While it nominally remained an Enid station, KOCO had moved its studio operations to Oklahoma City, setting up temporary facilities inside a converted former Kimberling's grocery store on Britton Road.

(KOCO was the second Oklahoma television station to transfer its license and operations to a larger, nearby city: fellow ABC affiliate KTVX [now KTUL] had moved from Muskogee to Tulsa in August 1957.

[62][63] Despite this, on March 24, Star Communications—which had twice extended its sale contract with CCC to accommodate the FCC's hearing docket following delays in the hearing date—terminated the sale, citing a court appeal filed by the Adams Morgan Organization, the District of Columbia chapter of the National Organization for Women, the D.C. Media Task Force and the National Black Media Coalition that accused Star Communications on reneging on efforts to help minority-owned groups obtain financing to acquire the company's broadcast properties.

However, the purchase created an ownership conflict between KOCO-TV and NBC-affiliated rival KTVY, as FCC rules in effect at the time had prohibited a single company from owning two commercial television stations in the same market.

When the FCC approved the merger in late November 1995, the agency's Broadcast Bureau stipulated that Gannett would have to sell KOCO and NBC-affiliated sister station WLWT in Cincinnati to comply with cross-ownership regulations.

[102] (Gannett would re-enter the Oklahoma City market in November 2019, when the now mainly publishing-centered firm acquired The Oklahoman—which, ironically, was co-owned with KFOR-TV from that station's June 1949 sign-on until founding owner Gaylord Broadcasting's sale of channel 4 to the Evening News Association was completed in October 1975—through its merger with GateHouse Media.)

On June 13, 1998, rear flank downdraft winds approaching 105 mph (169 km/h) struck the station's Britton Road studio, causing minor damage that included a toppled backyard fence and a large dent to the dome of its weather radar.

The event was broadcast live as the station was providing wall-to-wall coverage of the accompanying supercell thunderstorm, which spawned seven tornadoes across Canadian and northern Oklahoma counties, while a KOCO photojournalist positioned in the studio's garage was shooting video of the storm as it approached the Britton Road facility.

Electricity was knocked out to the studio and transmitter facilities, taking the KOCO broadcast signal off-the-air for almost 24 hours; the station remained available to Cox Communications and Multimedia Cablevision subscribers via a direct auxiliary feed transmitted by fiber optic to the cable providers.

It was also among the more than 20 stations that declined to air ABC's November 2004 telecast of Saving Private Ryan, amid concerns that the intense war violence and strong profanity retained from the 1998 World War II-set film's theatrical cut would subject stations that aired it to being fined by the FCC, which initiated a crackdown on indecent material following the wardrobe malfunction incident during Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show performance that February.

Since the team's relocation from Seattle in 2008, under ABC's share of sister network ESPN's television contract with the National Basketball Association (NBA), channel 5 has also carried certain ABC-televised regular season and playoff games featuring the Oklahoma City Thunder.

By this time, Swanson and chief meteorologist Fred Norman were joined weeknights by sports director Jerry Park, who would become the station's longest-serving on-air personality, working there for 25 years.

[131][132] After being acquired by Gannett, the company made substantial investments in KOCO's news operations—among them, the acquisition of an Aerospatiale Astar 350 (branded as "Sky 5"), which was the first helicopter to be used for aerial newsgathering in the Oklahoma City market upon its introduction in February 1978.

In June 1979, while on assignment at a Public Service Company of Oklahoma (PSO) press conference, KOCO anchor/reporter Ron Stahl and photographer Bill Collard were arrested on a trespassing complaint after crossing a utility fence to cover a protest against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Inola.

Stahl (who contended that he and Collard would have been unable to return for the press conference in time had they chosen to hike more than 2 miles (3.2 km) over rough terrain to reach a sanctioned area to view the demonstrators' arrests) and nine other reporters who were taken into custody—including Tom Newcomb and Susie Welsh of KTVY, and Vicki Monks of KWTV—were convicted and individually levied a $25 fine in January 1980.

[134][135] KOCO's ratings fortunes improved from 1980 to 1982, when its newscasts briefly overtook KWTV for second place following the installment of Jack Bowen and Mary Ruth Carleton as its primary anchor team, alongside Norman and Park.

In 1984, the station was sued for defamation by local OB-GYN William Crittendon, who claimed a report on a medical malpractice case he was being tried for had misquoted an expert witness who said that a patient had a "perfectly healthy" (rather than "perfectly normal") uterus; the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that station management must pay Crittendon $550,000 in damages; an appeal of the ruling, charging First Amendment violations, gained the support of the National Association of Broadcasters, which contended that the court did not establish negligence or causation.

Massive staffing changes took place during 1984 under newly appointed vice president of news operations Gary Long (a former general manager at ex-sister station KARK-TV in Little Rock).

Oklahoma County District Court Judge Bana Blasdel denied the station's request for an emergency temporary restraining order to prevent KFOR, which contended it was using a slogan that could not be trademarked, from using the term on May 25.

Then on September 11, 1995, the noon newscast was expanded to one hour, replacing first-run syndicated shows that had been occupying the 12:30 half-hour locally since the ABC soap opera Ryan's Hope ended in December 1988.

[154][155][156][157] The 1990s saw continued changes to its anchor team that included Jennifer Eve—who rejoined KOCO in 1987, after a reporting stint from 1982 to 1984—being moved to the weeknight newscasts, a position Eve remained in until she left television news in 2001, replacing the departing Jane Jayroe (in 1992) and Gerry Bonds (née Harris, in 1993);[158][159][160] Ben and Butch McCain being pulled from Good Morning Oklahoma in May 1994, after the station decided to switch its morning show to a conventional news format (the McCains would file a wrongful termination lawsuit against KOCO centering on their firing in September 1996);[161][162] and Jack Bowen departing for Fox affiliate KOKH in November 1995 to become co-anchor of its then soon-to-launch 9 p.m.

Though the "circle 5" logo introduced in 1995 under Gannett ownership was retained, the station implemented Hearst-Argyle's standardized graphics package in use at the time (with a visual appearance of swirling light and patterns intended to resemble a camera lens).

In 1999, then-weekend evening anchor/reporter Cherokee Ballard—who worked at the station from 1989 to 2005, and was the first person of Native American descent to anchor a local newscast in the Oklahoma City market—became the focus of a series of reports chronicling her battle with non-Hodgkin's large-cell lymphoma (for which she had been diagnosed with that June) to educate viewers about the disease.

)[164][165] KOCO has increased its commitment to news and weather coverage in recent years, with these efforts helping propel the station's 5 p.m. newscast to first place in the ratings in 2004, followed by its first-ever outright win at 6 p.m. in November 2006.

[174][175] On April 4, 2016, beginning with a special into the investigation and arrest of convicted former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw (who was convicted in December 2015 of multiple counts—including rape, sexual battery and forcible oral sodomy—committed against eight African American women in traffic stops he conducted in the majority-Black northeast Oklahoma City), the station premiered KOCO 5 Chronicle, a recurring series of hour-long prime time specials focusing on state and community issues.

units"), which utilized custom vehicles equipped with video cameras and pioneering technology that enabled still photographs to be transmitted over cellular telephone using a dash-mounted computer combined with photo compression codecs.

KOCO's coverage of an F5 tornado that killed 36 people in several of Oklahoma City's southern suburbs on May 3, 1999, earned the station a special recognition award from Governor Frank Keating.

[186] In October 2012, Mitchell was succeeded by Damon Lane (who had been with the station since 2009 as a weekday morning meteorologist), who just eight months later on May 20, 2013, covered an EF5 tornado that killed 24 people in Moore, narrowly missing the home he lived in with wife Melissa Newton (formerly a reporter at KOCO from 2004 to 2006).

[191][192] In addition, KOCO-DT2 carried a half-hour block of syndicated children's programs compliant with FCC educational programming guidelines on Monday through Saturday afternoons, and was occasionally used to air special weather coverage from its sister stations during tropical weather events (in particular, in September 2008, it simulcast coverage of Hurricane Gustav from NBC-affiliated sister station WDSU in New Orleans to provide information on the storm for Louisiana residents who evacuated inland to Oklahoma City).

[197] As part of the SAFER Act,[198] KOCO-TV kept its analog signal on the air until July 12 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.