supported Comcast’s bid for additions to the city’s cable offerings, but even though the city negotiates and approves Comcast’s franchise to provide service, its leverage in steering content is limited.
“We can’t require Comcast to provide specific channels,´ said Assistant City Manager Tom Vosburg. “We have sent numerous letters of support for Channel 5, because we believe it would support the community and provide local coverage. We’ve done everything we can to encourage Comcast to include them. I wish Comcast was more responsive.”
No one answered repeated phone calls from the Business Report to Comcast’s administrative offices in Denver, and efforts to reach company spokeswoman Jeannine Hanson were likewise unsuccessful.
KGWN has yet to seek help from federal regulators in its cable bid by filing documents with the Federal Communications Commission asking that Comcast be bound to a “must-carry” provision in FCC regulations.
The must-carry doctrine provides that cable companies include broadcast outlets that provide necessary service to underserved television markets.
Wall described the must-carry action as “a last resort,” and one that the company would rather not pursue.
City officials also said the mismatch between Channel 5, one of the nation’s smallest television broadcasters, and Comcast, the nation’s largest cable-service provider, would not bode well for a battle before the FCC.
“I’m not sure how successful that route might be for them,” Vosburg said. “Comcast could bankrupt them in that process just with bureaucratic delays.”

Hold sway
Wall said he and Channel 5 managers would rather rely on the goodwill of Fort Collins viewers and the strength of the station’s local offerings, including news and sports, to sway the cable provider in KGWN’s direction.
“Of all our television stations, we’re more excited about what we’re doing in Northern Colorado than anywhere else,” he said. “It’s a community that’s going places, and we intend to be part of that …We know that a lot of people who live in Cheyenne work for employers in Northern Colorado. We see that state line dissolving somewhat. We’re all one region.”
With permits for the remodeling of the leased space in place last week, KGWN is enlisting King Contracting Inc. of Loveland to spruce up the station’s Fort Collins outpost for an October grand opening.
“The remodel will be very, very becoming,” Turner said. “It’s going to be a very nice space for us and for the people who visit us.”

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