More than meets the eye to Fairbanks TV deal

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We knew that Newport Television was bailing out of the interior Alaska DMA of Fairbanks by selling NBC KTVF there, and we knew local owner Michael Young and his Chena Broadcasting was stepping up to buy it. Now we know the price of the Kalil-brokered deal, and a whole lot more.


First things first, however – before we get to the whole lot more, we’ll share that price. It’s $1.1M, with Kalil and Co. holding a $100K escrow deposit and the rest coming in cash at closing. As a matter of deal trivia, did anybody remember that this station was once owned by Clear Channel? It sold it and other properties it acquired from Ackerley Broadcasting to a company that was to become Newport back in 2007.

It turns out that Young will not be alone when it comes to running KTVF. He will be entering into an SSA with Tanana Valley Television Company, headed by William St. Pierre. Tanana will handle things like promotion, traffic, master control, facility maintenance, and will provide less than 15% of the station’s programming.

It also holds an eight-year purchase option on the station. It could not acquire the station today, due to the small size of the market and the fact that it is already the owner and operator of Fox KFXF. And that’s not all – it also brings CBS into Fairbanks via translator K13XD. So it already had two major network affiliations and will now have at least an arm’s-length relationship with a third. We note in passing that low power facilities such as K13XD do not count as attributable assets for local ownership cap calculations.

But that’s still not all – Tanana has two other properties that do count – AC KYSC-FM 96.9 and Country KDJF-FM 93.5.

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