In Praise of the Downtown News Edifice

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on March 11, 2026

I wrapped up my nearly three-week trip to Missouri with a visit to the building now housing KMOV-TV, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis. News Director Chris Nagus—a favorite former student of mine—invited me to stop by on my way to the airport. The station moved to the St. Louis suburb of Maryland Heights at the end of 2023, ending decades of broadcasting from a landmark building near the Gateway Arch in downtown. The new home of the station, a former biomedical company building, lies in an office park near a major interstate on the city’s west side. Nagus showed me around the facility and I was impressed. The new location is a palace. Its three stories of state-of-the-art facilities are beautiful to behold and seem comfortable to inhabit. The station has really refitted this old biomedical company building well, adapting it from its old use to efficiently and beautifully serve as a television station.

Just two miles away in the same suburb you’ll find KTVI/Fox 2. It moved from its own landmark location near the now-demolished St. Louis Arena in 2008. ABC affiliate KDNL (which doesn’t do local news) moved to suburban Richmond Heights in 2022, followed by KMOV’s move in 2023. Just this January, the last of the landmark stations downtown, veneratedNBC affiliate KSDK-TV, moved west from its signature building between Busch Stadium and St. Louis City Hall to, interestingly enough, a new facility on the old St. Louis Arena site, putting it right next to where KTVI’s station used to be.

These changes aren’t unique to my hometown of St. Louis.

Though St. Louis may be the only major market in which all the television stations have moved away from landmark locations in or near downtown, a number of news organizations in other cities have also abandoned their locations in the city center to move to cheaper or more efficient digs further out. For example, KDFW Fox 4 in Dallas is in the process of moving to the Las Colinas suburb. And it’s not just broadcasters. The downtown Los Angeles Times building, an art deco masterpiece designed by the architect of the Hoover Dam, now serves occasionally as a movie set, but otherwise sits vacant since the paper moved to El Segundo near LAX in 2018.

I’m not arguing that these moves weren’t good business decisions for the owners of these media organizations. KMOV’s new location boasts a much more modern set-up than its old riverfront location. The last time I was in that building—probably a dozen years ago—it was pretty worn around the edges. The more than a decade the station spent in that building since my last visit certainly took its toll on the facilities even further. Even moving into a building originally built for something else, as KMOV did, gave managers a chance to gut it and build new facilities with 21st century newsgathering in mind. Our old mid-20th century TV station buildings are often more of a hindrance than a help in terms of space for everything a newsroom must do now. Also, if I’m running a newsroom in St. Louis, I’d much rather have crews in a hurry to get to breaking news jump on I-270, a belt highway that circles the city, rather than wending their way out of a congested downtown. Security also comes into play, not only because crime can be more prevalent in the central city, but also because getting to a more anonymous location can mean it’s harder for the crazies to find us. And there are always the issues of parking and employee commutes to consider—both of which get easier in the ‘burbs.

What I’m lamenting is the loss of a symbol.

A landmark building towering about a city’s downtown sends a message to the public that we are important. Just think of your own hometown’s skyline (or if you’re from a small town, the closest big city). That skyline is dotted with not just buildings, but names. Companies put their names and logos on their buildings to shout to the public that they matter. When KSDK and KMOV were still in downtown St. Louis—along with KTVI out by the Arena, their buildings made a statement that they were just as important a part of the city as the big banks, manufacturers and other corporations that populated downtown. The TV buildings brought awe from the people who looked at them. And they were a goal for young journalists, to someday see themselves going downtown to walk in the footsteps of so many journalists who had gone before them into those hallowed halls.

As traditional journalism becomes less and less important in people’s lives, I can’t help but feel that moving our television stations and newspapers out of the public eye downtown and into the relative obscurity of suburban office parks speaks volumes about our new place in society. I’m excited my colleagues in St. Louis have shiny, modern facilities in which to work, but also a little bit sad that they don’t get to work inside a landmark anymore. I wonder if new employees entering a suburban office park building will get the same charge that wet behind the ears workers once got strolling into a downtown edifice on day one. It must be at least a little bit less of a thrill.

These moves will probably become more common.

The sheer age of a lot of our TV station buildings is catching up with the entire industry. Many TV newsrooms are located in buildings that are 60 or 70 years old—or more. My longtime outpost KOMU’s building just turned 73—but the cows are younger (IYKYK). It doesn’t make sense to refit a mid-20th century building for our needs today if it costs more than moving into a custom space.

I hope someone is capturing bits and pieces of these downtown temples of television to save for posterity. TV stations are only so-so when it comes to saving important file video and news footage. They’re even worse at holding on to their own histories. I would love to see a substantial exhibit in each of the new TV station buildings in St. Louis showing photos and artifacts from their old downtown palaces. That won’t replace having giant letters on top of landmark buildings downtown, but it could give new generations of journalists a peek into the glorious time when television stations made up the downtown skyline.