KDNL-TV (channel 30), branded as STL30, is an independent television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios at the University Tower on South Brentwood Boulevard in the suburb of Richmond Heights and a transmitter in Shrewsbury.
Channel 30 in St. Louis was sought on several occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s, though no station materialized. The fourth attempt to build the channel was originally spearheaded by a group of local investors as well as Washington attorney John Dean; after the construction permit for KDNL-TV was sold to Thomas Mellon Evans, the station began broadcasting on June 8, 1969. It served as the second independent station for the St. Louis area, airing syndicated reruns as well as financial news and sports. Cox Broadcasting purchased KDNL-TV in 1981, in part because it held a permit for over-the-air subscription television broadcasting. Cox launched this service in June 1982, but it was a business failure, and Cox shut it down in February 1983. The station continued to be an overall money-loser and a misfit in the Cox station portfolio, even though it became the first local affiliate of Fox in 1986.
Barry Baker and Larry Marcus, former executives of rival independent KPLR-TV who were fired for trying to buy that station, purchased KDNL-TV from Cox in 1989. It became the first station in a St. Louis–based company eventually known as River City Broadcasting, which soon acquired other independent and Fox-affiliated stations. Ratings and revenue improved with the success of the Fox network, with total viewership approaching KPLR-TV, and led the station to start a local news department in January 1995. Under a deal announced in 1994 but carried out in August 1995, KDNL-TV lost its Fox affiliation and switched with KTVI to become the affiliate of ABC in St. Louis.
In 1996, River City merged into Sinclair Broadcast Group. However, KDNL's news department failed to gain traction, hurt by the traditionally poor ratings for ABC programming in the market; high turnover in news talent; a lack of full-day news service; and the resistance to change of many St. Louis viewers. In 1999, Baker left Sinclair and assigned an option to purchase KDNL-TV and six Sinclair-owned radio stations in St. Louis to Emmis Communications; the option resulted in a lawsuit settled with Sinclair retaining the TV station and selling off the radio properties. More critically, it led to neglect of the station's transmitter facility, causing signal issues, and the suspension of early evening newscasts for the struggling news operation. In the wake of the advertising slump after the September 11 attacks, Sinclair closed the KDNL-TV news department in 2001 and laid off all 47 staff. Since then, the station has largely been the fourth- or fifth-rated station in the market, with two short-lived and outsourced attempts at local news programming since the 2001 newsroom closure. ABC disaffiliated from KDNL on September 1, 2026, and moved to a subchannel of KMOV; KDNL replaced ABC network programming with syndicated shows and The National News Desk, Sinclair's national newscast. The station also made plans to resume local newscast production.
Channel 30 prior to KDNL-TV Three different attempts were made to start channel 30 in St. Louis. The assignment was added in 1952 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended its nearly four-year freeze on new television stations and introduced assignments in the new ultra high frequency (UHF) band. Applications were filed by the Empire Coil Company and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod for the channel, with the latter receiving the construction permit in February 1953 after Empire Coil withdrew. The church planned to run KFUO-TV as a noncommercial station in conjunction with its existing radio station. While it initially planned an early 1954 start, the station project was said to still be in consideration by February 1954, and the church surrendered the permit for cancellation in January 1956 after finding the potential for a UHF station poor.
In September 1956, the Plaza Radio and Television Company of New York applied for channel 30. Plaza also applied for authority to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming using the proposed station. The FCC indicated it would need to hold hearings to determine whether the channel should be awarded, even though no other group was seeking channel 30, because Plaza held but was not using a permit for channel 26 in San Francisco. This application and another for a station in Detroit were dismissed by the FCC in September 1958.
Pre-construction For the third time, channel 30 in St. Louis was sought when Washington, D.C.–based Globe Television Corporation filed to build the station in June 1964. The two leading stockholders in Globe were lawyers: Vincent B. Welch and Edward P. Morgan of the Washington firm of Welch, Mott & Morgan. Welch had founded the communications law firm in 1946, and Welch and Morgan were applying for new television stations nationwide, including Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Henderson, Nevada. The Welch–Morgan group was awarded the St. Louis permit and stations in Miami and San Jose, California, in October 1964. Globe Television renamed itself the Continental Summit Television Corporation after the permit was awarded; in June 1965, the company requested an extension of time to build. It stated that the Missouri Pacific Building, its intended transmitter site, was inadequate, as downtown office buildings interfered with the signal in the Illinois portion of the metropolitan area. It also requested that its application be switched from channel 30 to 24, which was inserted as part of a national overhaul of the UHF table of allocations that year.
Boyd Fellows, the former general manager of educational station KETC and assistant to the president of Continental, then left that company to become the president of a new firm seeking channel 30, the Greater St. Louis Television Corporation. Other officers included a Black dentist, Dr. Benjamin F. Davis, and a Washington attorney, John Dean; his then-wife, Karla Hennings, was also a stockholder. Dean had participated in the formation of Greater St. Louis Television Corporation in January, while he was still employed by Welch & Morgan; when the firm found out about the work, it dismissed Dean for what Welch called "unethical conduct". Though characterizations of his dismissal varied, one former associate told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was ordered to leave immediately and not given time to pack up his belongings. This story came to light during the Watergate hearings, during which Dean was a crucial witness as to the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, and was first reported by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
The Greater St. Louis Television Corporation received the construction permit for channel 30 on June 7, 1966, and took the call sign KDNL-TV on August 17.
Evans Broadcasting ownership Citing "unanticipated difficulties and unexpected changed circumstances", the stockholders of Greater St. Louis Television Corporation filed in April 1968 to sell the construction permit to financier Thomas Mellon Evans. The transfer was granted by the FCC in late July. At the time, Evans was in the middle of a push into UHF television, buying dormant construction permits for stations from Dallas to Worcester, Massachusetts.
Under Evans, construction activity finally commenced. The former studios of KMOX-TV at 13th and Cole streets were acquired to house channel 30, while the station was approved to build a tower in Shrewsbury, on land that was part of the Kenrick Seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. In April, a mast began rising on the site.
KDNL-TV debuted on June 8, 1969. Its program schedule was dominated by syndicated reruns of former network shows as well as a daytime financial news program, TV 30 Financial Observer. Channel 30 was the first station built by the newly formed Evans Broadcasting Corporation, which had plans to start activating additional stations. KDNL-TV trailed the established independent station in the St. Louis market, KPLR-TV, and had less than half of its audience share as of July 1972.
In 1977, KDNL added coverage of St. Louis Blues hockey road games, which aired through the 1980–81 season; after that, the games moved to KSDK (channel 5).
Evans made one attempt at expanding the reach of KDNL-TV deeper into Illinois. In June 1979, a subsidiary company, Southern Illinois Broadcasting Corporation, was granted the permit to build channel 13 at Mount Vernon, Illinois, for which it had filed two years prior. However, the Evans proposal attracted protests from southern Illinois residents who feared the channel would merely be used to rebroadcast KDNL-TV programming and wanted to see a full-fledged local station for their area. A farmer in Salem, Illinois, went as far as to refuse to lease her land for transmitter site construction when she learned of Evans's plans for channel 13. Though Evans had secured another site and even shipped the tower to Salem to be erected, the FCC responded to the residents' concerns by rescinding the permit grant in November 1979. In February 1980, citing the potential for years of litigation, it withdrew its attempt to build channel 13.
In April 1976, Evans Broadcasting applied for authority to broadcast over-the-air subscription television (STV) programming using KDNL-TV. The application languished because another company, Midwest St. Louis, had filed for channel 24 and proposed the same type of programming, and at the time the FCC only permitted one STV station per market. Despite that, the possibility of reaching the large, then-uncabled St. Louis market with pay TV programming excited interest from buyers in the STV space. Time Inc., which through its American Television and Communications unit had cable and pay TV operations, entered into negotiations to purchase the station from Evans. Evans reached an agreement to sell the station to Buford Television, a Texas company in the process of moving into subscription programming with stations such as WBTI in Cincinnati, in September 1979. With that sale pending, in February 1980, the FCC granted subscription authority to KDNL-TV. Though the FCC granted the Buford deal on April 30, the agreement was withdrawn on May 8.
Cox Broadcasting ownership Evans announced in March 1981 that he had sold KDNL-TV for $13.2 million to Cox Broadcasting, which at the time owned no UHF stations and only one independent, KTVU in Oakland, California. Upon completing the purchase in January 1982, Cox announced its plans to debut subscription television service on the station later in the year, once it had acquired sufficient equipment and personnel to handle the new operation. Cox Broadcasting president William A. Schwartz believed that the service could be viable even if just 15 to 20 percent of residents signed up for it, citing the large market and relatively low cable penetration. Beginning on June 1, 1982, KDNL-TV replaced its prime time and late night lineup with Preview, a subscription service featuring first-run movies and late night adult programming. Subscribers paid $24.90 a month plus a $49.95 installation fee.