Young Selling KRON Building

Young Broadcasting is looking to offload its KRON San Francisco building, retaining real estate firm Grubb & Ellis to handle the sale of 1001 Van Ness in San Francisco and find a new home for the station.

"While we love the Van Ness building and the location, the space required for a state of the art digital television station is a fraction of what we have here," said KRON General Manager Brian Greif. "Relocating to a smaller facility will enable us to build a new platform to effectively serve our viewing audience within the San Francisco DMA with the best of today's and tomorrow's digital TV advances."

Greif estimates the selling process and hunt for new space, will take up to a year. 

The sale of 1001 Van Ness was previously reported on the Rich Lieberman 415 Media blog.

KRON is of course infamous for Young's $823 million acquisition of it in 1999, and the subsequent loss of its NBC affiliation. The station airs MyNetworkTV programming and a batch of locally produced programs.

Young has been investing in its stations since wiping free $800 million of debt in bankruptcy. Young President Deb McDermott told B&C of KRON Oct. 24: "It had its problems earlier, but we're very competitive in numerous time periods."

Michael Malone

Michael Malone, senior content producer at B+C/Multichannel News, covers network programming, including entertainment, news and sports on broadcast, cable and streaming; and local broadcast television. He hosts the podcasts Busted Pilot, about what’s new in television, and Series Business, a chat with the creator of a new program, and writes the column “The Watchman.” He joined B+C in 2005. His journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Playboy and New York magazine.