KNPG-LD (channel 21) is a low-power television station in St. Joseph, Missouri, United States, affiliated with NBC, The CW Plus and Telemundo. It is owned by the locally based News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG) alongside fellow flagship properties, Fox affiliate KNPN-LD (channel 26) and CBS affiliate KCJO-LD (channel 30). The three stations share studios at News-Press & Gazette's corporate headquarters (which also house operations for the St. Joseph News-Press and local news and weather channel News-Press NOW) on Edmond Street in downtown St. Joseph; KNPG-LD's transmitter is located on South 16th Street (adjacent to US 36), just southeast of downtown.
There are no separate websites for the three stations, instead they are integrated with that of the co-owned St. Joseph News-Press.
History
Early history
The station's history traces back to the September 21, 1998 launch of a cable-only affiliate of The WB that was originally managed and promoted by St. Joseph Cablevision (a cable television provider that was owned by the News-Press & Gazette Company), alongside the launch of The WB 100+ Station Group, a service similar to The CW Plus that was created to expand national coverage of The WB via primarily local origination channels managed by cable providers in markets ranked above #100 by Nielsen Media Research. Since it was a cable-exclusive outlet that was not licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, the channel used the callsign "WBJO" in a fictional manner. Before the sign-on of the cable-only WBJO, viewers in the St. Joseph, Missouri area received their WB network programs, via Superstation WGN, and in September 1996, KCWB when the station began broadcasting, then from KSMO-TV when that station dropped UPN and picked up the WB from KCWB, in which it changed the call letters to KCWE two years later.
On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down their respective networks, The WB and UPN, to create The CW Television Network, which would feature programs from its two predecessors as well as new series that were specifically produced for The CW. The CW Plus was created by the network as a replacement for The WB 100+ Station Group to allow the existing cable outlets as well as low-power analog stations and digital subchannels of major network affiliates in smaller markets that had joined The WB 100+ in the years following its launch to maintain a network affiliation; "WBJO" affiliated with The CW Plus on September 18, 2006 upon the launch of the CW network.
Prior to the launch of KNPN-LD, residents in the St. Joseph market who received programming over-the-air or subscribed to other television providers besides Suddenlink viewed CW programming through out-of-market stations: some rural cable systems carried KCWE from the nearby Kansas City market (which provides at least grade B signal coverage to much of the St. Joseph market); the default CW outlet for local DirecTV subscribers was Omaha's KXVO, while Dish Network carried New York City affiliate WPIX, Los Angeles affiliate KTLA and Denver affiliate KWGN-TV as default affiliates through their carriage on its superstation package in lieu of regional affiliates located within proximity to St. Joseph. Upon the sale of News-Press & Gazette Company's cable television operations (which served St. Joseph, and parts of Arizona and California) to Suddenlink Communications in 2011 for $350 million, Suddenlink also acquired ownership of "WBJO" and sister cable outlet News-Press 3 NOW.
