photo by: Richard Gwin

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback waves after delivering his State of the State address to a combined session at the Kansas State Capitol on Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015, in Topeka.

Gov. Sam Brownbacks’ office announced this week that he will deliver his State of the State address on Tuesday, Jan. 10, at 5 p.m.

If you think about that for a moment, you’ll notice the time is when most TV and radio stations are carrying their evening news programs. And for people who work regular 9-5 jobs, it starts before they even get home.

But Brownback said that’s not because he’s trying to make it inconvenient for broadcasters. It’s just that broadcasters have lost interest in carrying it.

“I think the only one that was carrying it was public television, and they decided last year they couldn’t (carry it) at the later time, so we decided we’d want to make it as convenient for legislators as possible because they all have a lot of evening activities,” Brownback said.

The State of the State address is traditionally one of the most important speeches any governor gives during the year. It marks the opening of a new legislative session, and an opportunity for the governor to lay out his or her legislative and budget priorities.

For many years, KPTS-TV, the public television station in Wichita, produced a show for the State of the State address that included live broadcast of the speech itself, and post-speech interviews with lawmakers and other people. Their video feed of the speech was also made available for free to commercial broadcasters, and the audio was available to any radio station that wanted it.

And it wasn’t unusual on State-of-the-State night to see a line of satellite trucks from Kansas City, Wichita and Topeka TV stations parked on the Statehouse grounds, or on 10th Street south of the building, so they could take the video feed and relay it back to their stations.

Last year, though, KPTS cancelled its broadcast because it lost a major underwriter for the program. To fill in the gap, Kansas Public Radio, based at the University of Kansas, brought in equipment so it could carry the live audio, which it also made available to other broadcasters.

This year, though, even KPR is rethinking its strategy, mainly because the 5 p.m. start time conflicts with the highly popular NPR news program “All Things Considered.”

KPR news director J. Schafer said Tuesday that the station still plans to carry the speech, but officials there haven’t yet decided exactly how or when it will be broadcast.

One possibility, he said, would be to carry the speech live on its sister station, KPR-2, a separate programming stream designed for high-definition digital receivers, which very few people have. It is also available online. And in Lawrence, it’s available over the air with a standard radio on KPR’s new, additional station at 96.1 FM. It would then be rebroadcast on KPR’s regular signal, 91.5 FM, at 6 p.m., after All Things Considered.

That would mean for the vast majority of people in Kansas, the only way to see or hear the speech live will be to find an online source that will be live-streaming the event.

The Journal-World hopes to provide a list of those live streams when it becomes available.