Up in Aberdeen, in another sign that commercial momentum has shifted away from the northwest, KSFY has sold its old KABY broadcast building and is following Dakota Broadcasting downtown:
Dakota News Now will open our new bureau in the Blackstone Office Building in downtown Aberdeen.
”The location and the ability for our Aberdeen news reporter to go and do the things that she needs to do, the location couldn’t be any better,” said Berman.
Work will officially begin for Dakota News Now in the new space this summer [Sarah Parkin, “Aberdeen Newsroom Moving to New Location,” KSFY, 2022.04.30].
While Dakota Broadcasting moved from the Subway strip mall next to the shuttered Shopko to the glamorous and sunny prime location in the new Malchow Plaza on Main Street, KSFY is taking up space in the somewhat uninspiring Blackstone Office Building. The Blackstone building does have a cute little courtyard, but it faces the parking lot, not the street where news and life happen. On the good side, it’s just a one-block sprint from the Blackstone building to the Brown County Courthouse, ensuring KSFY’s Aberdeen reporter a scoop on any Trumpist hammer attacks or other acts of terrorism in or around the courthouse. Also within a block are Mazatlan and Roma’s, two Aberdeen restaurants that provided the best take-out during our pandemic isolation and to which it’s worth taking company.
The downtown can use it. I love Aberdeen. Used to live there for several years, met my wife there. It’s a great place. Learned how to cast bronze there. It lead to my career. The only bad thing is the South Dakota thing of not believing you can move on and above your situation. I met all kinds of those boys there. It’s sad but true. Hope the downtown can become what it used to be.
That humans even care about or even use commercial broadcast remains a mystery.
There are no free lunches, Lar, only the free breakfasts you can get with the coupons I left in your name.
Cutting costs just like the Aberdeen newspaper has done. That is the same building where the newspaper now officially calls home. I’m sure this has move has no meaning other than lower operating costs.
According to Northpine (a regional broadcast industry news website), KABY originally signed on in 1958 as an actual locally based TV station called KXAB-TV, sharing both NBC and ABC affiliation. They were purchased by KSOO-TV (now KSFY) in 1970 and had been a satellite of KSFY until 2017. KABY’s tower had to be torn down due to structural problems and was never rebuilt. Gray turned in the KABY license a few years later.
Rather than rebuild the tower, Gray found yet another way to reduce costs by eliminating the station altogether, and relying on cable/satellite carriage. The FCC has placed channel 9 in an upcoming auction of broadcast licenses. Channel 9 Aberdeen may be a hard sell since KELO already runs a satellite out of Florence, Gray probably won’t rebuild KABY, and Aberdeen itself may be considered too small of a city to run a major network broadcast station independently. With streaming TV being so prominent, I imagine there really aren’t that many viewers who use old rabbit ears these days.
And then there’s the voluntary transition to ATSC 3.0, or “NextGen TV”. But that’s a story for another day….
Commercial broadcast is the coal plant America needs during the nuclear winter.