KXMA

KXMA is the call sign used in listings for KXMA-TV, a television station licensed to Dickinson, North Dakota, in the United States. It broadcasts on virtual channel 2 and is affiliated with The CW. The station operates as a semi-satellite of KXMB-TV, channel 12, in Bismarck, and is owned by Nexstar Media Group. Together with KXMB, KXMC-TV in Minot and KXMD-TV in Williston, it forms KX Television, a regional network of stations covering much of the western and central two-thirds of North Dakota, as well as parts of eastern Montana and northwestern South Dakota.

KXMA simulcasts the newscasts of KXMB and shares the branding, website and programme operation of the KX group. Its own full-power licence allows separate station identifications and local commercial inserts, even though viewers in Dickinson see essentially the Bismarck station's schedule. That model has defined the second half of the station's life. The first half was very different: for its first three decades channel 2 in Dickinson was an independently owned station, known as KDIX-TV, that had to assemble a schedule from several networks because no single network service was provided to it on a full-time, properly fed basis.

Launch as KDIX-TV in 1956

The station first went on the air on October 15, 1956, as KDIX-TV, sharing its call letters with Dickinson's KDIX radio station. It broadcast in analogue on VHF channel 2, the allocation it retained until the digital transition in 2009. From the beginning it was a CBS affiliate, and CBS remained its primary affiliation for sixty years, an unusually long continuity that survived several owners, two changes of call sign and the station's eventual absorption into a regional network. In its early decades, however, a primary affiliation did not mean an exclusive one. KDIX-TV also carried NBC programmes on a secondary basis from 1956 until 1980, and ABC programmes on a secondary basis from 1956 until 1986.

Secondary affiliations were a normal feature of small-market television in that era. A city the size of Dickinson could not support three or four separate full-power stations, so one station carried the programmes of more than one network, choosing among them and often showing some outside their network time slots. Viewers gained access to programmes they would otherwise have missed, but the schedule was a compromise, and not every programme from every network could be cleared. In Dickinson's case the compromise lasted a long time, in part because the market — the combined Minot–Bismarck–Dickinson–Williston market — is geographically vast and was served by groups of linked stations rather than by stand-alone outlets in each city.

The problem of the network feed

The KX Television history records a revealing episode in the station's development. The KX group itself had been formed in 1958, when John Boler, the owner of Bismarck station KBMB-TV, sold a half interest in that station to Minot businessman Chester Reiten, and the two men together bought the Minot station KCJB-TV and renamed it KXMC-TV. KBMB later became KXMB, Williston's KXMD joined in 1969, and Boler sold his interest to Reiten in 1971. Dickinson, however, remained outside the group.

In 1970, KDIX-TV began switching to and from KXMB's signal whenever CBS programming was on the air, because KDIX-TV could not afford a network feed of its own. In practical terms, the Dickinson station took its CBS programmes off the Bismarck station's broadcast rather than paying for a separate network connection. That arrangement continued even after KDIX-TV was sold to new owners and changed its call letters, a measure of how tight the economics of a small-market station could be. A network affiliation on paper was of limited value if the station could not afford the line charges and equipment needed to receive the network directly.

From KDIX-TV to KNDX to KXMA

The station changed its call letters from KDIX-TV to KNDX in 1983, separating its identity from the radio station of the same name. The new identity was short-lived and, by the mid-1980s, unsuccessful in commercial terms. By late 1984 the station was on the verge of closure. At that point Chester Reiten, whose family company already owned the other KX stations, bought the Dickinson station, merged it fully into the KX network and changed its call letters to KXMA in 1985. The KXMB history notes that the intended call sign was at first KXME, but that after an objection from Prairie Public Television the letters KXMA were chosen instead.

The purchase rescued the licence and ended Dickinson's separate television history. From 1985 onwards channel 2 was programmed from outside the city, first as part of the Reiten family's regional network and later as part of a national station group. Local inserts into the Bismarck newscasts were provided for many years, giving Dickinson stories a place within the shared programmes, but later cutbacks led to KXMA's operations being largely merged with those of KXMB and the local inserts being eliminated. The station retained its licence, transmitter and identifications, while editorial and technical control moved to Bismarck.

The KX Television network

KXMA is one of four full-power stations in the KX network. KXMB-TV in Bismarck and KXMC-TV in Minot are the two principal stations; KXMA simulcasts KXMB, while KXMD-TV in Williston simulcasts KXMC. Historically KXMC was treated as the flagship of the group even though KXMB served the state capital, but master control and internal operations were moved to KXMB's studios on North 15th Street in Bismarck during the 2000s. The four stations are counted as a single unit for ratings purposes, and satellite and cable providers do not necessarily carry all of them, since their schedules substantially duplicate one another.

The network arrangement allows the group to cover a very large area with a shared news operation, shared syndicated programming and a single website, KXNet.com, which brought the previous separate station domains together under one umbrella in 2006. The stations are branded on air as KX Television and their news operation as KX News. For a viewer in Dickinson, the practical result is a local channel number and local advertising carried within a service produced in Bismarck, supplemented by the Minot operation's newscasts shared across the group.

Reiten family ownership and the Nexstar sale

After Chester Reiten retired in the 1990s, control of the Reiten Television stations passed to his five children, who continued to own KXMA and its sister stations into the following decade. That made the KX group one of the longer-lived family-owned regional television companies in the United States, operating in a period when most comparable groups had already been sold to national chains. Members of the family served as the group's president and as general managers of individual stations within it.

That era ended with a sale to Nexstar. Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced on September 17, 2015, that it would purchase the Reiten Television stations, including KXMA-TV, for 44 million dollars. The sale was completed on February 2, 2016. A consequence of the acquisition was the termination of the group's joint sales agreement with KBMY, the ABC affiliate in Bismarck, because Nexstar's ownership of the KX stations changed the competitive and regulatory position in the market. KXMA has remained a Nexstar Media Group station since that completion, operated as part of the same four-station network its previous owners built.

Move of CBS to a subchannel and arrival of The CW

The other major change of the Nexstar period was to the station's programme identity. In 2016, the year the sale was completed, KXMA moved CBS programming from its main channel to its second digital subchannel, 2.2, and placed The CW on the primary channel, 2.1. The same rearrangement was made across the KX network. Contemporary explanations for the change at Dickinson noted that it was likely intended to secure must-carry status for The CW in Dickinson: a primary channel is carried by cable and satellite providers on different terms from a subchannel, so moving The CW to 2.1 guaranteed its distribution to pay-television households in the Dickinson area.

CBS therefore continued to be available to channel 2 viewers, but as a subchannel service rather than as the station's headline affiliation, for the first time since 1956. Listings from that period show the multiplex as 2.1 The CW, branded as Dakota's CW, 2.2 CBS, 2.3 Laff and 2.4 Ion Mystery. The station's former-affiliation record reflects that sequence: CBS as the main affiliation from 1956 to 2016 and on 2.2 thereafter, with the secondary NBC affiliation ending in 1980 and the secondary ABC affiliation ending in 1986. Viewers who associated channel 2 with CBS for two generations had to relearn the position of both networks on their receivers and programme guides.

News operation

KXMA does not produce its own separate newscasts. It simulcasts the newscasts produced by KXMB in Bismarck, which in the group's established pattern have included weekday newscasts at noon, 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. and weekend newscasts in the early and late evening. KXMC in Minot produces a morning programme and co-produces an early-evening newscast with KXMB that is broadcast across the four stations. All of the group's local newscasts have been broadcast in high definition. News for Dickinson viewers is therefore state and regional news produced from Bismarck and Minot, rather than a programme presented from a Dickinson studio.

For many years that shared model was softened by local inserts: Dickinson material was placed inside the Bismarck newscasts, so that local stories, weather and sport could appear within the network programme. As noted above, those inserts were later eliminated as operations were consolidated in Bismarck. The change illustrates a trade-off present throughout the station's history. Consolidation kept a full-power Dickinson licence and a full network schedule viable in a very small market, but it progressively removed the separate local editorial voice that KDIX-TV had possessed in its independent years.

Digital transition and technical information

KXMA shut down its analogue signal on VHF channel 2 on June 12, 2009, the date on which full-power television stations in the United States completed the federally mandated transition from analogue to digital broadcasting. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 19, and through the digital channel mapping system receivers continue to display the station as virtual channel 2, preserving the number viewers had used since 1956.

The Federal Communications Commission lists KXMA's facility identifier as 55684. Its digital effective radiated power is 150 kilowatts, with an antenna height above average terrain of 217 metres, about 712 feet. The transmitter coordinates place the site south-southwest of Dickinson; an older sign-off announcement for the Reiten stations described the channel 2 transmitter as about twelve and a half miles south-southwest of the city, with offices then at an address on West Villard in Dickinson and studios in Bismarck. Those technical arrangements suit a station whose job is to cover Dickinson and the surrounding southwestern North Dakota counties reliably rather than to reach the whole combined market alone — the other KX transmitters cover Bismarck, Minot and Williston in the same way.

Present status and significance

Today KXMA continues as a Nexstar Media Group semi-satellite of KXMB-TV, carrying The CW on its main channel, sharing the KX Television and Dakota's CW branding, using the shared KXNet website and simulcasting KXMB's newscasts. It is a station whose significance is historical as well as current. It began in 1956 as Dickinson's own television station, carried three networks because it had to, took CBS programmes off a neighbouring station's signal because it could not afford its own feed, and came close to closing in 1984 before being absorbed into the regional network that now operates it. Channel 2 in Dickinson still provides a full network service to southwestern North Dakota, but it does so as part of a system designed in Bismarck — the outcome of the economic pressures that have shaped small-market American television throughout the station's life.