KIMT: Mason City's CBS Station for North Iowa and Southern Minnesota

KIMT is a television station licensed to Mason City, Iowa, broadcasting on virtual channel 3. It serves as the CBS affiliate for a market that straddles two states, covering north central Iowa and southeastern Minnesota, including the cities of Rochester, Austin and Albert Lea in Minnesota. The station is owned by Allen Media Group, which operates it through Rochester TV License Company, LLC. Its main studios are on North Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Mason City, and the operation is supported by a news bureau on Highway 52 North in Rochester and a sales office on East William Street in downtown Albert Lea.

Few American stations illustrate the cross-border character of Upper Midwestern television better than KIMT. Its call letters stand for Iowa-Minnesota Television, a name adopted in the late 1970s that openly acknowledged what the station had been since its earliest days: a single broadcaster serving viewers whose daily lives, shopping, medical care and weather concerns cross the state line constantly. Through its main channel, KIMT delivers the CBS network schedule, while a second digital subchannel, branded My 3.2, carries MyNetworkTV programming alongside independent fare, and a third subchannel carries Ion Television. Its official website is kimt.com.

Overview

KIMT broadcasts CBS programming on channel 3.1, including the network's prime-time entertainment, daytime drama and talk, national news and major sporting events. The station's local identity is built around its newscasts, branded KIMT News 3, which cover a geographically large and largely rural market anchored by Mason City on the Iowa side and Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, on the Minnesota side. Because the Rochester–Mason City–Austin market combines farm country, small manufacturing cities and a world-renowned medical center, the station's news agenda ranges from agricultural conditions and severe weather to health care and state politics in two different capitals, Des Moines and St. Paul.

The station's digital signal is transmitted from a tower near Meyer, Iowa, between Stacyville and McIntire, just south of the Minnesota state line — a location chosen to serve both halves of the market. According to Federal Communications Commission records, the station operates on digital channel 24 with an effective radiated power of 472 kilowatts and an antenna height above average terrain of about 465.7 metres, under facility ID 66402.

History

The station signed on the air on May 15, 1954, under the call letters KGLO-TV. It was owned by Lee Enterprises, the media company that also published Mason City's Globe Gazette newspaper and operated KGLO radio, AM 1300 and FM 101.1. The call letters echoed the newspaper's GLO branding. On its first day, the new channel 3 signal, radiating the maximum permitted 100,000 watts for its heritage VHF allotment, was reported received as far away as Gary, Indiana, a striking demonstration of early television's reach under the right conditions.

KGLO-TV affiliated with CBS, a natural choice given KGLO radio's long-standing relationship with the CBS radio network. In its earliest years it also carried programming from the DuMont network on a secondary basis, until DuMont ceased operations in 1956. For more than two decades the Lee Enterprises cluster of newspaper, radio and television defined local media in Mason City, but federal ownership policy eventually forced a breakup. In August 1977, the FCC ruled that one company could no longer control all of the media outlets in the city, and Lee was required to divest. KGLO radio was sold to BY Communications in 1977, and the television station took the new call letters KIMT — for Iowa-Minnesota Television — to mark its independent identity and its two-state service area.

Ownership Changes

KIMT's ownership history after the Lee era reflects the consolidation waves that reshaped American local television. In 1980 the station was sold to the Shott family of Bluefield, West Virginia, and their Daily Telegraph Printing Company. Four years later, in 1984, the Shotts sold KIMT, along with WBTW in Florence, South Carolina, to Spartan Radiocasting Company, which later became Spartan Communications. Spartan held the station through the 1990s before merging with Media General in 2000.

Under Media General, KIMT marked a technological milestone when its digital signal launched on UHF channel 42 in May 2002, adding high-definition network capability that summer, and the station celebrated its 50th anniversary on May 15, 2004, with retrospective programming. Media General later decided to shed several CBS affiliates, and in 2006 it sold KIMT and WIAT in Birmingham, Alabama, to New Vision Television in a deal valued at roughly $35 million. A decade later, KIMT changed hands again as part of the Nexstar–Media General divestitures: in 2016 it was among five stations, alongside outlets in Fort Wayne, St. Joseph, Terre Haute and Lafayette, sold to USA Television MidAmerica Holdings for a combined $115 million. The final step in that chain came in 2019, when Byron Allen's Entertainment Studios, through what became Allen Media Group, agreed to acquire eleven stations from USA Television for $290 million; KIMT was part of that package, bringing it into the Allen Media portfolio where it remains.

Affiliation and Programming

CBS has been KIMT's primary network home since sign-on in 1954, an unusually durable relationship that has lasted more than seventy years. The network connection gives the Mason City station the CBS prime-time lineup, CBS News programming in the morning and evening, the network's daytime schedule and its extensive sports portfolio. Beyond the main channel, KIMT has used its digital spectrum to broaden the market's choices. The 3.2 subchannel operates as the area's MyNetworkTV affiliate, branded My 3.2, supplemented with syndicated and independent programming. A third subchannel, which for years carried a continuous local weather loop, switched to Ion Television programming on November 18, 2015, ending the weather-loop era as weather information migrated to the station's website and apps.

Earlier in its history the station also maintained secondary affiliations beyond CBS, most notably its secondary DuMont service in the mid-1950s, when small-market stations routinely stitched together schedules from multiple networks. The modern KIMT schedule, by contrast, is a familiar major-network pattern: morning news, network daytime, early-evening local and national news, prime time, and a late local newscast followed by CBS late-night shows.

News Operation

Local news has long been central to KIMT's identity, and its newsroom serves one of the more spread-out small markets in the Midwest. The station's newscasts, presented as KIMT News 3, originate from the downtown Mason City studios, with reporting support from the Rochester bureau, an important presence given that Rochester is the market's largest city and a destination for patients and visitors from around the world. The station has historically aired morning, midday or early-evening, evening and late-night editions, and its morning programme — for many years titled Daybreak — became part of one of the most widely reported stories in American broadcast history.

Weather is a defining assignment for the KIMT newsroom. North Iowa and southern Minnesota experience blizzards, ice storms, tornadoes and summer flooding, and the station's forecasts and storm coverage are a core reason viewers in farm communities across the two-state region rely on channel 3. The station also covers Minnesota and Iowa state government, high school and junior-college sports across dozens of small towns, and the agricultural economy that underpins the region.

The Disappearance of Jodi Huisentruit

No account of KIMT is complete without the case of Jodi Huisentruit, the station's morning anchor, whose disappearance in 1995 remains unsolved. Huisentruit, a Minnesota native and St. Cloud State University graduate who had previously worked at KGAN in Cedar Rapids and KSAX in Alexandria, anchored the Daybreak morning newscast. In the early morning of June 27, 1995, when she failed to arrive at the station, producer Amy Kuns called her apartment; Huisentruit answered, said she had overslept and was on her way. She never arrived. Police found signs of a struggle outside her apartment near her car, including her shoes and a bent key, and investigators concluded she had been abducted.

Despite extensive investigation, no definitive clues emerged. Huisentruit was declared legally dead in May 2001, but her body has never been found and no arrest has been made. The case has been revisited repeatedly over three decades, including anniversary gatherings of friends and former colleagues in Mason City and renewed investigative attention in 2025–2026, and it continues to cast a long shadow over the station and the community it serves.

Market and Audience

The Rochester–Mason City–Austin market is one of the unusual American television markets defined by two states at once. Its audience includes Mason City and Clear Lake in Iowa; Rochester, Austin and Albert Lea in Minnesota; and dozens of farming communities between them. Rochester's Mayo Clinic gives the market an outsized health-care economy and a constant flow of out-of-state visitors, while the Iowa side contributes agricultural processing, manufacturing and the cultural draw of Clear Lake, famous in music history as the final concert stop of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson before their 1959 plane crash near Mason City. KIMT's two-state branding speaks directly to this shared regional identity, summed up in its former slogan, “Iowa. Minnesota. Together.”

Technical Details

KIMT broadcast in analogue on VHF channel 3 from 1954 until the digital transition in 2009. Its digital service began on UHF channel 42 in May 2002 and later moved to channel 24 as part of the national spectrum repack, while continuing to display as virtual channel 3. The transmitter site near Meyer, Iowa, south of the Minnesota border, positions the signal between the market's population centers. FCC records list the station's facility ID as 66402, with an effective radiated power of 472 kilowatts from an antenna roughly 465.7 metres above average terrain, giving channel 3 one of the stronger broadcast footprints in the region and reach across both states.

Recent Developments

In recent years KIMT's story has been shaped by its place inside Allen Media Group, which acquired the station in the 2019–2020 transaction with USA Television's successor operations. The station continues to operate its Mason City studios, Rochester bureau and Albert Lea sales presence, and distributes its newscasts and weather coverage through kimt.com and digital platforms alongside the broadcast signal. Anniversaries of the Huisentruit case continue to draw regional and national attention to the station, including the 31st anniversary observances in June 2026, when former colleagues again gathered in Mason City to press for answers. For a station that began in 1954 as a newspaper's television arm, KIMT's endurance as the CBS voice of a two-state market remains its defining achievement.