KJCT
KJCT is the branding and call sign of a low-power, Class A television station in Grand Junction, Colorado, United States, broadcasting on virtual channel 8. It serves Colorado's Western Slope, the Grand Junction-Montrose market, as an affiliate of ABC, with The CW Plus on its second subchannel and Ion on its third. The station shares studios on Blichmann Avenue in Grand Junction with dual NBC and Telemundo affiliate KKCO (channel 11). Its transmitter is located at the Mesa Point Electronics Site on the Grand Mesa, southeast of Interstate 70. Although the present licence dates from the 2000s, the KJCT service itself is much older: its intellectual unit began in 1979 as Grand Junction's full-power ABC station.
The Western Slope market
Grand Junction is the largest city on Colorado's Western Slope, the part of the state west of the Continental Divide. The television market is geographically large and mountainous, and for the first quarter-century of local television it was served by a single commercial station, KREX-TV (channel 5), which from the 1950s to 1979 carried programming from all three major networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, in a shared schedule. Cable viewers in the area could see the full ABC schedule from Denver, but over-the-air viewers could not. The arrival of a dedicated ABC station in 1979 therefore changed what Western Slope households could watch without cable, and translators across central and northwestern Colorado were needed to carry the new service over mountain terrain into smaller communities, including Montrose, where relay station K28AD-D has operated from Storm King Mountain since September 1982.
Sign-on in 1979 as a full-power ABC station
The original KJCT (channel 8) signed on on October 22, 1979. It was the first new television station in Western Colorado since KREX-TV in 1954. It was owned by Pikes Peak Broadcasting Company as a semi-satellite of its fellow ABC affiliate KRDO-TV in Colorado Springs. The station had full production facilities in Grand Junction, but much of its programming was fed from KRDO by hundreds of miles of microwave links. On sign-on it took the ABC affiliation away from KREX, which continued with CBS and NBC. The call letters refer to Grand Junction. KJCT quickly developed a local identity separate from its Colorado Springs parent: it was the first Western Colorado station with modern electronic news gathering technology, and its first live microwave news van, branded 8 Live, entered service in 1984.
Modernization and the News-Press & Gazette years
In the late 1990s, KJCT's chief engineer Roger Hightower modernized the station into one of the first true digital facilities in Colorado, and the electronic link that had fed programming from KRDO was severed, making Grand Junction operationally self-contained. In 2006 the News-Press & Gazette Company announced the purchase of KJCT, together with KRDO-TV and KRDO radio, from Pikes Peak Broadcasting. Under NPG the station added digital services that broadened its role. In January 2007 it added a second subchannel carrying Telemundo programming, and in late 2008 its third digital subchannel became Western Colorado's affiliate for The CW. Denver's KWGN-TV nevertheless remained available on cable in Grand Junction, as it had been for decades, and through low-power repeaters in the area.
The 2013 sale to Excalibur and Gray
On August 2, 2013, News-Press & Gazette announced the sale of KJCT's licence assets to Excalibur Broadcasting and its non-licence assets to Gray Television. Excalibur was owned by Don Ray, a former Gray executive. Gray planned to operate the station through joint sales and shared services agreements, making KJCT a sister station to its NBC affiliate KKCO. The sale was completed on October 31, 2013. It was NPG's first broadcast divestiture since it sold its original group of five stations to New Vision Television in 1993. The structure, in which a separate company held the licence while Gray supplied services, was a common response to federal ownership limits in small markets where one company could not directly own two of the leading stations.
The 2014 virtual channel swap
The arrangement was short-lived. As the Federal Communications Commission increased its scrutiny of such virtual duopolies, Gray announced that it would move KJCT's programming and sell the original KJCT licence to an independent, minority-owned broadcaster, which would operate the station autonomously. On August 27, 2014, Gray announced the sale of the original station to Jeff Chang and Gabriela Gomez-Chang. To prevent viewer confusion, on October 21, 2014, the FCC approved a swap of virtual channels between the original KJCT and a co-owned low-power station in Grand Junction, KKHD-LP (channel 20), which Gray was acquiring at the same time. The original station, renamed first temporarily and then permanently KGBY and later, in 2020, KLML, would map to virtual channel 20, while KKHD inherited virtual channel 8 together with KJCT's ABC programming. The sale of the original licence was completed on December 15, 2014, and Gray subsequently changed KKHD's call letters to KJCT-LP. Viewers continued to find ABC on channel 8, but the licence behind that position was now the low-power station, and the former full-power channel 8 became a differently programmed station on channel 20.
The low-power licence behind the KJCT name
The present KJCT licence has its own separate history. It was founded on August 16, 2005, and first aired on December 17, 2006, as KKHD-LP, having briefly used the call sign K20IN in 2005 and 2006. From 2006 to 2014 it was an affiliate of Telemundo. In 2015, after inheriting the channel 8 position and ABC affiliation, it became KJCT-LP. In 2025 its suffix changed again, to KJCT-CD, reflecting its Class A digital status. It broadcasts on digital channel 20 while displaying virtual channel 8, with an effective radiated power of 15 kilowatts and an antenna 922 metres above average terrain on the Grand Mesa, a height that partly compensates for low-power status in mountainous country. Its facility ID is 128473.
Programming and subchannels
KJCT's main channel, 8.1, carries ABC network programming and local news under the branding KJCT 8 and KJCT News 8. Its second subchannel, 8.2, carries The CW Plus, branded Western Colorado CW 13, a reference to its cable position. Its third subchannel, 8.3, carries Ion. The combination gives Western Slope viewers three national services from one low-power licence, supplemented by the NBC and Telemundo services of sister station KKCO. Syndicated programming historically carried by the station has included entertainment news and court and talk programmes supplied through national syndication. The station's website is kjct8.com.
News operation and studios
Local news has been central to KJCT's identity since the original station's investment in electronic news gathering and its 8 Live van in 1984. The present station maintains the KJCT News 8 brand and shares its Blichmann Avenue studios in Grand Junction with KKCO, after earlier periods in separate facilities on Foresight Circle in northern Grand Junction. Sharing a building, technical resources and management with the market's NBC affiliate allows the ABC service to sustain local newscasts in a market ranked near the bottom of the national market list by population, where a completely separate newsroom for each network would be difficult to support commercially.
The Gray-Scripps exchange
On July 7, 2025, it was announced that KJCT and KKCO would be transferred from Gray Media to the E. W. Scripps Company as part of a multi-market exchange of stations between the two companies, involving comparable assets in several states with no cash consideration exchanged between them. Scripps said the acquisitions would strengthen its presence in the West and support its local news and sports strategies. The FCC approved the multi-market exchange on April 28, 2026. In the station's current listings its owner is shown as the E. W. Scripps Company, with KKCO remaining its sister station. The transfer continued a pattern in which KJCT's ownership has changed repeatedly, from Pikes Peak Broadcasting to News-Press & Gazette, to Gray and now to Scripps, while the ABC service on channel 8 has continued without interruption for viewers.
Significance
KJCT's story contains two histories in one. The first is that of a pioneering full-power station that ended a one-station era in Western Colorado in 1979 and built a local news tradition. The second is that of regulatory change, in which that original licence was sold away in 2014 and the name, channel position, network affiliation and news brand moved to a low-power licence that had begun life as a Telemundo station. Understanding that distinction explains why modern KJCT is classed as a low-power Class A station while also legitimately tracing its service back to 1979, and why its Grand Junction audience still knows ABC simply as channel 8.
