KTVZ

At 5 p.m. on a weekday, the newsroom at 62990 O.B. Riley Road in Bend is running at full tilt. Producers stack a wildfire evacuation update next to a Bend City Council vote and a high-desert forecast that can swing 40 degrees in a day. KTVZ channel 21, the NBC affiliate for Central Oregon, has been the region's default local television news source since the late 1970s, and that daily rhythm has not changed much even as the delivery methods have.

The station is owned by the News-Press & Gazette Company, a Missouri-based broadcaster that also runs KFXO-CD channel 39, a Class A low-power outlet carrying Fox and Telemundo programming on its subchannels. The two stations share studios and pool resources for weather and breaking news, a shared-services arrangement that lets a lean operation cover a territory roughly the size of West Virginia. KTVZ's transmitter sits on Awbrey Butte, west of US 97, sending a signal across Deschutes, Crook, and Jefferson counties. Translators push coverage into parts of the Columbia River Gorge and the northern Klamath Basin, so the station reaches Bend, Redmond, Sisters, and Prineville without much interference.

Network programming fills the rest of the schedule: NBC's prime-time lineup, Today, and NBC Nightly News. KFXO-CD handles Fox sports and Spanish-language Telemundo content, which matters in a region with a growing Latino population. KTVZ's brand positioning, "Central Oregon's News Leader," appears on its website, Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube accounts, and the station maintains an active digital presence with roughly 24.9K Instagram followers and about 11.3K YouTube subscribers across some 26,000 posted videos.

In October 2026, the station became the central information hub during the Silver Rail Elementary School shooting in Bend, breaking the news of an active shooter with multiple victims, including children, on October 15. Since then KTVZ has run round-the-clock follow-up coverage under a "Central Oregon Strong" banner, including live community-response updates, a Bend community vigil, a full interview with survivor-witness Kaylub Giamanco, and a celebration-of-life feature on slain teacher Megan Lambert. For a market ranked well outside the top 100, that kind of sustained crisis coverage is both a public service and a reminder of why local television still matters here. [edit]

KTVZ exists to give Central Oregon a daily local television news product that reflects the region's specific concerns: wildfire season, water policy, tourism, city government, and the outdoor-recreation economy. The station pairs that local reporting with NBC's national and international coverage, and it uses its shared services with KFXO-CD to stretch a small staff across a large geographic footprint. Community information during emergencies, from evacuations to school crises, has become a core part of that mission. [edit]

KTVZ signed on in 1977, according to the most commonly cited station records, though some accounts place its launch in the early 1980s as a small independent outlet that later joined NBC. The discrepancy persists in public databases, but the 1977 date appears more often in station histories and Wikidata. Either way, the station spent its early years building a signal and a newsroom in a market that had few local television options.

Ownership changed hands several times over the following decades. At one point the station operated under Northwest Broadcasting, a company that held a cluster of small-market outlets across the West. In 2017, News-Press & Gazette Company acquired KTVZ as part of a group deal, adding it to a broadcast portfolio that already included stations in Missouri, California, and other Western markets. NPG also owns KFXO-LD in nearby Prineville, and the company has invested in shared-services arrangements that let the Bend operations combine resources for weather and breaking news.

The station's transmitter on Awbrey Butte and its translator network have been central to its reach, carrying the signal into the Columbia River Gorge and the northern Klamath Basin. That infrastructure matters in a region where terrain can block reception, and it has helped KTVZ remain the primary local broadcast outlet for Bend, Redmond, Sisters, and Prineville. [edit]