Harron, Ackerley, and Clear Channel ownership
In 1993, Retlaw sold KMST for $8.2 million to Harron-Smith Television Partnership,[18] a joint venture of Harron Communications and Smith Broadcasting. Amid a major retooling of the station, the call letters were changed in October to KCCN-TV, representing the new title of its newscasts, "Central Coast News".[19] The call letters were shared with two stations in Honolulu, Hawaii, KCCN AM and KCCN-FM.
A year into the partnership, Smith sold its half back to Harron; the next year, it bought KSBW-TV, channel 46's longtime competitor. Meanwhile, Harron began to realize it was in over its head with the task it confronted at KCCN-TV, having underestimated the dimensions of the challenge posed by turning it around.[20] In late 1995, Harron began to shop KCCN-TV—or its assets—for sale. Smith then looked at buying back KCCN-TV's assets and programming the station under a local marketing agreement (LMA). A deal with Smith was far along enough that it was reported as confirmed by the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper.[21] However, negotiations then stalled, and Harron sought another buyer.
At 3 p.m. on April 24, 1996, KCBA owner Ackerley Communications took over the operations of KCCN-TV. Harron immediately laid off 70 employees and shut the channel 46 newsroom down, though 25 employees would then be hired back by KCBA.[22] News director Adrienne Laurent popped up three hours later as a fill-in anchor on KSBW's 6 p.m. newscast. KCBA promised to restore news to KCCN-TV on June 3 in what was just the second LMA of its type involving two news-producing stations.[23] With the agreement, KCCN-TV operations moved from Monterey to Salinas.[24] The move drew fire from the city councils of Salinas and Monterey and the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, as well as several private petitions to the FCC.[25] The first KCCN-TV local newscasts from KCBA in Salinas were picketed by some of the employees that were not rehired.[26] On February 23, 1997, KCCN changed its call letters again, this time to KION, after the rise of the World Wide Web brought new complaints from the Honolulu radio stations, who wanted to restrict channel 46 from using their call sign on their website.
Late in 1998, Ackerley bought KION outright from Harron and sold KCBA to Seal Rock Broadcasters, though Ackerley would continue to operate that station on Seal Rock's behalf.[28] It took more than a year for this transaction to receive FCC approval, due to the then-pending license renewals for both stations; the deal was completed on January 12, 2000. Ackerley instituted three master control hubs in its group in 2000, one of them in Salinas and the others at KGET-TV in Bakersfield and WIXT in Syracuse, New York.[29] The Salinas hub served KION and KCBA as well as KFTY in Santa Rosa, KVIQ-TV in Eureka, and KMTR in Eugene, Oregon.[30]
Two years later, Ackerley merged with Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel already owned radio stations on the Central Coast, and one of them began to share KION's call sign: news/talk-formatted KTXX (1460 AM) became KION as part of a partnership that saw collaboration between the radio station and the TV newsroom.[31]
