Owned by Tegna Inc., the station maintains a news bureau on the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and its transmitter is located southeast of the city in rural Coconino County.

KNAZ-TV operates as a full-time satellite of Phoenix-based KPNX (channel 12, licensed to Mesa), whose studios are located at the Republic Media building on Van Buren Street in downtown Phoenix.

Elliott originally sought to build a 200 feet (61 m) tower atop Mount Elden and downtown studios, raising $85,000 by selling stock in the venture.

[7] With the permit approved, construction commenced nearly immediately;[8] in January 1970, power lines were buried under Mormon Mountain to provide electrical service to the summit.

[19]) A new maximum-power transmitter at 100,000 watts was installed; the news department was expanded; and Capitol also moved the station into a new building on Vickey Street in 1982.

[29] In January 1997, Grand Canyon announced that it had sold KNAZ-TV and KMOH, by that point disconnected from the Flagstaff station, to the Gannett Company, which owned KPNX in Phoenix.

[30] The purchase, which closed in May 1997,[31] attracted attention and concern over the fate of KNAZ-TV; rumors swirled that Gannett would discontinue local newscasts for Northern Arizona and run the station as a full-time rebroadcaster of KPNX.

[35] Some of the void was filled when Northern Arizona University began producing a local newscast, NAZ Today, for cable and streaming in 2008.

[36] In its DTV allotment plan of April 3, 1997, the FCC assigned channel 22 for KNAZ-DT, and on February 22, 2001, it granted to Gannett a construction permit to build the digital facilities.

This plan was abandoned as the existing channel 2 antenna had sustained damage in three successive ice storms; an April 2008 inspection found arcing and repeated automatic shutdown due to signal power being reflected back into the transmitter that left it incapable of full-power operation, as well as an eight-inch (20 cm) crack in the antenna mast that would have required welding to repair.