KCCI

KCCI (channel 8) is a television station in Des Moines, Iowa, United States, affiliated with CBS.

Owned by Hearst Television, the station maintains studios on Ninth Street in downtown Des Moines and a transmitter in Alleman.

The FCC tightened its ownership rules in the 1970s, forcing the Cowles interests to sell one of their Des Moines broadcast outlets.

They opted to sell KRNT radio and KRNQ-FM (KSTZ, originally the second KRNT-FM) to Stauffer Communications in 1974 and retain both newspapers and KRNT-TV, with the callsign changing to KCCI-TV on February 25; the new calls standing for owner Cowles Communications, Inc. (FCC rules at the time had a restriction on call letters being used by TV and radio stations in the same market, but with different ownership, which led to the TV station changing its callsign.

In 1983, the Cowles family announced it was breaking up its vast media empire, selling off most of its assets except the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

After H&C initially planned on selling its entire television station group to Young Broadcasting in 1992,[3] KCCI and WESH were sold to Pulitzer in 1993.

On December 10, 2008, KCCI President and General Manager Paul Fredericksen announced a staffing reorganization which eliminated six positions, including on-air talent.

In 2009 and 2011, KCCI won the Photography Station of the Year award in the small market division from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA).

The NPPA also named Photojournalist Cortney Kintzer as the Photographer of the Year in Region 5 (Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois).

[11] On July 15, 2024, KCCI added an hourlong 4 p.m. newscast, moving The Kelly Clarkson Show to 3 p.m. and The Jennifer Hudson Show to 12:37 a.m.[12] The station's signal is multiplexed: KCCI shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 8, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate.