KTMJ

KTMJ is the call sign used in listings for KTMJ-CD, a low-power, Class A television station in Topeka, Kansas, in the United States. It broadcasts on channel 43 and is affiliated with the Fox network. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside KSNT, channel 27, the NBC affiliate for Topeka. Nexstar also provides services to KTKA-TV, channel 49, the market's ABC affiliate and a CW Plus outlet, under joint sales and shared services agreements with that station's owner, Vaughan Media. All three stations share studios on Northwest 25th Street, on U.S. Route 24, near the unincorporated community of Kiro in Shawnee County, with a Topeka mailing address. KTMJ-CD's transmitter is located along Southwest West Union Road west of Topeka.

KTMJ is unusual among Fox affiliates in being a low-power station. Most Fox affiliates in the United States are full-power licences; Topeka's Fox service instead developed out of a cluster of low-power stations serving three separate Kansas communities — Topeka, Manhattan and Junction City, the three places named in its call letters — and it only became a Topeka station in the full sense in 2001, nearly two decades after the first station in the group signed on. Because a low-power signal cannot cover the whole market, KTMJ is also simulcast in high definition on the second digital subchannel of its full-power sister station KSNT, channel 27.2, which is how many viewers across northeastern Kansas actually receive Fox 43.

Origins in Junction City as K06KZ

The station traces its roots to June 16, 1982, when a station with the call sign K06KZ signed on in Junction City, broadcasting as an independent station on VHF channel 6. It was a low-power outlet for a community whose television otherwise came from the larger Topeka and Manhattan area stations and from Kansas City. In 1987 the station changed its call letters to KTMJ-LP. The new letters represented its intended service area — Topeka, Manhattan and Junction City — even though the station itself was then based in Junction City. In listings of the period, in the Kansas City edition of TV Guide and in Topeka-area newspapers, it was referred to as KTMJ-TV 6.

On April 6, 1987, the station became an affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company, which had launched its prime-time service the previous year and was building its affiliate body largely from independent stations and smaller outlets willing to take a new network. Fox gave the Junction City low-power station a network identity, and the association, despite several interruptions in the station's primary affiliation during the 1990s, is the one with which it is identified today. A second low-power station joined the group the following year: a station that signed on November 30, 1988, as K17CK, initially an independent, was converted into a repeater of the Junction City station and eventually became its Emporia outlet.

Expansion through repeaters

Low-power television in a rural state works through accumulation. No single low-power transmitter can cover a market spread among several cities tens of miles apart, so the KTMJ operation grew as a small network of stations and repeaters, each serving one community and all carrying the same programme service. The Emporia station on channel 17 was one element. Another began operating on August 4, 1992, as K15DQ, serving the Ogden and Manhattan area; it became a Class A repeater of the Junction City signal on September 24, 2001. A further repeater operated on channel 43 in Topeka itself — the facility that would eventually become the main station.

Under owner Montgomery Communications, this group gave northeastern Kansas a Fox service tailored to its geography long before the Topeka market had a full-power Fox licence of its own. The arrangement also explains several features of the station's later history that would otherwise be puzzling: why its call letters name three cities, why stations in Emporia, Ogden and Junction City changed call letters in step with it, and why the station's operations were for years directed from Junction City rather than from the state capital it now serves as its principal community.

UPN, The WB and the return to Fox as primary

The 1990s brought the launch of two further national networks, UPN and The WB, and small stations across the country rearranged their affiliations to carry them. On January 16, 1995, KTMJ became a primary affiliate of UPN and a secondary affiliate of The WB, while retaining its Fox connection in a secondary form. Managing three networks on one low-power schedule required compromises. The station aired UPN's Monday and Tuesday night programmes in pattern, but carried The WB's initial Wednesday line-up on a week-delayed basis on Sunday nights, because Wednesday nights were committed to the Prime Time Entertainment Network service. In September 1995 it moved the delayed WB Wednesday programmes to Saturdays so that it could carry The WB's new Sunday schedule in pattern, and it added the children's blocks of both new networks, running their weekend line-ups back to back on Sunday mornings and early afternoons as part of a seven-hour block of network and syndicated cartoons.

That crowded arrangement ended on April 1, 1996, when KTMJ became a primary affiliate of Fox once again and UPN was reduced to secondary status. The change left the Topeka market without a local WB affiliate until a cable-only WB 100+ station launched in September 1998; until then, viewers wanting WB programmes relied on the superstation feed of Chicago station WGN-TV or, after its September 1996 sign-on, on the Kansas City WB station. KTMJ and its repeaters finally dropped the secondary UPN affiliation in 2003, completing the return to a single primary network identity.

The move to Topeka in 2001

In 2001 Montgomery Communications reassigned the KTMJ call letters to the repeater on UHF channel 43 in Topeka, converting that outlet — which was at the same time redesignated as a Class A station — into the flagship of the group. The Junction City station that had originally held the KTMJ name changed its call letters to KTLJ-CA, and the channel 17 station became KETM-CA, subsequently acting as a repeater of channel 43. With the reassignment, the station's operations moved from Junction City to facilities on Southgate Drive in southwestern Topeka, although master control remained in Junction City until it too moved to the Topeka facility in May 2004.

Class A status is a regulatory category for low-power stations that meet certain local service and operating requirements and in return receive a measure of protection in the television spectrum. For KTMJ it formalised the station's position as Topeka's Fox outlet despite its low-power licence. The station has since been known on air as Fox 43, and its identity, studio address and news presence have all been Topeka-based, even though the repeater stations that extended its reach into Junction City, Manhattan and Emporia remained an important part of how viewers outside the capital received it. One of those repeaters later relinquished that status: on March 30, 2011, the Emporia station surrendered its Class A designation, reverted to a standard low-power licence and changed its call letters from KETM-CA to KETM-LP.

Purchase by New Vision and co-location with KSNT

On July 7, 2008, New Vision Television, the owner of Topeka NBC affiliate KSNT, announced its intention to buy KTMJ and its repeaters from Montgomery Communications. The purchase was completed on September 1, 2008. KTMJ then relocated its operations into KSNT's facilities on Northwest 25th Street, ending its separate existence on Southgate Drive and beginning the shared arrangement that continues today. In November 2008 KSNT began providing a simulcast of KTMJ on its second digital subchannel, solving the low-power coverage problem by giving Fox 43 a full-power path to the whole market. The simulcast replaced a CW Plus service on that subchannel, which moved to KTKA-TV when that station later joined the shared operation.

The New Vision period also brought KTKA into the group. After KTKA was sold to PBC Broadcasting in 2011, New Vision operated it under local marketing and shared services agreements and its operations were merged into the Northwest 25th Street facility with KSNT and KTMJ. Objections were raised at the time by the American Cable Association, which argued that a virtual triopoly of the three stations could give their operator too much leverage in retransmission consent negotiations, but the Federal Communications Commission approved the related sale on July 21, 2011. The result was that Topeka's NBC, ABC and Fox services came to be produced from one building by one newsroom.

LIN Media, Media General and Nexstar ownership

New Vision Television's stations, including KSNT and KTMJ, were subsequently sold to LIN Media, and LIN in turn merged with Media General. Media General was then acquired by Nexstar Broadcasting Group, in the transaction that made Nexstar the largest local television station group in the United States. Through those national consolidations KTMJ passed from LIN to Media General to Nexstar Media Group, which remains its owner. Its local circumstances did not change with the national ones: it stayed in the Northwest 25th Street studios, stayed alongside KSNT as a sister station, and stayed as the Fox service distributed by the KSNT subchannel simulcast.

There is no separate website for KTMJ; its online presence is integrated with that of KSNT, including a Fox 43 section within the KSNT site. That integration is consistent with the station's position in the group. It has its own licence, channel, network affiliation and on-air brand, but its sales, news, promotion and web services are all functions of the combined Topeka operation.

News operation

KTMJ's news presence has been provided by the news department it shares with KSNT and KTKA rather than by a separate Fox 43 newsroom. The centrepiece of that presence is an evening newscast in the 9 p.m. hour, the traditional local news slot for Fox affiliates whose network prime-time schedule ends an hour earlier than those of the older networks. Fox 43 news programmes carry the station's own branding while being reported, produced and presented by the shared staff based on Northwest 25th Street, alongside the differently timed newscasts produced for KSNT's NBC schedule and KTKA's ABC schedule.

That model gives a low-power station a local news service it could not have funded alone. A Class A station with a limited transmitter, a small sales market and no full-power licence of its own would ordinarily be an unlikely source of a nightly local newscast in a market the size of Topeka. As part of a three-station operation it can offer one, drawing on the same reporters, weather service and studio facilities as the market's NBC and ABC stations, and reaching viewers throughout the market through the KSNT 27.2 simulcast, cable carriage and streaming as well as through its own channel 43 signal.

Subchannels, cable carriage and technical information

KTMJ-CD broadcasts digitally on channel 43 — recent channel listings show its digital signal associated with UHF channel 20 — and its multiplex carries more than the Fox service. Current Topeka listings show 43.1 Fox, 43.2 Ion Mystery, 43.3 Grit and 43.4 Laff. On cable, the station has been carried on Cox Communications channel 6 in standard definition and on the corresponding high-definition tier, and on AT&T U-verse channel 43 in standard definition and channel 1043 in high definition. Cable position 6 thus gave Fox 43 a prominence on Topeka cable systems that its low-power over-the-air signal alone could not have achieved.

The station's limited broadcast radius is the central technical fact of its existence. Its own digital signal does not reach the northern and eastern fringes of the Topeka market, which is why the simulcast on KSNT's second subchannel, transmitted from the tower at the Northwest 25th Street studios, is not a convenience but a necessity. Between its own Class A transmitter west of Topeka, its historic repeater network, its full-power simulcast and its cable and satellite carriage — satellite local-channel packages for Topeka have included Fox channel 43 alongside the market's other network stations — the station achieves market-wide distribution by combining several different delivery paths.

Present status

Today KTMJ-CD continues as Topeka's Fox affiliate, a low-power Class A station owned by Nexstar Media Group, operated from the shared Northwest 25th Street studios with KSNT and KTKA-TV, simulcast on KSNT-DT2 and branded as Fox 43. Its path to that position — from a Junction City independent low-power station in 1982, through Fox, UPN and WB affiliations in its first two decades, reassignment to Topeka's channel 43 in 2001 and absorption into the capital's combined television operation in 2008 — makes it one of the clearest examples in Kansas broadcasting of how a network service can be built, piece by piece, from low-power licences in a market that never had a full-power licence to spare for it.