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| - The station first went on the air on November 1, 1953 as KLZ-TV. It was owned by Edward K. Gaylord and his Oklahoma Publishing Company along with KLZ radio (560 AM and 106.7 FM, now KBPI). KLZ-TV immediately took CBS from KBTV (channel 9, now KUSA), owing to KLZ-AM's long affiliation with CBS Radio. In 1954, Gaylord sold KLZ-AM-FM-TV to Time-Life. McGraw-Hill bought the station in 1972, changing the calls to the present KMGH-TV. During the 1950s, the Channel 7 staff included newscaster (later sportscaster and Dialing For Dollars host) Starr Yelland who came from KOA-TV (now KCNC-TV) and Ed Scott as Sheriff Scotty to entertain the kids. [1] In 1956, KLZ-TV presented the first TV remote broadcast from a courtroom after General Manager Hugh Terry won a court battle to allow cameras into the courtroom. In 1957 Panorama, a weekly public affairs series on Channel 7, became the first Denver-produced program to win a prestigious national Peabody Award. It was written and hosted by Gene Amole and directed by Jim Lannon. The television station has since won two more Peabody awards for the investigative reports "Honor and Betrayal: Scandal at the Air Force Academy"(2003) and "Failing the Children: Deadly Mistakes"(2008). More recently, KMGH-TV won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award for the investigative documentary "33 Minutes to 34 Right," hosted by Tony Kovaleski and produced by Tom Burke and Arthur Kane. (2010) The station was the first in Denver to operate a news bureau in Washington, D.C., as well as the first Denver station to receive reports from its own radio and TV correspondents in Europe and Asia. Channel 7 televised the first kidney transplant in the mid-1960s. Starting in 1968 and running through 1983, the most popular kids show in town was the Noell and Andy Show, 8–8:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. Her coloring contest drew hundreds of entries each week [2]. Channel 7 has always been located in the same block at Speer Boulevard and Lincoln Street, though from 1953 until 1969 the station was housed in a former auto dealership on the east side of the block at E. 6th Avenue and Sherman Street. The station's current eight-sided, five-level building, called "The Communications Center", opened in 1969, state-of-the-art at the time. The 1990s did not begin well for KMGH; the station saw significant losses in 1990 and 1991, as well as lower news ratings. A new management team introduced in 1991 turned things around at KMGH; net profit soared 105.5 percent in 1992 as a result. KMGH had been one of CBS's stronger affiliates. However, as a result of CBS's partnership (and later merger) with Westinghouse in the mid-1990s, the network had to divest its owned-and-operated station (O&O) in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV (since Westinghouse already owned KYW-TV in that city). In a three-way trade, WCAU was sold to NBC while Denver's longtime NBC affiliate and O&O, KCNC-TV, was sold to a partnership of CBS and Westinghouse. A shot of the KMGH studiosAt the same time, McGraw-Hill had recently struck its own affiliation deal with ABC, due in part to having its stations in San Diego and Indianapolis aligned with the network (KERO-TV in Bakersfield, California was also part of the deal between McGraw-Hill and ABC; however, it had to wait for its affiliation contract with CBS to run out in March 1996 before it could finally switch to ABC). In keeping with all of this, on September 10, 1995, ABC moved its programming from KUSA to KMGH. KMGH's outgoing CBS affiliation went to KCNC, with NBC moving from KCNC to KUSA. In 1998, KMGH's current rendition of the Circle 7 debuted, which is a variation of those seen on other ABC stations on Channel 7. The station added the ABC logo to it in the bottom left approximately a year later colored in yellow (like the network's yellow-and-black on-air look of the era, as well as the station's blue-and-yellow). In 2006, KMGH aligned itself with other ABC stations, including KABC-TV in Los Angeles, by using the same news package by Gari Communications, specifically designed for ABC O&Os. KMGH is not, however, owned by ABC. In conjunction with the music switch, on-air graphics were overhauled to include shades of red in addition to KMGH's signature gold and blue combination, and its Circle 7 logo was updated to look like real glass (on the website, it was metallic). KMGH went HD August 18, 2008 and amended its 2006 graphics. The logo is now a deep blue circle 7 logo. Air Tracker 7==[edit] Digital television== In April 2009, KMGH-TV remained on channel 7 when the analog to digital conversion completed. The digital channel is multiplexed; 7.1 carries ABC-HD (720p, 16:9) while 7.2 carries Azteca America (KZCO-LP) in standard definition.
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