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.

While WMIN-TV and WTCN-TV were affiliates of ABC, in keeping with WTCN radio,[18] their programs and even network shows during each station's airtime originated from separate facilities.

[45] To support its new local programming, the station expanded its footprint in the Calhoun Beach Hotel to include space on the lower level and acquired new equipment.

A major advertising contract with Hamm's beer for the baseball games helped the station acquire programming and get on steadier footing—its first profitable footing in its ten-year history.

[50] Chris-Craft Industries agreed to purchase WTCN-TV alone for $4 million in a deal announced in May 1964; it was the company's third TV property after two other independents, KCOP in Los Angeles and KPTV in Portland, Oregon.

The relocation to the newer, taller masts was necessitated because of the construction of the IDS Center, a Minneapolis skyscraper that shaded many viewers from the Foshay Tower site.

[71] Metromedia's purchase of WTCN-TV included a parcel of land at the corner of Boone Avenue and Minnesota State Highway 55 in Golden Valley, intended for the construction of new studios.

[73] TV Guide ran a feature calling WTCN the real-life equivalent to WJM-TV, the Minneapolis station depicted on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

In the late 1970s, as ABC soared to number one in the national ratings, the network began a campaign to upgrade its affiliate base and approached WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV, and WTCN-TV.

Neal Gendler in the Minneapolis Tribune was unimpressed and found the program pedestrian, formulaic, overdone, and out of tune with Twin Cities viewers' tastes.

Carman and Karl Vick (also of The Minneapolis Star) assigned some blame for the failure to the direction of the station by out-of-town consultants—particularly Ted Kavanau, the former news director of Metromedia's WNEW-TV in New York[88]—and executives unfamiliar with the market.

[86] Kavanau wanted a tabloid-style newscast in the mold of WNEW and hired people for such a program, but general manager Robert Fransen believed a more conventional format was advisable in the market and prevailed in a meeting of Metromedia executives.

[91] Meanwhile, freed of its network programming and having picked up the North Stars[92] and Twins[93] rights, KMSP-TV became one of the nation's leading independents, beating NewsCenter 11 in the ratings just as WTCN had done when KMSP was an ABC affiliate.

[104] Asked in 1981 by the Boston Herald American to appraise Metromedia's management of WTCN, M. Howard Gelfand of the Minneapolis Tribune noted that "it has taken WTCN-TV ... just a couple of years to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear".

Gannett took control of WTCN in April 1983 and began implementing a top-to-bottom overhaul of the station's local news programming, promising to raise its quality to match WCCO and KSTP.

[113] Armed with research identifying WCCO and KSTP as having older-skewing viewership and seeing a void for a newscast for a younger audience,[114] the station added as many as 40 new staff members[115] in addition to the 40 that it had at the time of purchase—compared to 100 apiece for the newsrooms at WCCO-TV and KSTP-TV.

[115] Gannett filled the meteorologist position, left unfilled on a permanent basis since Burns's departure in January 1982, by hiring Paul Douglas, who had worked for the Satellite News Channel.

It replaced the existing anchor pairing of John Bachman and Cora-Ann Mihalik[c] with Paul Magers and Diana Pierce, both hired in August from California stations.

[126] While Gannett initially intended to do the same immediately after acquiring WTCN-TV, it instead focused on rebuilding the news operation and beating back a challenge to the KUSA assignment from the USA Network cable service.

On July 18, 1986, helicopter pilot Max Messmer was in the air headed to an assignment when he heard that a funnel cloud was forming in Brooklyn Park, eventually touching down in Fridley.

The newscast was a ratings milestone for the station—in 2011, Douglas recalled that it led many WCCO and KSTP viewers to sample KARE's news—and the raw footage was widely requested by scientists and meteorologists.

The latter was evident in its photojournalism style, which the Star Tribune later called "highly visual and emotional"; KARE became a regular winner of National Press Photographers Association awards.

[143] When the Minnesota Poll in 1988 found KARE's viewership concentrated among young adults, Noel Holston of the Star Tribune predicted that the station could be dominant "for years to come" based on the age of its news watchers.

[114] In September 1988, Pat Miles left her job at WCCO-TV and signed a five-year agreement to work at KARE, including a year where she could not appear on camera under a non-compete clause.

[145][146] Under the leadership of general manager Linda Rios Brook, from 1989 to 1991, the station tried several unsuccessful initiatives, most notably a morning talk show titled Between Friends that failed to make an impact in the ratings, but its newscasts regained the local news lead for the first time in several years.

Rios Brook resigned after mixed programming results and a controversy over her evangelical Christianity[147] and resurfaced in the market as the president and general manager of family-oriented KLGT.

[147] In 1992, KARE became one of the television homes of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves, joining KITN-TV (channel 29, now WFTC) and effectively replacing KSTP-TV with seven to eight games a year of a 25-game broadcast TV package.

The audience support for the program was sufficient to help its creators, Tim Scott and Rick Kronfeld, secure a pickup for their show from the Comedy Central cable channel.

[178][179] Pierce retired in 2016 after taking a buyout package offered by Tegna,[180] which became the new name for the former Gannett broadcast division when its TV stations and newspapers split into separate companies in 2015.