WHO-DT (channel 13) is a television station in Des Moines, Iowa, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Nexstar Media Group. The station's studios are located on Grand Avenue in downtown Des Moines, and its transmitter is located in Alleman, Iowa.
Although WHO-DT's call letters sound like "who" if pronounced as a word, the station is never referred to in that manner; it is always mentioned on air as "W-H-O".
History
WHO-TV signed on the air on April 15, 1954, as the third television station in Des Moines, after WOI-TV (channel 5) and KGTV (channel 17). It was signed on by the Tri-City Broadcasting Company, which was owned by the Palmer family, owners of WHO radio (AM 1040 and FM 100.3, now KDRB). The Palmers had competed with KIOA for the channel 13 license and won it after reaching a settlement. It has always been an NBC affiliate, having inherited this affiliation from WOI-TV and owing to WHO's long affiliation with the NBC Radio Network.
The Palmers sold off their broadcast holdings in 1996, with WHO-TV and sister station KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City going to The New York Times Company. Earlier that year, a joint plan by the Sinclair Broadcast Group (at the time in the process of purchasing Oklahoma City's then-UPN affiliate KOCB) and River City Broadcasting (then owner of Fox affiliate KDSM-TV) to purchase Palmer Communications, which since the 1970s had been the name of the Palmer family's holding company, fell through; Sinclair would have purchased WHO outright while River City would have received KFOR. However, River City was in the process of being merged into Sinclair, which would have resulted in duopolies, which were at the time prohibited by Federal Communications Commission ownership rules, in both the Des Moines and Oklahoma City markets. Up to that time, channel 13 had been the last locally owned commercial station in Des Moines. WHO radio, which was eventually acquired by Jacor Communications (which later merged with Clear Channel Communications), continued to occupy the same building until it moved to another building in 2005. While WHO-TV was co-owned with WHO radio, it used an owl as its mascot.
On January 4, 2007, The New York Times entered into an agreement to sell its entire television division, including WHO-TV, to private equity group Oak Hill Capital Partners. Oak Hill created Local TV LLC as a holding company for the former New York Times stations. The sale closed on May 7, 2007.
On December 20, 2007, Local TV and Tribune Company entered into a letter of intent to create a third-party broadcast management company to provide shared services to all of the stations Local TV and Tribune Company own respectively. The company will function as a wholly owned subsidiary of Tribune Company, and will provide back-office services, administration, and a number of other functions to the stations. The most noticeable byproducts of this partnership are the redesigned websites of WHO-TV and Local TV's other stations, which were launched during late January and into February 2009, using the Tribune Interactive platform also used by the websites of Tribune-owned stations. However, on March 7, 2012, following the lead of Local TV's Fox-affiliated stations, WHO-DT became the first of Local TV's "Big Three" network-affiliated stations to migrate its Web site away from Tribune Digital (successor to Tribune Interactive) to a new host, WordPress.com VIP.
On July 1, 2013, Local TV announced that it would be acquired outright by Tribune Broadcasting, making WHO-DT and KFOR Tribune's first NBC affiliates. The sale was completed on December 27.
Aborted sale to Sinclair; sale to Nexstar
Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has owned KDSM-TV since 1996, entered into an agreement to acquire Tribune Media on May 8, 2017, for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in Tribune debt. The deal received significant scrutiny over Sinclair's forthrightness in its applications to sell certain conflict properties, prompting the FCC to designate it for hearing and leading Tribune to terminate the deal and sue Sinclair for breach of contract.
Following the Sinclair deal's collapse, Nexstar Media Group of Irving, Texas, announced its purchase of Tribune Media on December 3, 2018, for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. As Nexstar already owned ABC affiliate WOI-DT and CW affiliate KCWI-TV (channel 23), the company agreed on March 20, 2019, to divest the WOI/KCWI duopoly to Tegna Inc. as part of a $1.32 billion group deal with Tegna and the E. W. Scripps Company. The sale was completed on September 19, 2019.