KHNL (channel 13) is a television station in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, serving the Hawaiian Islands as an affiliate of NBC and Telemundo.

The two stations share studios on Waiakamilo Road in downtown Honolulu; KHNL's transmitter is located in Akupu, Hawaii.

Under the management of future Honolulu mayor Rick Blangiardi, in 1984 the station renamed itself KHNL; it then added coverage of University of Hawaiʻi athletics as well as an affiliation with Fox in 1986.

A limited amount of Japanese-language programming continued to air into the early 1990s, shortly after the Providence Journal Company acquired the station.

[2] Territorial Telecasters, a group linked to radio woman Christmas Early, filed for the channel in December 1952,[3] only to abandon its bid within months and formally withdraw it in June.

[4] In October 1956, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser applied for channel 13 after also requesting authority to build a new Honolulu radio station.

[5] The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a construction permit in December,[6] but this was stayed between January and April 1957 following a protest by KULA-TV (channel 4) on economic grounds.

[12] The construction permit was granted on April 27, 1962,[13] and KTRG-TV began telecasting on July 4, 1962; it was more than five hours later than advertised due to technical difficulties with the transmitter and received an assist from the three other Honolulu TV stations to get on the air the first night.

[17]: 77 While the FCC's ruling on the matter was pending, Friendly Broadcasting sued Hawaiian Paradise Park Corporation in May 1967, alleging that Watumull had broken his contract to sell KTRG-TV to Eaton and was talking with another party who wished to buy the station for a greater purchase price.

[32] In 1979, Mid-Pacific Television Associates was approved to buy KIKU-TV for $2.7 million; the general partnership featured two consortia of investors, one local and one headed by the Cushman family of San Diego, as well as Japanese network TV Asahi with a 20 percent stake.

[36] Joanne Ninomiya, who had been KIKU's general manager since 1969,[37] left in January 1981 due to the proposed changes and then began a venture broadcasting Japanese-language shows on cable.

[38] In addition to syndicated programming and the remaining Japanese-language shows, channel 13 also began offering newscasts seven days a week on November 1, 1981.

[41] In a show of the impact KIKU had on non-Japanese-speaking viewers, a Hawaiian woman, A. T. Ko-Opuna, started an unsuccessful petition-writing campaign to urge the FCC to support expanded Japanese-language broadcasting on the station.

[36]: 88 The largest changes, however, came after Rick Blangiardi, a former University of Hawaiʻi assistant football coach who had worked at KGMB-TV, was named general manager in February 1984.

Japanese-language shows continued to air from 10 p.m. to midnight, but other than that, the station was operating as a full-time general-entertainment independent that branded itself as a "news alternative" and the "free movie channel".

[41] In February 1986, the King Broadcasting Company of Seattle purchased KHNL from Mid-Pacific Television Associates at a time when the local investors who owned 30 percent of the station were facing financial pressures.

[46] After the King sale, Joanne Ninomiya returned to the station, particularly assisting with the introduction of subtitles to KHNL's long-running sumo telecasts.

[52] In 1992, the Providence Journal Company acquired King Broadcasting; Blangiardi, who had been promoted to running Seattle's KING-TV in 1989, was fired from his post there immediately.

[54] Under Providence Journal ownership, the station rebranded to "Fox 13" in January 1993;[55] later that year, it began programming KFVE "K5" (channel 5) under a time brokerage agreement.

[60] However, the deal languished for months at the FCC because NBC was challenging the structure of SF's purchase of a fourth Burnham station, WLUK-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

[61] On November 21, KHNL and NBC reached an affiliation agreement, with the effective date to be determined as part of the Burnham–SF transaction sale process.

[76] The structure of the deal, particularly the channel 5–9 swap seen as an end-run around a rule that prohibited common ownership of two of the four highest-rated stations in the market, led to criticism from media watchdog groups and a formal opposition being filed with the FCC.

One reason was that, unlike larger Mainland markets, Honolulu was still measured by Nielsen by means of a diary system instead of meters that electronically track ratings habits.

[92] In part because of the merger and with a successor lined up, Blangiardi stepped down from running KGMB and KHNL in 2020 and mounted a successful campaign for mayor of Honolulu.

[93] Even prior to signing an affiliation agreement with NBC, KHNL announced in November 1994 its intention to begin producing newscasts sometime in 1995.

Providence Journal decided to make KHNL the first tapeless TV newsroom in the United States with all-digital editing equipment.

[94] Another KITV employee soon followed: sports director Robert Kekaula, who as part of moving to KHNL would also become a presence on KFVE's UH athletics broadcasts.

[104] In 2007, even though KFVE was still the official station of UH athletics, KHNL ceased airing regular sports segments in its newscasts and proceeded to lose both of its sportscasters.

When KHNL became an NBC affiliate, K5 exclusively aired the 9 p.m. news, but it was canceled effective August 3, 1997, because of frequent sports preemptions and a lack of ratings and resources.

[111] While the merger of newsrooms created a stronger competitor to KHON-TV in the ratings and sometimes eclipsed it in combined totals, most of the viewership was attributable to KGMB, not KHNL, and the two stations initially carried separate advertising during news simulcasts.