the other New World-owned stations affected by the affiliation agreement with Fox, WDAF-TV retained its existing branding – in its instance, Newschannel 4, which the station adopted as a universal brand in April 1992 as an NBC affiliate – upon the affiliation switch; branding references to Fox, both visually and verbally, were limited in most on-air imaging, with the exception of on-air IDs (which used the tagline "in Kansas City, Newschannel 4 is Fox") that aired until January 1997. In addition to expanding its local news programming, the station added additional syndicated talk shows as well as some reality series and off-network sitcoms to fill time periods that were occupied by NBC's daytime and late-night lineups beforehand, as well as syndicated film packages for broadcast in weekend afternoon timeslots on weeks when Fox did not provide sports programming. Fox Television Stations ownership On July 17, 1996, News Corporation announced that it would acquire New World in an all-stock transaction worth $2.48 billion, with the latter company's ten Fox affiliates being folded into the former's Fox Television Stations subsidiary, making them all owned-and-operated stations of the network (the New World Communications name continued as a licensing purpose corporation for WDAF-TV and its sister stations until 2007 under Fox, and from 2009 to 2011 under Local TV ownership); the purchase was finalized on January 22, 1997, making WDAF-TV the first owned-and-operated station of a major network in the Kansas City market since DuMont briefly operated KCTY (channel 25) from December 1953 until it shut down that station in February 1954. On January 26, coinciding with Fox's telecast of Super Bowl XXXI, WDAF-TV subsequently changed its branding from Newschannel 4 to Fox 4 under the network's branding conventions (with its newscasts concurrently rebranding as Fox 4 News). On June 29, 2001, reports surfaced that Fox Television Stations had reached an agreement to sell WDAF and three of its other owned-and-operated stations – WGHP, WBRC and WHBQ-TV in Memphis, Tennessee (which Fox purchased through a separate agreement with Communications Corporation of America as an ABC affiliate in August 1994) – to New York City-based African American business executive Luther Gatling. The deal was reportedly would have been an effort to free ownership cap space (the four stations covered 2.7% of 40.74% of U.S. television households that Fox had access to one of its owned-and-operated stations) to allow Fox to get under the 35% national