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Market Profile
KANSAS CITY IS ONE OF THE FEW MAJOR MEDIA MARKETS THAT ARE SPLIT BETWEEN two states. The majority of the DMA's population is on the Missouri side, with the remainder in Kansas City, Kan. Known as the City of Fountains, Kansas City, Mo., has dozens of all sizes; the city's parks department maintains more than 40 public fountains. The best known is the 51-year-- old J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain, named for the developer of Country Club Plaza, a large shopping mall. Major League Baseball's Kansas City Royals have a 322-foot-- wide fountain beyond the outfield fence in their home park, Kauffman Stadium.
Located not far from the geographic center of the continental U.S., Kansas City has been a major transportation center since the 1800s. A $183 million upgrade of the market's airport is currently under way.
The Kansas City broadcast-television market ranks 31st in the country, with 849,730 TV households, according to Nielsen Media Research. The market's sign-on-to-- sign-off household ratings leader is Hearst-Argyle Television's ABC affiliate KMBC-TV, which also wins the evening and late local-news races.
For the past two years, KMBC has led the morning news competition from 5 to 7 a.m. The station expanded the program by a half hour in 1999, moving to a 5 a.m. start. "We have been very fortunate to have a very stable group of on-air anchors," says Wayne Godsey, KMBC president and general manager. In March 2000, top KMBC female anchor Laurie Everett retired. Laura Moritz, who had been a morning anchor, took over Everett's slot at 10 p.m., and Kelly Eckerman, the station's 5 p.m. anchor, added 6 p.m. to her duties. Natalie Moultrie succeeded Moritz in the mornings.
In regard to the station's 10 p.m. newscast, Godsey says he has been quite concerned about the poor ratings performance of ABC's prime-time schedule this season, calling it a "less than adequate" lead-in to KMBC's news.
Last September, KMBC replaced the syndicated Roseanne, which the station had aired for years at 10:30 p.m. following its late news, with Seinfeld, which had previously aired in the market on Meredith Corp.'s CBS affiliate, KCTV-TV, in a latenight time slot. "We felt [Seinfeld] was underexposed in the market," Godsey says. This fall, KMBC will add syndie reruns...