the principals of a Palm Springs law firm were appointed as receivers; the studios were relocated to Cathedral City. Esquire years In late 1977, negotiations were concluded to sell KPLM-TV to Esquire, Inc. The $800,000 purchase marked Esquire's return to broadcasting after owning and selling WQXI radio in Atlanta in the 1960s. The call letters were changed to KESQ-TV on September 18, 1978. Esquire purchased KECC-TV in El Centro in 1981. It attempted to sell both stations to Cimarron Broadcasting, an Oklahoma group headed by Harry Nilsson, in 1983, but Cimarron lacked the capital to make the purchase, and the deal fell apart in March 1984. However, Esquire, which had become wholly owned by Gulf+Western, was anxious to divest itself of the small-market TV station which the large conglomerate did not want and sold it to Gulf Broadcasting of Dallas, an unrelated concern, two months later; the El Centro station was not included. Gulf was then swallowed by Taft Broadcasting in 1985, when the FCC increased ownership limits on television and radio properties—but KESQ-TV was not included in the transaction, which immediately brought Taft to the limit. Instead, KESQ-TV was sold to E. Grant Fitts, who had been the chairman of the broadcasting division. Expansion under NPG Fitts reached a deal to sell KESQ-TV to its current owner, the News-Press & Gazette Company of St. Joseph, Missouri, for $19.4 million in late 1995. Under NPG, KESQ-TV's operation expanded to include additional low-power TV stations. KUNA-LP, a Telemundo affiliate, launched in 1997. In 1998, NPG entered into a local marketing agreement to run KDFX-LP, the low-power Fox affiliate in Palm Springs; it started that station's first local newscast. A local affiliate of The WB followed in 2000. In 2012, NPG bought KPSP-CD, the local CBS affiliate. In 2013, KESQ-TV moved into a new state-of-the-art studio in Thousand Palms. While in the later years under Fitts, KESQ had briefly run a radio station (920 AM), it returned to the field again when 1400 AM, previously KUNA, was bought by the station and flipped to sports as KESQ at the end of 1997. In the late 1990s, KESQ-TV flirted with another kind of expansion. In 1996, the station received FCC approval to move its transmitter to a spot in the San Jacinto Mountains, which would have increased its coverage area to include much of western Riverside County and San Bernardino County. Riverside County