KEVN Black Hills Fox News – The Six (Full), 1/22/2021

March 6, 2022 Pharaoh

Complete 6pm newscast on the Fox affiliate covering the Black Hills of South Dakota, including Rapid City, Lead and Deadwood. KEVN Fox 7 is owned by Gray Media Group.

KEVN launched the 6pm newscast, branded as “The Six” (dumb name IMO and the logo makes me hate it more) on March 31, 2008. Prior to that date the early evening news aired at 5:30pm. KEVN became a Gray property on May 1, 2014. They have served as the market’s Fox affiliate since 1996, and were the NBC affiliate before that. Gray would buy the dominant KOTA-TV in 2016 as part of larger group deal acquiring Schurz Communications. The KOTA-TV call letters and programming moved to the former full power KEVN license (RF channel 7) which was far superior to KOTA’s existing RF channel 2. That license was then divested to a third party who made it KHME, the MeTV affiliate for the market. KEVN then moved to a new low power UHF license but retained virtual channel 7.1 (with the new KOTA on RF 7 retaining the virtual channel 3). While all these maneuvers were done from a legal standpoint, the viewer would have noticed nothing other than rescanning their TVs to find the newly relocated stations. Some other shuffling was also done with the two stations’ existing satellites in which some stayed as KOTA satellites, some stayed as KEVN satellites, and one was reassigned to KNOP in North Platte.

KOTA and KEVN are now combined into the longtime KEVN complex on Skyline Drive in a newly built expansion. The two stations share a set, control room and reporters, but have separate anchors and presentational styles. The stations do not compete in any timeslots whatsoever, which is standard for Gray duopolies. The music (OSI’s Fox Affiliate News Theme), branding, and voiceover (unknown) were held over from the previous ownership but the graphics are a custom job from Gray’s hub when they went HD (which they did in 2016 once their expansion was completed). Most of the talent are either KOTA veterans or new Gray hires although longtime KEVN’er Jack Caudill has remained with the station all these years. I believe he was the only one to survive the transition from Mission TV (entirely separate entity from the Nexstar sidecar) to Gray post-KOTA merger.

Anchored by Jack Caudill and Caroline Pettey, meteorologist David Stradling, and sports anchor Padraic Duffy. Includes reports from Austin Goss (Dakota News Now) and Vic Quick.

Commercials are edited out, station promos have been retained.

open, news open, news close, close, rejoin, bump, legal ID, station ID, ident, logo, promo

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