KPXJ (channel 21) is a television station licensed to Minden, Louisiana, United States, serving the Shreveport area as an affiliate of The CW. The station is owned by locally based KTBS, LLC, alongside ABC affiliate KTBS-TV (channel 3). Both stations share studios on East Kings Highway on the eastern side of Shreveport, while KPXJ's transmitter is located near St. Johns Baptist Church Road (southeast of Mooringsport and Caddo Lake) in rural northern Caddo Parish. History Early history; as a Pax TV owned-and-operated station The UHF channel 21 allocation was contested between multiple groups that competed for approval by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to be the holder of the construction permit to build and license to operate a new television station on the third commercial UHF allocation to be assigned to the Shreveport–Texarkana market (assigned to the Shreveport suburb of Minden, Louisiana). Among the prospective applicants were John E. Powley (who applied for the license on January 16, 1996), Tucson, Arizona-based Northwest Television Inc. (owned by company president William L. Yde III, president, who applied for the license on January 18, 1996) and five parties who each applied for individual applications on April 4 and 5, 1996: Los Angeles-based Venture Technologies Group LLC (majority owned by Lawrence Rogow, who also served as the group's president), Little Rock-based Kaleidoscope Partners (forerunner company to Equity Broadcasting), Washington, D.C.-based WinStar Broadcasting Corp. (owned by Stuart B. Rekant), Wichita, Kansas-based entrepreneur Marcia T. Turner, Columbia, South Carolina-based Universal Media (majority owned by company president Murray Michaels) and Shreveport-based Word of Life Ministries Inc. On December 19, 1997, West Palm Beach, Florida-based Paxson Communications (now Ion Media Networks) – which was preparing to launch Pax TV, a family-oriented broadcast television network, that tapped Paxson Communications-owned affiliate stations of the Infomall TV Network (inTV), and newly launched and purchased stations to serve as the network's initial affiliates – reached a settlement with the other applicants to acquire the construction permit to operate UHF channel 21, among seven it settled to acquire for an average cost of $4.95 million. On April 14, 1998, The FCC approved the purchase of the channel 21 permit to Paxson and dismissed the applications of the seven competing applicants. The station first signed on the air on August 31, 1998 as WPXO (in reference to its network affiliation and original corporate parent). Channel 21 originally operated as a charter owned-and-operated station of