KMGH Denver

With neither general manager nor news director in place, The Denver ABC affiliate is rudderless. The station has floated through two ratings sweeps periods on auto pilot.

Longtime KMGH boss Byron Grandy, who rose from news director to become vice president and general manager of the station, abruptly resigned his post and left the company, Scripps confirmed Monday.

The E.W. Scripps ABC affiliate will replace the two syndicated hits as of Sept. 8 with a 6 p.m. newscast and a half-hour newsmagazine, The List, a national program with local inserts.

The new 4 p.m. show debuts today on KMGH Denver and KSHB Kansas City, Mo., with a focus on topics that are trending on social media networks. The content will be include viral videos, breaking news stories, content from Scripps stations and websites, original local content and national content that will originate from KMGH. It will eventually get rolled out to six more Scripps stations.

A TV ad-buying company with close ties to Republican Party leaders reserved a whopping 1,326 spots in the Denver market this fall, but the station receiving the $740,070 contract, ABC affil KMGH, removed it from public view when a reporter tried to learn who was footing the bill.

The Scripps-owned ABC affiliate in Denver has been airing news tickers in commercials during its early morning newscasts since 2011. It’s proving to be a win-win for the station and advertisers, GM Byron Grandy says, with viewers knowing there’s always information for them and advertisers benefitting from not having viewers clicking away during their spots.

This year’s Peabody Award winners included efforts by four stations. This week, we look at two of them: Investigating the Fire, the KMGH Denver report that showed how a controlled burn in Colorado turned deadly, and KNXV Phoenix’s Ford Escape: Exposing a Deadly Defect, which led to the recall of 700,000 SUVs.

Station winners include KUSA Denver, KARE Minneapolis-St. Paul, KMGH Denver, Hearst Television and Belo Corp. The awards from the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism  will be presented at the National Press Club in Washington on April 19.

On the Scripps-owned Denver ABC affiliate’s 5 p.m. news on Monday, the station reported on ex-CIA director David Petraeus’ relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell and showed an image of her book: All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. However, when KMGH reporter went on the Internet to get an image of the book cover, the reporter mistakenly grabbed a Photoshopped image that said, All Up In My Snatch: The Education of General David Petraeus.

In Colorado Springs and Dayton, the dollars are flooding in at three times the rate they did in 2008. In Cedar Rapids, it’s six times. In Richmond, 10. “It’s a finite supply,” says Missy Evanson, GSM at KMGH Denver. “This is classic economics, right? Supply and demand theory. I’ve got so many parking spots, it’s a race to see who gets ’em.”

Ferrugia, an investigative reporter for the Scripps-owned ABC affiliate in Denver and former CBS News correspondent, is one of 10 recipients of the award for a career in journalism.

TV stations covering the wildfires were all over the airwaves and Internet as the blazes caused mass evacuations, destroyed acres of forest and wiped out 600 homes. For many of the people who covered this story, mustering the ability “to keep going” had an emotional component as well. That is particularly true for the Colorado Springs news crews, some of which lived in the Waldo Canyon fire’s path. Now the Colorado Broadcasters Association has produced PSAs in support of the Red Cross and local firefighters.

The four ABC affiliates in Denver, San Diego, Bakersfield, Calif., and Indianapolis and five low-power Azteca affiliates go for $212 million in cash. “We are energized by the addition of good people at good stations in good markets,” says Scripps SVP Brian Lawlor.

NBC O&O WMAQ Chicago’s 10 p.m. newscast won for Outstanding Regional News Story for its coverage of the Burr Oak Cemetery scandal. Denver McGraw-Hill’s ABC affiliate KMGH Denver won the Emmy for Outstanding Regional News Story in the investigative reporting category. The awards were handed out by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

Mike McKinnon has put in a bid for the four stations, but is particularly interested in ABC affiliates KGTV San Diego, which he could pair with his KUSI independent, and KERO Bakersfield, Calif. The McGraw-Hill group also includes KMGH Denver and WRTV Indianapolis.

When The Oprah Winfrey Show concludes its run on Denver CBS O&O KCNC on May 25, McGraw-Hill’s ABC affiliate KMGH hopes to replace it in viewers’ minds with The Dr. Oz Show at 4 p.m. The station will move its 4 p.m. newscast to 3 p.m.