The station was established by Craig Media Inc., and went on the air for the first time on September 18, 1997 as the flagship station of the A-Channeltelevision system. It promoted itself as a very locally oriented station whose schedule was not drawn up in Toronto, with the slogan "Very independent, Very Edmonton!" In 1999, a letter bomb exploded in the CKEM newsroom, injuring the assignment editor and one of the general assignment reporters. The station simulcast the Live@Five and News@Six newscasts from Calgary sister station CKAL-TV, while police investigated the bombing. Local Edmonton newscasts resumed later on in the evening. Raymond Neal Best was charged with attempted murder and possession of explosive substances, in connection with the A-Channel letter bomb, and the attempted letter bombings aimed at both Calgary and Edmonton police chiefs. On September 17, 2003, several employees who were members of the Canadian Energy and Paperworkers Local 1900 went on strike over worry of jobs being lost, wages, and jobs being moved to Calgary. The strike lasted 166 days. CKEM's master control facilities moved to the CKAL studios in Calgary in late 2003. In 2004, Craig Media announced a deal to sell the A-Channel stations to CHUM Limited. The sale was approved by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on November 19, 2004, and became official on December 1. On February 3, 2005, CHUM announced that the A-Channel stations would be relaunched under the Citytv brand by that fall, effectively turning Citytv into a television system; the changes took effect on August 2 of that year.
Under Rogers ownership
On July 12, 2006, Bell Globemedia announced plans to take over CHUM Limited. On June 8, 2007, the CRTC announced its approval of CTVglobemedia's purchase of CHUM Limited, but added a condition that CTVglobemedia must sell off CHUM's Citytv stations to another buyer while keeping the A-Channel stations since the company already owned CTV owned-and-operated station CFRN-TV in the same market. The following Monday, it was announced that Rogers Communications would buy the Citytv system's stations. The sale was approved by the CRTC on September 28, 2007, and was finalized on one month later on October 31. In late 2015, Rogers' television stations in Edmonton moved from their studios in downtown Edmonton to the headquarters of Rogers' Edmonton radio stations on Gateway Boulevard.
News operation
CKEM presently broadcasts 14 hours of locally produced newscasts per-week. On July 12, 2006, the station's local newscasts were immediately cancelled after years of ratings struggle in the Edmonton market. The local newscasts were replaced by a half-hour newsmagazine program called Your City at 6 and 11 p.m., along with a national and international newscast called CityNews International. On January 19, 2010, CityNews at Noon, Your City and CityNews International were cancelled as part of Citytv's corporate restructuring and concurrent layoffs. On May 7, 2015, Rogers announced that as part of further cuts, Breakfast Television would be cancelled on May 19, 2015. It was replaced by Dinner Television, a two-hour evening program hosted by Jason Strudwick that featured newsmagazine and discussion segments, and no original news reporting. An encore of the previous night's Dinner Television with on-screen news, weather, and traffic updates replaced Breakfast Television in its morning timeslot. On September 4, 2017, after a seven-year hiatus, CityNews was relaunched as part of an expansion of local news programming by Citytv's stations. The station airs hour-long newscasts at 6 and 11 p.m. nightly. Similarly to the format of its sister station in Toronto, CKEM's newscasts use an "anchorless" format, where all stories are presented by videojournalists on the field, eschewing in-studio anchors.
Digital television
Digital channel
Analogue-to-digital conversion
On May 26, 2010, CKEM began testing its digital signal with the broadcast of a test loop. On June 29 of that year, the station began broadcasting regular programming over its digital signal. On August 31, 2011, when Canadian television stations in CRTC-designated mandatory marketstransitioned from analogue to digital broadcasts, the station's digital signal relocated from UHFchannel 51 to channel 17. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers originally displayed CKEM-DT's virtual channel as 51.1. On February 28, 2020, Rogers applied for permission to convert their Red Deer repeater to digital operations as part of the 600 MHz spectrum auction. The upgrade would entail moving from VHF 4 at 7 kW to UHF 15 at 35 kW. If approved, the analogue signal would be shut off on November 17, 2020.
