KARE

KARE (channel 11) is a television station licensed to Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, serving as the NBC affiliate for the Twin Cities area. Owned by Tegna Inc., the station maintains studios on Olson Memorial Highway (MN 55) in Golden Valley and a transmitter at the Telefarm site in Shoreview, Minnesota. History Early years Channel 11 signed on the air in 1953 with its broadcast hours split between WTCN-TV in Minneapolis and WMIN-TV in St. Paul; the WTCN-TV callsign was originally used by the Minneapolis-licensed channel 4 from that station's sign-on in 1949 to 1952; channel 4 changed to WCCO-TV when, in August 1952, Twin Cities Newspapers (a partnership between the Minneapolis Tribune and the Saint Paul Pioneer Press-Dispatch) divested its broadcast properties. The television station was sold to a new company, Midwest Radio and Television, which was created for the purchase, with CBS as a minority partner. CBS at the time owned WCCO radio; with the purchase of the TV station, channel 4's calls were changed to match the radio cousins. Meanwhile, the Twin Cities Newspapers radio properties, WTCN (1280 AM) and WTCN-FM (97.1, now KTCZ-FM), were sold to the Minnesota Television Service Corporation headed by Saint Paul businessman Robert Butler, a former ambassador to Cuba and Australia. Soon afterward, Butler's group and the owner of WMIN radio submitted separate applications for the new channel 11 construction permit. Because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had a backlog of contested licenses, the two parties submitted a joint application to share the allocation in hopes of expediting its processing and approval. The FCC approved this deal and WTCN-TV/WMIN-TV went on the air on September 1, 1953, as an ABC affiliate. The station also carried a secondary affiliation with DuMont. During the late 1950s, the station also was briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Under the agreement, the stations shared a transmitter mounted atop the Foshay Tower in downtown Minneapolis, alternating use every two hours. WTCN-TV's studios were in the Calhoun Beach Hotel in Minneapolis near Lake Calhoun, while WMIN-TV was based in the Hamm Building in downtown Saint Paul. On April 3, 1955, with FCC approval, WMIN sold its share of channel 11, making the frequency solely WTCN-TV. On the same day, the WTCN stations were sold to the Bitner Group. Two years later, the Bitner group merged with Time-Life.