KCLO
KCLO is a television station in Rapid City, South Dakota, in the United States. It broadcasts on virtual channel 15 and is affiliated with The CW, with MyNetworkTV programming carried on a subchannel in its present configuration as described in its market listings. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group and forms part of the KELOLAND Media Group centred on KELO-TV, channel 11, in Sioux Falls. Although it holds its own licence for Rapid City and identifies separately, KCLO is treated as a semi-satellite of KELO-TV. Its master control and most internal operations are based at KELO-TV's studios on Phillips Avenue in downtown Sioux Falls.
KCLO maintains a news bureau and sales office on Canyon Lake Drive in Rapid City, and its transmitter is on Skyline Drive near the downtown area. That combination — a local presence in the Black Hills combined with a newsroom, technical operation and programme schedule directed from the other side of the state — defines the station. It exists because western South Dakota is far from Sioux Falls, in a different time zone and a distinct television market, yet historically it lacked the full range of network services available in the east of the state.
Origins as a translator
The station's roots go back to 1980, when Midcontinent Broadcasting, the owner of KELO-TV, applied to build a translator on channel 15 in Rapid City to relay KELO's CBS service. At that time Rapid City was one of the few markets in the country without full service from all three of the then major networks. CBS programmes in the Black Hills were divided on a part-time basis between the local ABC affiliate, KOTA-TV, and the local NBC affiliate, KEVN, each of which carried only a limited number of hours of CBS programmes each week. Viewers with cable could see the complete CBS schedule from a Denver station, but over-the-air viewers could not.
The Federal Communications Commission approved the translator application in November 1980 despite protests from KOTA and KEVN. KOTA in particular argued that allowing a KELO translator in the Black Hills would give KELO a monopoly position in South Dakota television. The new translator, K15AC, began broadcasting on September 26, 1981. It operated at 1,000 watts and brought CBS programming to viewers within roughly a 35-mile radius of Rapid City. It received the KELO signal by way of KPLO-TV, the KELO satellite serving Reliance and Pierre, relayed through three microwave sites to the Black Hills.
A shoestring beginning
K15AC began with minimal local resources. Its staff consisted essentially of a resident manager who worked from his home in Rapid City and a single reporter whose stories appeared on KELO-TV's main newscasts. It did not sell advertising in the Black Hills at the outset. In functional terms it was not yet a Rapid City station in its own right; it was a relay device that finally gave the area a continuous CBS service. Even so, its arrival changed the local market. It returned full-time CBS programming to the Black Hills, where the last full-time CBS affiliate, KRSD-TV, had closed in February 1976, and it ended the practice under which CBS shows had been shared in off-hours by stations affiliated primarily with other networks.
For the next several years that translator status continued. The signal was useful but limited in power, in coverage and in local identity. Viewers in Rapid City watched Sioux Falls programmes, Sioux Falls news and Sioux Falls advertising, delivered by a low-power relay whose sole purpose was distribution. The next stage was to convert that relay into a full-power station licensed to Rapid City itself, with the ability to carry separate advertising, separate identifications and, if its owner chose, separate programming.
Conversion to full power as KBLO-TV and KCLO-TV
In 1987 the channel 15 operation was converted to full-power status under the call letters KBLO-TV. On November 28, 1988, it became a full-power station as KCLO-TV, having taken its present call letters that year as a disambiguation of KELO — close enough to signal the family connection, distinct enough to identify the Rapid City licence. From that point KCLO was no longer simply a translator. It was a semi-satellite: it cleared most of its parent station's network and syndicated schedule, but it could air separate commercial inserts and legal identifications, maintain its own office and sell locally.
As a full-power station KCLO initially carried network programmes, and KELO's Sioux Falls-based news, on a one-hour delay. The delay was a practical response to geography and time. Rapid City is in the Mountain Time Zone, while Sioux Falls is in the Central Time Zone. Delaying the feed allowed programmes to appear at their customary local clock times in the west. That practice ended during a major news event. In January 1991, during the Gulf War, KCLO began carrying the network programmes and KELO news live rather than delayed, and the station announced that live carriage would become permanent. News urgency, in other words, overrode the convenience of a timeshifted schedule.
A distinctive programme clock
One lasting consequence of the time-zone position is KCLO's prime-time clock. Its prime-time schedule starts at 6 p.m. rather than the 7 p.m. start customary in the Mountain Time Zone, and rather than the pattern followed by the rest of the KELOLAND stations in the Central Time Zone. Newscasts originating in Sioux Falls are likewise seen an hour earlier by the clock in Rapid City. The arrangement can appear unusual to visitors, but it follows directly from carrying a live feed produced in a city one zone to the east. KCLO's schedule is therefore a visible reminder that, although it serves a separate market, it remains operationally tied to Sioux Falls.
The semi-satellite model also means KCLO's syndicated offering is not identical in every respect to KELO's. The station has simulcast KELO-TV's newscasts, with local weather inserts for the Black Hills, while offering a separate selection of syndicated programming outside network and news hours. Separate commercials are inserted for Rapid City advertisers, and the station gives its own legal identifications. Those differences are modest compared with a fully independent station, but they are the difference between a relay and a licence with a local commercial life of its own.
Ownership: Midcontinent, Young, Media General and Nexstar
KCLO was built by Midcontinent, the original owner of KELO-TV and its other satellites, KDLO-TV in Florence and KPLO-TV in Reliance. On January 12, 1996, Midcontinent Media announced the sale of KELO-TV and its satellite stations to Young Broadcasting for 50 million dollars; Young assumed control on May 31, 1996. KCLO passed with the group. Young was the owner during the analogue-to-digital transition and during the period when the KELOLAND stations developed their digital subchannel services.
Young Broadcasting later merged with Media General, in a transaction approved by the Federal Communications Commission on November 8, 2013, and completed on November 12, 2013. Media General was in turn acquired by Nexstar Broadcasting Group, in a sale announced in January 2016 and completed on January 17, 2017. Nexstar, now Nexstar Media Group, remains KCLO's owner. Through each change the station's basic role did not change: it stayed with KELO-TV and its sister semi-satellites as a single statewide group, because the value of the Rapid City licence to each successive owner lay precisely in its connection to the Sioux Falls flagship.
From CBS to The CW
For most of its full-power life KCLO was a CBS station, as a semi-satellite of CBS affiliate KELO-TV from 1988 onwards. CBS was the reason the translator had been built in 1981, and it remained the station's main identity for nearly four decades. Its digital subchannels added services around that core: a second channel carrying The CW for the Black Hills and later branded within the KELOLAND CW operation, Ion Television on a further subchannel, and Ion Mystery on another. By 2019 the Black Hills CW service was being carried in high definition on channel 15.2, and on January 1, 2024, that service was replaced by a simulcast of KELOLAND CW, operated from Sioux Falls and carried across the KELOLAND group.
On August 1, 2026, that long CBS association ended for KCLO, though not for KELO-TV itself. KCLO lost its CBS affiliation and became a primary affiliate of The CW, while CBS service in Rapid City continued by other means, including a subchannel of another local station. Current listings describe KCLO's main channel, 15.1, as The CW, in the form of The CW Plus service, and its second channel, 15.2, as an independent service carrying MyNetworkTV programming under the KELOXTRA branding, alongside Ion services on the remaining subchannels. The station history summarised in its licence entry accordingly lists CBS, as a semi-satellite of KELO-TV from 1988 to 2026, as a former affiliation.
News operation
KCLO has never maintained a full separate news department producing a complete schedule of Rapid City newscasts. Its news comes from KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, simulcast with local weather inserts relevant to the Black Hills and with reporting from its Rapid City bureau. That model reflects both economics and geography. A statewide newsroom can cover the South Dakota legislature, statewide weather systems and major stories wherever they occur, and distribute the result to Florence, Reliance, Sioux Falls and Rapid City at once. The Rapid City bureau and sales office give that statewide operation a physical base for gathering news and serving advertisers in the west.
The practical effect for viewers is a hybrid service: the presenters, studio and most reporting originate in Sioux Falls, but the programmes are identified for Rapid City, carry Black Hills weather information and appear at Mountain Time clock positions one hour earlier than in Sioux Falls. Following the 2026 affiliation change, KCLO continued to carry news and other programmes from Sioux Falls even though its main network entertainment affiliation was no longer the same as KELO's, underlining that its semi-satellite relationship is about ownership and operation as much as about any single network.
Technical information and digital television
KCLO broadcasts digitally on UHF channel 16 while displaying virtual channel 15, its historic channel number. Its analogue signal broadcast on UHF channel 15 from the full-power conversion in the late 1980s until the national full-power analogue shutdown in 2009. The Federal Communications Commission facility identifier for the station is 41969. Its digital effective radiated power is listed as 150 kilowatts, with an antenna height above average terrain of 154 metres, or about 505 feet, from its transmitter site on Skyline Drive in Rapid City.
Those figures are far lower than those of the Sioux Falls flagship, but they are appropriate to a station whose coverage target is the Rapid City metropolitan area and the surrounding Black Hills rather than the whole state. Terrain in the Black Hills is also very different from the flat plains around Sioux Falls: hills and valleys shape reception, and a transmitter on elevated ground near the city can serve the populated core of the market more effectively than its raw power figure might suggest.
Place in western South Dakota television
KCLO's history traces the wider history of television in western South Dakota. A market once served only by part-time clearances of a third network gained a translator in 1981, a full-power semi-satellite in 1988, live rather than delayed network programmes in 1991, digital subchannels offering additional networks, and eventually, in 2026, a change of its own primary affiliation separate from its parent station. At each stage the aim was the same: to give Rapid City viewers the same breadth of service available in larger markets without requiring a completely stand-alone station to pay for it.
Today KCLO remains a Nexstar station, operated from Sioux Falls as part of the KELOLAND group, with a bureau and sales office in Rapid City, The CW on its main channel and MyNetworkTV among its subchannel services. Its call letters, its channel number and its continuing use of KELOLAND branding preserve a link to the CBS semi-satellite it was for most of its life, even as its programme identity has moved on.
