Jan. 15, 2021

Dakota News Now will start a newscast Monday on the Sioux Falls Fox affiliate.

The hourlong newscast will air at 9 p.m. with anchors Brian Allen and Kelsie Passolt. Meterologist Tyler Roney will anchor the weather, and Mark Ovenden will anchor sports.

Dakota News Now started a 9 p.m. newscast on its CW affiliate in April after the pandemic drove increased demand for news.

“It was always on our radar to do so eventually, but because of COVID, we realized there’s a need for information, and it’s coming rapidly, and we thought we just need to get it on the air,” general manager Jim Berman said.

“Week after week, it’s grown and picked up an audience, and that’s good, but even though we love the CW, it’s not Fox. There’s a reason they call it the Big Four, and Fox has ratings in prime time that are similar to ABC and NBC, so moving this to Fox, that lead-in is going to, we really think, exponentially grow the audience and put this newscast in a similar place to what we have on KSFY and KDLT at 10 p.m.”

Dakota News Now, which is owned by Gray Television, picked up the Fox affiliation last year after Independent Communications Inc., longtime owner of KTTW, Channel 7, decided to exit the broadcast business.

The station is adding a second evening reporter to support the hourlong show and also report for the 10 p.m. newscast.

“This isn’t going to just be a newscast that’s a repeat or rehash of what we had all day,” news director Kevin King said. “We’re looking at new content for 9 p.m. through 10:30 p.m. And with Fox, there’s a lot more content we can get from the network as well.”

There also could be opportunities for more long-form reporting and live interviews, he said.

“We’ve been doing a lot of live interviews through Zoom during the pandemic, so it’s a great option for us.”

It’s a good fit for those who want to wrap up their day with local news before 10 p.m., Berman added.

“It’s a time period for Fox affiliates that has been enormously successful, so it’s a real opportunity for us to jump onto something that has been in existence for years around the country; it’s just our market never had it.”

It has been exactly one year since KSFY and KDLT combined as Dakota News Now, joining their news teams and adding local news at more nontraditional time slots, including 4, 5:30 and 6:30 p.m.

“It’s going, we think, really, really well,” Berman said. “The feedback has been terrific from an anecdotal perspective but even more from a ratios perspective. We’re creating new habits, and new habits take a long time to kick into high gear, but for the first year we couldn’t be happier.”

The operation also likely isn’t done adding newscasts, he said.

“Stay tuned because there clearly is going to be more on all three platforms.”

KTTW ‘exiting broadcast business’; Fox moves to Gray Television