conflict with the Bay Area television stations and cementing its status as a Stockton station serving Sacramento instead of San Francisco. Gannett and Metromedia ownership As work continued on the Butte Mountain transmitter, Television Diablo began to seek a buyer for KOVR. It first proposed to sell the station to the Hudson Valley Broadcasting Company of Albany, New York—which was in the process of buying a television station in Durham, North Carolina, and renaming itself the Capital Cities Broadcasting Company; despite the FCC's blessing, this sale was not consummated and dismissed in November. Weeks later, the Gannett Company of Rochester, New York, entered into an agreement to acquire the station, taking ownership in February 1958. For Gannett, KOVR was far-flung compared to its other media properties. It owned radio and television stations in New York and Illinois as well as newspapers in those states, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The next year, KOVR reopened KCCC-TV's former Sacramento studios on Garden Highway, also providing use of the facilities by new educational station KVIE. After less than two years of ownership, as well as the end of talks between Gannett and 20th Century Fox, Gannett applied to sell KOVR to the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company, owned by John Kluge, in 1959. (This company renamed itself Metromedia in 1961.) Metromedia's ownership of KOVR would be highlighted by its participation in the Trans-Tower project that built a common transmission facility for Sacramento's three commercial television stations in Walnut Grove. Expanding production of commercials and other programming in Sacramento eventually led KOVR to leave the Garden Highway facilities and renovate a former Red Heart bakery on Arden Way to serve as its Sacramento studio and news center, operating alongside the Miner Avenue plant in Stockton. The McClatchy years On October 4, 1963, Metromedia announced it would sell KOVR for $7.65 million to McClatchy Newspapers, publisher of The Sacramento Bee and The Modesto Bee newspapers and owner of radio stations KBEE (970 AM) in Modesto and KFBK (1530 AM) and KFBK-FM 92.5 in Sacramento. For McClatchy, the contract to buy a television station serving Sacramento fulfilled a long-held dream of the company. McClatchy had desired to build a station in Sacramento since 1948, when it applied for channel 10. While an FCC examiner's initial decision favored McClatchy for the station, its competition, a group known as Sacramento Telecasters and consisting of non-broadcast interests, successfully objected the award on