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WSMH

WSMH (channel 66), branded on-air as Fox 66, is a television station licensed to Flint, Michigan, United States, serving as the Fox affiliate for northeastern Michigan. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which provides certain services to Saginaw-licensed NBC affiliate WEYI-TV (channel 25, owned by Howard Stirk Holdings) and Bay City-licensed CW affiliate WBSF (channel 46, owned by Cunningham Broadcasting) through separate shared services agreements (SSAs). However, Sinclair effectively owns WBSF as the majority of Cunningham's stock is owned by the family of deceased group founder Julian Smith.

The three stations share studios on West Pierson Road in Mount Morris Township (with a Flint mailing address); WSMH's transmitter is located on Amman Road (near Gary Road) near St. Charles, Michigan. There is no separate website for WSMH; instead, it is integrated with that of sister station WEYI-TV.

History
Flint Broadcasting Limited Partnership requested a station with the call letters WSMH, which were assigned on September 27, 1984. WSMH first went on the air on January 13, 1985, as an independent station with Frederick (Fritz) Mills as general manager. Mills was formerly director of national sales, UPI Media in Chicago. A fire at the transmitter in April 1985 forced the station to go off the air for about one month until repairs could be made. Flint Broadcasting sold the station to Gerald J. Robinson by July 1986. On October 9, 1986, it became a charter Fox affiliate. Sinclair Broadcast Group bought the station in 1996.

Per a new five-year affiliation agreement reached between Sinclair and Fox on May 15, 2012, WSMH would remain a Fox affiliate until at least December 31, 2017, although currently, its Fox affiliation remains to this day.

News operation
Sinclair announced numerous layoffs at WSMH/WEYI in March 2023, which led to a major cut in news production from the stations. As of April 15, 2023, WSMH presently broadcasts just five hours of locally produced newscasts each week, only airing an hour-long show at 10 p.m. WSMH no longer produces local weekend news.

On October 28, 2002, WSMH started up a news department and began airing local broadcasts every night at 10. Called Fox 66 News at 10, it was assisted by Sinclair's centralized news department under the News Central brand. Local news originated from WSMH's studios while national news, weather, and sports aired from News Central headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland. The station was the first Sinclair-owned property to use the News Central service and marked the first time it had ventured into the local news market. In January 2006, Sinclair announced plans to end its News Central operation due to low ratings and expense.

On April 10, Sinclair announced that CBS affiliate WNEM-TV would begin producing a nightly 10 o'clock show on WSMH known as TV 5 News at 10 on Fox 66. This began airing on April 24 from WNEM's studios on North Franklin Street in Downtown Saginaw. After the final News Central broadcast on April 21, many local WSMH news employees were laid off. It had been expected that some personalities would join the WNEM-produced newscast in the future according to a press release. This was the case for former WSMH reporter David Custer who joined the WNEM news team on May 3.

The final News Central broadcast featured, in its last few minutes, clips from past shows. At the end, the studio was darkened and Jim Kiertzner and his boss left for the last time. Even after WSMH shut down its news operation, Mark E. Hyman's controversial "The Point" editorials continued to air following the end of the WNEM-produced newscasts. Hyman ended his commentaries on November 30. On May 1, 2009, the 10 o'clock news title was re-branded and the broadcast received updated graphics. Every night at 10:45, a fifteen-minute sports highlight show called Sports Extra airs. There is also a segment called "Fugitive Files" airing every week on Mondays which is a common segment offered by local news departments operated by Sinclair. Although WNEM upgraded its newscasts to 16:9 enhanced definition widescreen on October 14, 2010, the newscasts on WSMH remain in pillarboxed 4:3 standard definition because this channel lacks a modern master control facility at its separate studios to receive the newscast in widescreen.

Effective April 27, 2015, WEYI took over duties of producing the 10 p.m. newscast for sister Sinclair station WSMH, Fox 66 News at 10. Prior to April 27, WNEM-TV produced WSMH's evening newscast as part of a local agreement with WSMH. Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson, a Sinclair Broadcast Group produced half-hour investigative news program, airs on the channel on Sunday morning starting October 4, 2015.

Subchannels
The station's signal is multiplexed: On September 30, 2006, WSMH began broadcasting The Tube on its secondary subchannel.

In late 2010 and early 2011 with new carriage deals by owner Sinclair, WSMH added two music video networks to its digital subchannels, TheCoolTV on 66.2 and The Country Network on 66.3.

In late August 2012, TheCoolTV was dropped from all 32 Sinclair stations that carried the channel, including WSMH, with no replacement due to non-renewal of affiliation. Sinclair signed an agreement in June 2014 which added GetTV to 33 TV markets with WSMH adding that channel on channel 66.2 effective July 2.

Zuus was replaced on WSMH-DT3 by Comet on October 31, 2015. In December of that year, the station replaced GetTV with Antenna TV.

On October 30, 2023, Stadium was replaced on WSMH-DT4 by a new Sinclair owned TV network called The Nest.

Analog-to-digital conversion
WSMH discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 66, on May 21, 2009. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 16, using virtual channel 66.

title: WSMH


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Joe Hall (ice hockey)

Joseph Henry "Bad Joe" Hall (May 3, 1881 – April 5, 1919) was a Canadian professional ice hockey player. Known for his aggressive playing style, Hall played senior and professional hockey from 1902 to 1919, when he died as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic. He won the Stanley Cup twice with the Quebec Bulldogs and once with the Kenora Thistles, and became hospitalized while participating in the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals, which were cancelled on April 1, six hours before the deciding game and four days before he died.

Career
Hall was born in Milwich in Staffordshire, England. He moved with his family to Canada in 1884, initially going to Winnipeg, Manitoba before settling in Brandon, Manitoba. Details of Hall's life before 1902 are otherwise scarce. Nicknamed "Bad Joe" for his aggressiveness on the ice, he played in the Manitoba Hockey Association (MHA) with the Brandon Wheat City Hockey Club, Winnipeg Rowing Club and Kenora Thistles between 1902 and 1907, and in the first fully professional league, the International Professional Hockey League (IHL), where he was a teammate of Cyclone Taylor on the Portage Lakes Hockey Club during the 1905–06 season. Between 1907 and 1909 he played for the Montreal Shamrocks, Montreal Hockey Club and Montreal Wanderers in the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association (ECAHA), after having been expelled from the MHA in December 1907 for rough play.

Between 1910 and 1917 Hall played in the National Hockey Association (NHA) as a member of the Quebec Bulldogs. On the Bulldogs he formed a successful defence pairing with Harry Mummery. He played for the Montreal Canadiens in their first two seasons in the National Hockey League from 1917 to 1919, after having been claimed from Quebec in the Dispersal Draft in November 1917.

Hall won the Stanley Cup with the Kenora Thistles in 1907, as a spare player, for which he received a loving cup which is on display in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He won the Stanley Cup with the Quebec Bulldogs in consecutive years in 1912 and 1913. He also challenged for the Stanley Cup in 1904 with the Winnipeg Rowing Club, losing over three games to the Ottawa Hockey Club.

1919 Stanley Cup Finals
In 1919, Hall was part of the Montreal Canadiens team that made it to the 1919 Stanley Cup Finals. The Finals were interrupted, with the two clubs having won two games each, and were cancelled on April 1, six hours before the deciding game, due to an outbreak of Spanish flu. The flu was contracted by several players on both the Canadiens and their opponents, the Seattle Metropolitans. Hall eventually succumbed to pneumonia, related to his influenza, in a hospital in Seattle, Washington, just four days after the series was abandoned.

Hall was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961.

Playing style
Hall, a right-handed shot, started out his playing career as a forward, playing predominantly as a right winger. During the 1905–06 season with the Portage Lakes Hockey Club he scored 33 goals in 20 games in the International Hockey League from the right wing position. During the second half of his career he played as a defenceman. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from December 20, 1931 by Harold C. Burr, interviewing former player Lester Patrick, described Hall as a "fast hard-riding forward in the old days of seven-man hockey" and as a "scoring defense man, too, and a hard blocker." The article described further how Hall was "built like a tomcat, with long arms and legs."

Hall had a reputation as one of the roughest and dirtiest players of his era, which earned him the moniker "Bad Joe", and he was involved in several instances of violence where he was reprimanded for attacking either opposing players or officials. On December 19, 1907, at the onset of the 1907–08 season, while playing for the Winnipeg Maple Leafs in an qualifying test game against the Winnipeg Hockey Club, Hall was involved in a contest which was dubbed a "disgraceful exhibition" by the Winnipeg Tribune, and the newspaper singled out Hall as the chief offender regarding violent displays. The game ended when the Winnipeg Hockey Club refused to continue playing, thus defaulting the game. The most blatant act of violence happened when he knocked down Charlie Tobin with his stick. Hall was subsequently expelled from the MHA along with Maple Leafs teammate Harry Smith.

During the inaugural NHA season in 1910, while playing for the Montreal Shamrocks in a game against the Cobalt Silver Kings, Hall attacked referee (and former Montreal Wanderers player) Rod Kennedy which prompted the NHA to expel him from the league, although he was later reinstated. Three years later, during the 1912–13 NHA season, he was again involved in a violent situation with an official as he kicked referee Tom Melville on the shins and later swung his stick against him.

During the inaugural NHL season in 1917–18, while a member of the Montreal Canadiens, Hall was involved in a violent tussle with Alf Skinner, forward of the Toronto Arenas, during a game on January 28, 1918. Both players were arrested for assault and appeared in a Toronto court together on January 29 where both were released after being handed a suspended sentence.

Cy Denneny, a longtime left winger with the Ottawa Senators who played directly against (right defenceman) Hall in the NHA and NHL, claimed in an interview with Bill Westwick of the Ottawa Journal in December 1945 that Hall, despite his reputation as a dirty player, "was a friendly fellow also", off the ice. Denneny claimed that Hall had told him that he did not like opposing players who tried to avoid him by shifting sides, but that he had never been dirty towards Denneny because he came in on Hall's side minding his own business.

Awards and achievements

 * International Professional Hockey League First Team All-Star (1906)
 * Stanley Cup Championships (1907 with Kenora, 1912 and 1913 with Quebec)
 * Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1961
 * Honoured Member of the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Joe Hall (ice hockey)


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KDNL-TV

KDNL-TV (channel 30) is a television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, affiliated with ABC. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios at the University Tower in the suburb of Richmond Heights and a transmitter in Shrewsbury.

Channel 30 in St. Louis was sought on several occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s, though no station materialized. The fourth attempt to build the channel was originally spearheaded by a group of local investors as well as Washington attorney John Dean; after the construction permit for KDNL-TV was sold to Thomas Mellon Evans, the station began broadcasting on June 8, 1969. It served as the second independent station for the St. Louis area, airing syndicated reruns as well as financial news and sports. Cox Broadcasting purchased KDNL-TV in 1981, in part because it held a permit for over-the-air subscription television broadcasting. Cox launched this service on June 1982, but it was a business failure, and Cox shut it down in February 1983. The station continued to be an overall money-loser and a misfit in the Cox station portfolio, even though it became the first local affiliate of Fox in 1986.

Barry Baker and Larry Marcus, former executives of rival independent KPLR-TV who were fired for trying to buy that station, purchased KDNL-TV from Cox in 1989. It became the first station in a St. Louis-based company eventually known as River City Broadcasting, which soon acquired other independent and Fox-affiliated stations. Ratings and revenue improved with the success of the Fox network, with total viewership approaching KPLR-TV, and led the station to start a local news department in January 1995. Under a deal announced in 1994 but carried out in August 1995, KDNL-TV lost its Fox affiliation and switched with KTVI to become the affiliate of ABC in St. Louis.

In 1996, River City merged into Sinclair Broadcast Group. However, KDNL's news department failed to gain traction, hurt by the traditionally poor ratings for ABC programming in the market; high turnover in news talent; a lack of full-day news service; and the resistance to change of many St. Louis viewers. In 1999, Baker left Sinclair and assigned an option to purchase KDNL-TV and six Sinclair-owned radio stations in St. Louis to Emmis Communications; the option resulted in a lawsuit settled with Sinclair retaining the TV station and selling off the radio properties. More critically, it led to neglect of the station's transmitter facility, causing signal issues, and the suspension of early evening newscasts for the struggling news operation. In the wake of the advertising slump after the September 11 attacks, Sinclair closed the KDNL-TV news department in 2001 and laid off all 47 staff. Since then, the station has largely been the fourth- or fifth-rated station in the market, with two short-lived and outsourced attempts at local news programming since the 2001 newsroom closure.

Channel 30 prior to KDNL-TV
Three different attempts were made to start channel 30 in St. Louis. The assignment was added in 1952 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended its nearly four-year freeze on new television stations and introduced assignments in the new ultra high frequency (UHF) band. Applications were filed by the Empire Coil Company and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod for the channel, with the latter receiving the construction permit in February 1953 after Empire Coil withdrew. The church planned to run KFUO-TV as a noncommercial station in conjunction with its existing radio station. While it initially planned an early 1954 start, the station project was said to still be in consideration by February 1954, and the church surrendered the permit for cancellation in January 1956 after finding the potential for a UHF station poor.

In September 1956, the Plaza Radio and Television Company of New York applied for channel 30. Plaza also applied for authority to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming using the proposed station. The FCC indicated it would need to hold hearings to determine whether the channel should be awarded, even though no other group was seeking channel 30, because Plaza held but was not using a permit for channel 26 in San Francisco. This application and another for a station in Detroit were dismissed by the FCC in September 1958.

Pre-construction
For the third time, channel 30 in St. Louis was sought when Washington, D.C.–based Globe Television Corporation filed to build the station in June 1964. The two leading stockholders in Globe were lawyers: Vincent B. Welch and Edward P. Morgan of the Washington firm of Welch, Mott & Morgan. Welch had founded the communications law firm in 1946, and Welch and Morgan were applying for new television stations nationwide, including Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Henderson, Nevada. The Welch–Morgan group was awarded the St. Louis permit and stations in Miami and San Jose, California, in October 1964. Globe Television renamed itself the Continental Summit Television Corporation after the permit was awarded; in June 1965, the company requested an extension of time to build. It stated that the Missouri Pacific Building, its intended transmitter site, was inadequate, as downtown office buildings interfered with the signal in the Illinois portion of the metropolitan area. It also requested that its application be switched from channel 30 to 24, which was inserted as part of a national overhaul of the UHF table of allocations that year.

Boyd Fellows, the former general manager of educational station KETC and assistant to the president of Continental, then left that company to become the president of a new firm seeking channel 30, the Greater St. Louis Television Corporation. Other officers included a Black dentist, Dr. Benjamin F. Davis, and a Washington attorney, John Dean; his then-wife, Karla Hennings, was also a stockholder. Dean had participated in the formation of Greater St. Louis Television Corporation in January, while he was still employed by Welch & Morgan; when the firm found out about the work, it dismissed Dean for what Welch called "unethical conduct". Though characterizations of his dismissal varied, one former associate told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was ordered to leave immediately and not given time to pack up his belongings. This story came to light during the Watergate hearings, during which Dean was a crucial witness as to the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, and was first reported by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

The Greater St. Louis Television Corporation received the construction permit for channel 30 on June 7, 1966, and took the call sign KDNL-TV on August 17.

Evans Broadcasting ownership
Citing "unanticipated difficulties and unexpected changed circumstances", the stockholders of Greater St. Louis Television Corporation filed in April 1968 to sell the construction permit to financier Thomas Mellon Evans. The transfer was granted by the FCC in late July. At the time, Evans was in the middle of a push into UHF television, buying dormant construction permits for stations from Dallas to Worcester, Massachusetts.

Under Evans, construction activity finally commenced. The former studios of KMOX-TV at 13th and Cole streets were acquired to house channel 30, while the station was approved to build a tower in Shrewsbury, on land that was part of the Kenrick Seminary of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. In April, a 1100 ft mast began rising on the site.

KDNL-TV debuted on June 8, 1969. Its program schedule was dominated by syndicated reruns of former network shows as well as a daytime financial news program, TV 30 Financial Observer. Channel 30 was the first station built by the newly formed Evans Broadcasting Corporation, which had plans to start activating additional stations. KDNL-TV trailed the established independent station in the St. Louis market, KPLR-TV, and had less than half of its audience share as of July 1972.

In 1977, KDNL added coverage of St. Louis Blues hockey road games, which aired through the 1980–81 season; after that, the games moved to KSDK (channel 5).

Evans made one attempt at expanding the reach of KDNL-TV deeper into Illinois. In June 1979, a subsidiary company, Southern Illinois Broadcasting Corporation, was granted the permit to build channel 13 at Mount Vernon, Illinois, for which it had filed two years prior. However, the Evans proposal attracted protests from southern Illinois residents who feared the channel would merely be used to rebroadcast KDNL-TV programming and wanted to see a full-fledged local station for their area. A farmer in Salem, Illinois, went as far as to refuse to lease her land for transmitter site construction when she learned of Evans's plans for channel 13. Though Evans had secured another site and even shipped the 1000 ft tower to Salem to be erected, the FCC responded to the residents' concerns by rescinding the permit grant in November 1979. In February 1980, citing the potential for years of litigation, it withdrew its attempt to build channel 13.

In April 1976, Evans Broadcasting applied for authority to broadcast over-the-air subscription television (STV) programming using KDNL-TV. The application languished because another company, Midwest St. Louis, had filed for channel 24 and proposed the same type of programming, and at the time the FCC only permitted one STV station per market. Despite that, the possibility of reaching the large, then-uncabled St. Louis market with pay TV programming excited interest from buyers in the STV space. Time Inc., which through its American Television and Communications unit had cable and pay TV operations, entered into negotiations to purchase the station from Evans. Evans reached an agreement to sell the station to Buford Television, a Texas company in the process of moving into subscription programming with stations such as WBTI in Cincinnati, in September 1979. With that sale pending, in February 1980, the FCC granted subscription authority to KDNL-TV. Though the FCC granted the Buford deal on April 30, the agreement was withdrawn on May 8.

Cox Broadcasting ownership
Evans announced in March 1981 that he had sold KDNL-TV for $13.2 million to Cox Broadcasting, which at the time owned no UHF stations and only one independent, KTVU in Oakland, California. Upon completing the purchase in January 1982, Cox announced its plans to debut subscription television service on the station later in the year, once it had acquired sufficient equipment and personnel to handle the new operation. Cox Broadcasting president William A. Schwartz believed that the service could be viable even if just 15 to 20 percent of residents signed up for it, citing the large market and relatively low cable penetration. Beginning on June 1, 1982, KDNL-TV replaced its prime time and late night lineup with Preview, a subscription service featuring first-run movies and late night adult programming. Subscribers paid $24.90 a month plus a $49.95 installation fee.

Preview failed in St. Louis due to poor economic conditions and a lack of sports rights (though seven St. Louis Cardinals baseball games were telecast ), in addition to a faster-than-anticipated wiring of the area for cable. In October, the company began aggressively discounting installation fees for new subscribers, causing it to lose money for every subscriber that signed up for Preview. Amid losses estimated at $100,000 a month and with just 10,000 households signed up, Cox announced in December 1982 that it would cease subscription television service on February 28, 1983. The Preview operation also hurt the station's ability to sell commercial advertising; advertisers were put off by the lost ad inventory and adult programming. Michael S. Kievman told a panel at the 1983 conference of the Association of Independent Television Stations (INTV) that he had received comments like "No one watches you, you're not really a TV station."

Emerging from Preview, Cox invested $2 million in updating the station's facilities. Blues hockey returned to the station, though it moved to KPLR-TV in 1986. KDNL-TV became a charter affiliate of Fox at its launch in October 1986. However, at the outset, Fox programming was little help for the station, which in May 1987 was tying KETC in the critical early evening period and was being beaten by KPLR by a factor of six-to-one. The network's flagging The Late Show with Joan Rivers was pulled from KDNL-TV's schedule two months before its cancellation.

Building a media group
In the fall of 1988, two former senior executives of KPLR-TV owner Koplar Communications—Barry Baker and Larry Marcus—formed Better Communications Inc. to acquire television and radio stations. They first offered to buy KPLR-TV and were then fired by company president Ted Koplar. Instead, their first purchase was KDNL, acquired from Cox. In selling channel 30, Cox Broadcasting president Stanley G. Mouse noted that the station "[did] not fit the profile of our other television stations", which included five network affiliates plus two independents in larger markets (KTVU and WKBD-TV in Detroit), all of which broadcast local news; another Cox source noted that the station had been a money-loser for Cox, in part because of the failed Preview service in 1982–1983. At the time of the purchase, KDNL had a total sign-on to sign-off share of five percent, trailing KPLR at 11 percent.

For Barry and Marcus, the purchase of KDNL-TV was the first act in the construction of a broadcasting group. In May 1989, a deal was struck to acquire KABB, an independent station in San Antonio, Texas, under the name River City Television Partners, which came to represent the entire group. The firm then expanded into radio broadcasting when it acquired St. Louis radio station KSTZ out of bankruptcy in 1990. River City changed the call letters and branded the station as "The Fox", a complement to his Fox affiliate. With the addition of the radio station, the company became River City Broadcasting (RCB).

KDNL finally took flight under River City ownership. Within a year, aided in part by the introduction of meters to measure ratings, the station doubled its total-day audience share from five to eleven percent, narrowly behind KPLR, as well as its revenue. By December 1993, it was the fourth highest-rated Fox affiliate in the nation, with an intensive focus on children's programming, counterprogramming the other stations, and Fox network programming. The 1994 edition of its Fox 30 Kids Fair, featuring guest appearances by two Power Rangers, attracted more than 50,000 attendees.

In February 1994, River City announced it would take the next step in growing KDNL-TV by starting a local half-hour 9 p.m. newscast to air beginning in early 1995. General manager Gregg Filandrinos credited the decision to start a newscast to Fox's acquisition of National Football League television rights. Renovation work estimated at more than $3 million began later that year to add news facilities to the channel 30 studios.

Affiliation switch to ABC and launch of local news
The arrival of NFL football to Fox, however, also triggered a massive realignment in television station affiliations which began in earnest on May 23, 1994, when New World Communications announced it would switch 12 of its stations affiliated with ABC, CBS, and NBC to Fox. Included were three stations New World had just agreed to acquire from Argyle Television, including KTVI, the then-ABC affiliate in St. Louis. With KTVI switching to Fox, the ABC affiliation was now open. KSDK and KMOV, the two strongest stations in the market, both were in long-term agreements with their respective networks. This left two primary contenders: KPLR and KDNL, plus home shopping station WHSL (channel 46). Though KPLR was the stronger-rated independent and a VHF station unlike KDNL, it was heavily committed to sports with contracts for Cardinals baseball and Blues hockey games that would lead to significant preemptions of network prime time programming, and it had also signed on to affiliate with The WB when it launched in 1995. The sports preemptions hurt KPLR in its negotiations with ABC.

On August 26, 1994, ABC announced that KDNL-TV would become its St. Louis affiliate beginning in mid-1995. Once that took place, KDNL-TV planned to scale up its nascent news operation to a level befitting a "Big Three" affiliate. The already-planned 9 p.m. newscast would shift to 10 p.m. and be joined by new 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts. The agreement was concurrent with a renewal for two of the three ABC stations River City was buying at the time: WSYX-TV in Columbus, Ohio, and WLOS in Asheville, North Carolina. The third station, KOVR in Sacramento, California, was excluded because it was losing its ABC affiliation to a station owned by the Belo Corporation.

In its last months with Fox, on January 1, 1995, KDNL began airing a 9 p.m. newscast, News 30 Now. It was the first new television newsroom in St. Louis since KPLR went on the air in 1959 and heavily relied on talent from elsewhere. Of the station's anchors and reporters, only one was already working in the market—the station's public affairs director, who doubled as the weekend anchor. The on-air talent came from stations as far away as Winnipeg, Orlando, and Spokane, Washington. Unlike other startup newsrooms of the period at Fox affiliates, KDNL shied away from an offbeat, edgy style in favor of a more straightforward news presentation.

In addition, KDNL began airing Star Trek: Voyager in overnight hours in 1995 after becoming a secondary affiliate of UPN. KDNL dropped UPN programming in January 1998, leaving the network without a St. Louis affiliate until 1999, when Christian station KNLC briefly began airing some of its programming.

KDNL-TV became the new ABC affiliate in St. Louis on August 7, 1995, with its level of network programming increasing from 35 to 85 hours a week. KDNL aired all ABC programming that KTVI had aired but maintained KTVI's preemption of the soap opera Loving. Fox Kids programming did not immediately move to KTVI; KNLC stepped in to pick up the shows, but issues over signal quality and replacement of commercials with public service announcements (including urging children to protest an execution), plus the size of the Fox Kids Club in St. Louis, the nation's largest, resulted in the children's block moving to KTVI in September 1996.

Immediately upon the switch, News 30 moved from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. and debuted a 6 p.m. edition. The station also signed Don Marsh, a veteran St. Louis news anchor who had left KTVI the year before, to anchor its newscasts.

Purchase of River City
On April 11, 1996, River City announced that it would merge with the Sinclair Broadcast Group for $2.3 billion, creating a company with 29 television and 34 radio stations nationwide. Barry Baker relocated to Baltimore, where Sinclair is headquartered, and remained with the combined company as the president and chief executive officer of its broadcasting division. At the time, KDNL-TV was unsettled in senior management. Original news director Gary Whitaker had left to run a TV station in Springfield, Missouri; the general manager then resigned to produce a syndicated talk show. Channel 30 was described by insiders as adrift, poorly rated, and with low morale in the newsroom. Its 10 p.m. newscast was well behind third-place KTVI. Sinclair continued to expand the former River City cluster in St. Louis by adding three radio stations being spun off by Heritage Media in 1997.

However, KDNL-TV's news efforts gained little traction and were plagued by high turnover as well as a reputation for sensationalized reporting. Tripp Frohlichstein, writing in the St. Louis Journalism Review, found the news department insufficiently staffed and the anchor team lacking chemistry; of the station's two daily newscasts, he wrote that KDNL-TV "gives the impression that it is not serious about the news". Don Marsh left the television news business in August 1998 when he failed to come to terms with Sinclair on a contract renewal; he was replaced by Patrick Emory, who had worked for CNN as well as KMOV-TV and KSDK. The other main anchor, Leslie Lyles—who had been with the station since the news department started—exited in 1999 and returned to Charleston, South Carolina, where she had been working prior to joining the KDNL news team. The station had three news directors in less than three and a half years, one of them—David Cohen—resigning in the wake of a racist joke he made at a news meeting. He told a Black reporter proposing a story on heart disease that "anyone who eats fried chicken and mashed potatoes is going to have heart disease". Gail Pennington of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch would later comment that the constant changes in on-air personnel were anathema to viewers, noting that "St. Louis doesn't like change." Frohlichstein concurred, writing, "More than most cities, St. Louis viewers stick with what they know."

Emmis option dispute
In February 1999, Barry Baker quit his position at Sinclair, where he was the "heir apparent" to company president David D. Smith, to become the president and chief operating officer of USA Networks. His employment agreement with Sinclair gave him the option to buy back Sinclair's media properties in one of two markets—St. Louis or Greenville, South Carolina—if exercised before August 8, 1999. In June, Baker transferred the option agreement to Emmis Communications, an Indianapolis-based radio and television station group that already owned three St. Louis radio stations, which then proceeded to attempt to exercise the agreement to purchase KDNL-TV and Sinclair's six local radio stations.

The manner in which the option agreement was transferred and executed instead led to a legal fight. In January 2000, Sinclair sued Emmis and Baker in its home state of Maryland and charged that the proposed buyer had no rights to acquire the stations, saying the option was too vague to take effect and was not designed to allow a party other than Baker to purchase them. In the lawsuit, Sinclair noted that Emmis asked Sinclair to pay millions of dollars to replace KDNL's transmitter and in employee severance costs, as well as to assign its ABC affiliation agreement unchanged to Emmis. The lawsuit was read by one Wall Street analyst as a stalling tactic to allow it to keep the cash flow from the radio stations for as long as possible before selling them. Two months later, Baker and Emmis filed a countersuit against Sinclair, accusing Sinclair of interfering with their agreement and engaging in "gross mismanagement" of the St. Louis stations. In June, Sinclair and Emmis settled the legal actions; Sinclair retained KDNL-TV and sold the St. Louis radio stations, the last ones it owned, to Emmis for $220 million.

The effect of the option agreement dispute was to leave KDNL-TV in a state of limbo and neglect for a year. Maintenance of the station's equipment fell off, and after a late 1999 fire affecting the transmission line on its Shrewsbury mast, the transmitter repeatedly failed, forcing KDNL off the air. Because of this and work to install KDNL's digital signal, which signed on January 2, 2001, the station operated on severely reduced power, leaving many non-cable homes without KDNL or ABC programming. The news department downsized from 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts, having abandoned the 6 p.m. timeslot in 1996, to just the 10 p.m. edition. While the early report was reinstated in December 2000, it could not regain the viewers it had, with more than twice as many St. Louis-area households watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch on KPLR-TV. Despite this turmoil, KDNL shocked industry observers by winning the regional Emmy Award for best large-market newscast.

Discontinuation of local news
On September 28, 2001, KDNL-TV general manager Tom Tipton informed the staff and the public that the station would cease airing local news on October 12, laying off all 47 staffers in its newsroom. Tipton cited "the increased competitive landscape and current market conditions" that "made it increasingly difficult to operate a competitive news operation". Other factors included a negative jolt to advertising revenue compounded by the September 11 attacks and financial trouble within Sinclair itself. At the time, Sinclair was closing down some of its underperforming news departments across the country. In November 2000, it shut down the newsroom at WTWC-TV in Tallahassee, Florida; it also had cut back the newsroom at WXLV-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before closing it altogether in January 2002. As a result of closing its news department, KDNL-TV became the only Big Four-affiliated station in the 25 largest media markets in the United States not to offer any local news.

Sinclair once again tried to sell the station in June 2002 as part of the company's eventually aborted attempt to sell all seven of its ABC-affiliated stations to focus on its Fox and WB stations.

Even without local news, KDNL has largely been among the weakest affiliates of ABC since switching to the network and generally ranks fifth in total ratings. The network's difficulty in St. Louis was not new: the market had always been an underperformer for the network, even when KTVI was the affiliate, though NBC and CBS had higher-than-average viewership.

In 2017, Sinclair entered into an agreement to acquire Tribune Media, owner of KTVI and KPLR. The two stations were in the top four in ratings, but KDNL was not; Sinclair proposed to own KTVI and KDNL while providing services to KPLR. In February 2018, it amended its proposal to specify a spin-off of KPLR to an independent buyer. On April 24, 2018, the Meredith Corporation, owner of KMOV, announced that it would purchase KPLR-TV for $65 million; the bid was soon scratched amid objections by the Department of Justice, with Sinclair instead proposing to sell KPLR to a divestiture trust. The larger Sinclair–Tribune deal never progressed; after the FCC designated it for hearing by an administrative law judge, Tribune called off the deal and sued Sinclair in August 2018.

News share agreement with KSDK (2011–2014)
On January 3, 2011, NBC affiliate KSDK began producing weeknight 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts for KDNL through a news share agreement. The newscasts, known as STL Now on ABC 30, were produced at KSDK's Market Street studios in Downtown St. Louis and required the hiring of additional personnel. KDNL general manager Tom Tipton stated that the station did not want to run simulcast or repurposed newscasts in its efforts to return daily news broadcasts to the station. The KSDK-produced newscasts on KDNL were pre-taped in advance. There was no sports report featured during the program. The news share agreement between the two stations was quite unusual given the rarity of a Big Three network affiliate producing newscasts for another Big Three station. In this case, KDNL and KSDK competed against one another in both timeslots. Although KDNL only aired local news programming on weekdays, the station did air replays of KSDK's entertainment/features program Show Me St. Louis on weekends. The agreement with KSDK was to end on December 31, 2013, but it continued into January 2014.

The Allman Report (2014–2018)
On February 10, 2014, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the station intended to restart an in-house news department, with 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts slated to be anchored by KFTK (97.1 FM) morning host and former KMOV reporter Jamie Allman. On November 24, 2014, KDNL officially announced that it would launch its new news program, The Allman Report, in January 2015. KDNL and Allman described the program as an extension of his radio show, with a conservative, "debate-driven format" that focused on local headlines and issues. The Allman Report originated from the studios of Pelopidas in Brentwood rather than from KDNL's facilities.

The program continued until April 9, 2018, when it was canceled by KDNL amid calls for a viewer and advertiser boycott. The cancellation took place two weeks after Allman tweeted a message alluding to him wanting to assault 17-year-old David Hogg, a student who was on campus at the time of the Parkland high school shooting, by sodomizing him with a heated fire poker for his gun control activism. Allman was fired from KFTK and took his Twitter account private. Allman was later re-hired by Salem Media Group-owned radio station KXFN in February 2019, though the program was short-lived after KXFN's sale to Relevant Radio, which converted it to a Spanish-language Catholic talk format in the fall of the same year. After converting his show to a self-distributed podcast, he now hosts mornings on KTLK-FM (104.9) after iHeartMedia converted that station to a conservative talk format in August 2021.

Local programming
KDNL-TV's local programming, as of June 2023, includes City Corner, a weekly public affairs program; a selection of St. Louis-area church services; and Them Yo People, a man-on-the-street interview program produced in St. Louis and also aired in other nearby markets.

Subchannels
The station's signal is multiplexed: {{legend|#DFEBF6|Broadcast on behalf of another station}}

Analog-to-digital conversion
KDNL-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 30, on February 17, 2009, the original date on which full-power television stations in the United States were scheduled to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (the official date was pushed back to June 12). The station's digital signal continued to broadcast on its pre-transition UHF channel 31, using virtual channel 30.

title: KDNL-TV


text:
WUTV

WUTV (channel 29) is a television station in Buffalo, New York, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate WNYO-TV (channel 49). The two stations share studios on Hertel Avenue near Military Road in Buffalo; WUTV's transmitter is located on Whitehaven Road (near I-190) in Grand Island, New York, behind its former main studio building.

Since February 2008, WUTV serves as the Fox network feed received in the Cayman Islands. It joined the Primetime 24 lineup in 2009, serving most of the Caribbean islands. The station is also broadcast in parts of Canada, in particular throughout the adjacent Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario, including the Greater Toronto Area.

History
WUTV signed on the air on December 21, 1970, as a general entertainment independent station, and its original studios were located at the transmitter site in Grand Island, New York. The station was owned by Ultravision Broadcasting Company, from which the "UTV" in the WUTV callsign originates. Ultravision was owned by Stan Jasinski, who had first applied for the station's license in 1963 and also owned Buffalo's WMMJ (1300 AM) at the time; shortly thereafter, Jasinski spun off WMMJ to country musician Ramblin' Lou Schriver, who turned it into present-day WXRL. The WUTV call sign was originally to be used for a station on VHF channel 3 in Indianapolis, Indiana, under the ownership of department store William H. Block Co., which never went on the air; the call sign was later issued to another station in Youngstown, Ohio, with a construction permit on channel 21 that also never launched, with NBC affiliate WFMJ-TV purchasing that permit and moving from channel 73 to the channel 21 allocation that the Youngstown WUTV permit was originally intended to broadcast on.

WUTV was the only independent station in Buffalo for many years; its schedule included cartoons (such as Astro Boy and Yogi Bear), sitcoms (such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Patty Duke Show, and The Munsters), and sci-fi shows (such as Lost in Space, Ultraman, The Invaders and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea), along with classic movies and drama series. It was the first commercially successful UHF station in Western New York; previous efforts on the UHF dial, including WBES-TV (channel 59), WBUF-TV (channel 17), and WNYP-TV (channel 26) all had failed within a few years of their debuts. Ultravision Broadcasting sold the station to Whitehaven Entertainment Corporation in 1977. The station was acquired by Citadel Communications, a Bronxville-based company not related to the larger radio station owner Citadel Broadcasting, in 1984.

On October 9, 1986, WUTV became one of the original charter affiliates of the newly launched Fox network. At the time, Fox only aired late-night programming five days a week, so WUTV was still essentially programmed as an independent station. However, by 1989, WUTV was one of several Fox affiliates nationwide that were disappointed with the network's weak prime time programming offerings, particularly on Saturday nights, which were bogging down WUTV's otherwise successful lineup. Fox then signed an agreement with WNYB-TV (channel 49, now WNYO-TV) to become its new Buffalo affiliate, and WUTV reverted to being an independent station full-time, effective September 1, 1989.

Ahead of the disaffiliation from Fox, Act III Broadcasting (a company controlled by Norman Lear) offered to buy WUTV, and Citadel accepted. This proceeded by a duopoly waiver from WUHF in Rochester, citing cross-ownership, which was normally not allowed by the FCC, and regularly did not allow a waiver in the process, until 2000 (Act III did apply for a waiver for the station). The sale was finalized in June 1990, and Lear moved WNYB-TV's stronger programming to WUTV, in turn bringing the Fox affiliation back to the station. The Buffalo Sabres, who held a minority stake in the new WUTV, which was then sold WNYB-TV to Tri-State Christian Television (Act III was known for such acquisition practices).

On January 16, 1995, WUTV became a secondary affiliate of the upstart United Paramount Network (the UPN affiliation subsequently moved to WNGS (channel 67, now WBBZ-TV) in April 1998, with WONS (channel 21, WVTT-CD) simulcasting WNGS the following year, and then to WNLO (channel 23) in 2003). Later that year, ABRY Partners purchased WUTV and the rest of the Act III Broadcasting stations; the group was then renamed Sullivan Broadcasting. Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired WUTV as part of its purchase of Sullivan in 1998; Sinclair then bought WNYO-TV in 2001, creating a duopoly with WUTV.

Since the 1994 NFL season, WUTV has aired Buffalo Bills games via the NFL on Fox; they are given at least two games a season to air, usually when the team plays host to an NFC team at Highmark Stadium; although the station has seen more games aired since 2014 when the NFL instituted cross-flex rules, meaning that games can be arbitrarily moved to the station from WIVB, which airs most of the team's games.

After Sinclair came to a retransmission consent agreement in February 2007 nationally with Time Warner Cable, WUTV and WNYO-TV's high definition feeds began to be carried locally by the provider. WUTV's HD feed was not available on the region's other cable provider, Atlantic Broadband, until 2012. The Time Warner Cable agreement was to expire at the end of 2010, and the two companies were late in reaching an agreement. In the event Sinclair had pulled WUTV from TWC, a separate agreement allows Fox programming to be piped in from out of market (likely involving Nexstar Media Group, whose stations have been used as out-of-market superstations in the past to temporarily replace in-market network affiliates displaced due to carriage disputes). This made WUTV particularly vulnerable to a prolonged blackout. It does not produce any local content, serving mostly as a "pass-through" for automated programming. Much of its syndicated programming could be seen on other cable channels (such as TBS, WGN and TVGN), and much of its daytime programming consisted of infomercials. The dispute was resolved without a blackout. On May 15, 2012, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox agreed to a five-year extension to the network's affiliation agreement with Sinclair's 19 Fox stations, including WUTV, allowing them to continue carrying the network's programming until 2017. Grit was added to a subchannel in October–November 2014.

The second subchannel was affiliated with The Country Network until early 2017 when it was announced to be switching over to TBD. On June 1, 2017, both digital subchannels were replaced, 29.2 with the previously announced TBD and 29.3 with Charge!.

Newscasts
Until 2013, WUTV did not air news programming, making Buffalo the largest television market in the United States whose Fox affiliate did not offer any newscasts at all (Sinclair is believed to have paid a large fee to Fox to avoid the network's mandate that its affiliates carry local news). The station long opted to air syndicated programming instead of carrying news programming, as it is within range of the Toronto market and features advertising targeted at Southern Ontario viewers, along with the large number of stations within the Buffalo market and those receivable in the market from Hamilton and Toronto that already produce local newscasts.

This lack of local news programming ended on April 8, 2013, as the 10 p.m. newscast produced by NBC affiliate WGRZ channel 2 moved from WNYO-TV to WUTV. Along with the move, it was expanded to seven nights per-week, and the station also announced plans to air an encore of the final hour of WGRZ's morning show on a one-hour delay. These moves were part of an effort to better compete against the WIVB-produced newscasts in the same timeslots on CW affiliate WNLO—both of which have been historically more successful even though WGRZ has surpassed WIVB in most of its main newscasts. Under the terms of the agreement to carry WGRZ's newscasts on WUTV, Sinclair had no editorial control over the newscasts. In addition to carrying WGRZ's newscasts, WHAM-TV meteorologists provide Fox 29 Weather Updates between programs.

In March 2021, WUTV established a studio to produce content for Sinclair's national news programming, such as The National Desk. The station does not produce long-form news programming from this studio and continued to carry the WGRZ-produced program in the meantime.

On July 1, 2021, WUTV introduced a new in-house newscast; it used resources from other Sinclair-owned stations in the state of New York, with its anchors based out of WSTM-TV in Syracuse and its weather and sports segments produced from WHAM-TV in Rochester. The program failed to make much of a ratings impression; in the November 2022 sweeps period, the WIVB–WNLO newscast attracted four times as many viewers. As a result, Sinclair discontinued it effective January 27, 2023, with Sinclair's national news service, The National Desk, airing in its stead. Four people lost their jobs: a news director, two reporters, and a photographer.

Notable former on-air staff

 * Mike Catalana – sports director (2021–23)
 * Maryalice Demler – weeknights at 10 p.m.
 * Kevin O'Connell – chief weather anchor (fired in 2018 due to an endorsement dispute)

Subchannels
The station's signal is multiplexed: {{legend|#DFEBF6|Broadcast on behalf of another station}}

Analog-to-digital conversion
WUTV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 29, at 11:59 p.m. on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later moved to June 12); this made WUTV the first television station in Buffalo to switch to digital. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 14, using virtual channel 29.

As part of the SAFER Act, WUTV kept its analog signal on the air until March 3, 2009, to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters. WUTV, along with PBS member station WNED-TV (channel 17) were the only Buffalo television stations that did not terminate their analog signals on the new June 12 date.

Canadian coverage
Up until 2003, Rogers Cable carried WUTV in Ottawa and London, Ontario; that year, Rogers replaced WUTV with Detroit owned-and-operated station WJBK as the Fox station available in these markets. The reason for the switch in Ottawa was twofold. The main reason was that MCI, the company which microwaved U.S. network television signals to Ottawa from Rochester, had decided to discontinue this service (until 2003, the ABC, NBC, and CBS stations available in Ottawa had originated from Rochester). Secondly, Rogers chose Detroit as the new source for U.S. television network signals because Canadian broadcasters were concerned about the increased Canadian advertising revenues that Buffalo stations would attract, were they to receive an expanded viewing audience across Ontario. Since Detroit (which like Buffalo, is located adjacent to a Canadian media market) is a much larger market than either Buffalo or Rochester, advertising prices would be much higher and it would therefore not be economical for Canadian businesses to purchase advertising time on such stations.

Although WUTV was the Fox affiliate available in Ottawa, Rogers decided to switch to WJBK in order to ensure uniformity in the source cities for all U.S. network television signals. Rogers switched to WJBK in the London market because the signal for the CBS affiliate available in London, WSEE-TV (out of Erie, Pennsylvania) was of lower quality than that of Detroit's CBS station, WWJ-TV. Hence, Rogers' London system switched from WSEE-TV to WWJ-TV and, as in Ottawa, decided to switch its Fox affiliate from WUTV to WJBK for source city uniformity for the U.S. network signals. Rogers continues to carry WUTV in both standard and high definition for customers in the Golden Horseshoe, including Toronto.

Cogeco Cable carries WUTV in standard definition for its customers in the Golden Horseshoe, but carries WJBK in high definition. For many years, WUTV was carried on cable in Quebec as far east as Gaspe, and was once carried on cable in Montreal and Montérégie until 1997, when Vidéotron replaced WUTV with WFFF-TV in Burlington, Vermont (the Fox station that signed on the air at the time). Originally, its sister station in Rochester, WUHF, was carried on cable in the Western Montreal suburbs during 1995. Those stations were the first Fox stations to be carried on cable in Montreal. It also returned temporarily when WFFF-TV was off the air for a brief time in the mid-2000s. WUTV was also carried via microwave on cable systems in Central New York, including the towns of Sullivan and Chittenango in the mid 1970s.

Because of its Canadian coverage, the station plays the respective American and Canadian national anthems "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "O Canada" and a display of both countries' national flags during its sign-off for maintenance on early Monday mornings between 3 and 5 a.m.

title: WUTV


text:
WNYO-TV

WNYO-TV (channel 49) is a television station in Buffalo, New York, United States, affiliated with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Fox affiliate WUTV (channel 29). The two stations share studios on Hertel Avenue near Military Road in Buffalo; WNYO-TV's transmitter is located on Whitehaven Road (near I-190) in Grand Island, New York.

The construction permit for channel 49 was issued in 1984 and changed hands twice before the station went on the air on September 1, 1987, as WNYB-TV. While TVX Broadcast Group handled much of the station's construction, the company made another purchase that forced it to sell the unbuilt WNYB-TV to remain under national ownership limits. Channel 49's first owner was Aud Enterprises, a division of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team; channel 49 aired Sabres road games and served as the Fox affiliate from 1989 to 1990. It also lost an average of $1 million a year. In 1990, under a deal brokered the previous year, the Sabres games, Fox programming, and syndicated shows on WNYB-TV moved to WUTV, with Tri-State Christian Television (TCT) buying channel 49 to broadcast Christian programming.

TCT sold WNYB-TV to Grant Broadcasting in 1996; the deal included TCT's acquisition of a dormant station on channel 26 in Jamestown, which became the new WNYB. In October 1996, Grant relaunched channel 49 as WNYO-TV, the Buffalo affiliate of The WB. Sinclair purchased the station in 2000, forming a duopoly with WUTV. The station produced its own local newscast from 2004 to 2006 as part of Sinclair's News Central service and then aired local news programming produced by Buffalo NBC affiliate WGRZ from 2006 to 2013. WNYO-TV is Buffalo's ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) station; in reciprocal arrangements, other Buffalo TV stations broadcast its subchannels on its behalf while it carries them in the new format.

History
Channel 49 was added to Buffalo in lieu of channel 76 in February 1966 as part of a national overhaul of UHF channel allocations. The Beta Television Corporation obtained the construction permit that June, but despite attempts to sell the permit to Evans Broadcasting Corporation and New York City's WPIX, as well as a call sign change from WBAU-TV to WBBU-TV, the construction permit was deleted in January 1971.

Permitting
In 1979, interest coalesced again around channel 49, with applicants investigating the possibility of building a station to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming to paying customers. The first formal application filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came from Anax Corporation in June. A group of California investors doing business as the Great Erie County Telecasting Corporation made its application in October, followed by Channel 49 Buffalo Television, owned by an investor consortium from Baltimore, the minority-owned Unific Broadcasting Company, and Bison City Television 49, whose principals were primarily from St. Louis.

In 1981, the FCC designated the applications for comparative hearing; an FCC administrative law judge initially dismissed Bison City's application because of a failure to establish ownership, but the company successfully appealed. The field thinned considerably when Unific settled with Anax, Great Erie County, and Channel 49 Buffalo Television at the start of the hearing, leaving Unific and Bison City the only contenders for the permit. While Unific believed its local ownership and proposal to feature programming for the Black community in Buffalo made it a superior applicant, administrative law judge Walter C. Miller selected Bison City over Unific; the primary reason was that the latter company had asked for four amendments to its financial qualifications due to an inability to secure financing.

Bison City made some progress at building channel 49; it attempted to secure financing to go on air in 1984, and it even purchased some syndicated programs for the station to air. In 1985, the station secured a tower site in Colden over the objections of some local residents, and Bison City engaged the services of Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to build the facilities on its behalf, with the call sign WNYB-TV selected.

TVX: ownership but not operation
Lacking the financial resources to build the station, Bison City sold 80 percent interest in the WNYB construction permit to TVX Broadcast Group, a chain of independent TV stations, in 1985. TVX proceeded with construction, but a change in its business plan put the station on hold. In November 1986, TVX acquired five major-market independents from Taft Broadcasting. Including the under-construction WNYB-TV but excluding WNRW-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which it was selling, TVX already owned eight stations; the Taft deal put TVX one station over the 12-station limit of the time. TVX announced its intention to sell the WNYB-TV construction permit.

In May 1987, TVX reached a deal to sell WNYB-TV to a subsidiary of the First Allied Corporation, owned by Malcolm Glazer of Rochester. First Allied, in turn, announced that WNYB-TV would begin broadcasting on July 1 from the under-construction studios on Hertel Avenue. However, by late June, the sale to First Allied had fallen through, and the start of the station had been delayed until September to align with the start of the new television season as well as contracts for much of the new outlet's programming.

Sabres ownership
Needing to dispose of a ready-to-operate television station, TVX reportedly approached the Buffalo Sabres, the city's National Hockey League (NHL) franchise, among other groups. By then, the Sabres were the only U.S.-based NHL team whose games still aired on a major network affiliate—NBC affiliate WGRZ (channel 2). Although WGRZ had been the television home of the Sabres for a decade, its interest in renewing the contract waned because it had to preempt NBC programming for Sabres games. The Sabres formed Aud Enterprises (named for Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, popularly known as "the Aud") as a subsidiary to buy WNYB-TV; the purchase was announced on July 20, 1987. While WGRZ nominally had the right to match channel 49's offer to air the Sabres, the franchise deliberately made it difficult for channel 2 to do so by announcing plans to increase the number of televised games from 24 to 29. This cleared the way for the Sabres to effectively take their local telecasts in-house.

Even though Citadel Communications, owner of competing independent WUTV, alleged that Robert E. Rich Jr.'s minority ownership in the Sabres and two Buffalo radio stations violated cross-ownership rules, the FCC discarded Citadel's complaint and approved the transfer to Aud Enterprises on September 1, 1987. That evening, WNYB-TV broadcast for the first time. The deal formally closed in early November. The $4.63 million purchase price represented the value of the property, as construction permits could not be sold at a profit under FCC regulation. In addition to syndicated reruns and movies, as well as the Sabres, WNYB-TV aired broadcasts of Buffalo Bisons minor-league baseball games.

Fox and WUTV had a falling out in 1989 over the performance of the network's programming in the Buffalo market. Fox contended that WUTV was underperforming other affiliates for its network programming. Another concern for WUTV was that CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, aired Fox programming as well. Channel 29 believed this caused unnecessary duplication because of the proximity of Hamilton to Buffalo and CHCH's presence on Buffalo-area cable systems. Additionally, CHCH was able to invoke simultaneous substitution of WUTV during Fox programs it carried, cutting into channel 29's ability to sell advertising to its large Canadian audience. Fox moved its programming to WNYB-TV effective September 1, 1989; it did not have the Canadian cable carriage of WUTV and did not depend financially on advertising revenue from Canada. This also left it far less financially lucrative; in two years of operation, WNYB-TV lost an average of $1 million a year, and from launch to April 1990, the team had lost $6 million on the station.

Consolidation with WUTV; sale to TCT
In August 1989, Act III Broadcasting moved to purchase WUTV from Citadel. However, it soon put the purchase on hold temporarily to negotiate a second acquisition: that of WNYB-TV's programming and facilities from the Sabres. Act III had pulled off a similar station consolidation the year before in Richmond, Virginia, when it bought WRLH-TV as well as the programming inventory of competitor WVRN-TV, which then shut down.

On August 29, 1989, Act III announced that it would buy WUTV along with WNYB-TV's programming and Fox affiliation, which would move to channel 29. Simultaneously, the Sabres announced that channel 49's transmitting facility would be sold to Tri-State Christian Television (TCT) of Marion, Illinois. In exchange, Sabres owners Seymour Knox and Robert Swados received equity in WUTV and would move their road games from channel 49 to channel 29, where they would have the exposure on Canadian cable systems that WNYB-TV had lacked since launching. The pair of deals would together reimburse the Sabres for their losses in running WNYB-TV. Approval of this set of transactions was not certain since Act III already owned WUHF in Rochester. Since both stations' signals overlapped in Orleans and Genesee counties, Act III could not buy it without an FCC waiver. In a letter seeking such a waiver, Act III billed the deal as a "consolidation" of WUTV and WNYB-TV. Act III argued that the Buffalo market could not support two independent stations due to its "fiercely competitive nature" and the difficulties of UHF broadcasting. It also faced objections from commercial stations WIVB-TV in Buffalo and WROC-TV in Rochester, as well as Stevens Media Services of Buffalo, which decried the monopolizing of the UHF television market and took issue with the overlap between the stations.

In June 1990, the FCC approved the WUTV sale to Act III, granting a one-year waiver to Act III to allow it to sell off WUHF; it had already granted the WNYB-TV sale to TCT in November 1989. WNYB-TV's programming, including Fox shows, was immediately merged onto WUTV's schedule, and TCT took over channel 49 on June 28, 1990, airing Christian ministry programming.

Grant ownership
The structure of the purchase of WNYB-TV by TCT incentivized Tri-State Christian Television to continue the station as a non-profit for five years by including a series of sliding scale payments to the Sabres that increased if the station began accepting commercial advertising or was sold to a commercial broadcaster. With the five years up, in December 1995, TCT made a deal with Grant Broadcasting. The deal would see Grant buy channel 49 from TCT, which would receive $12 million and the construction permit for WTJA in Jamestown, which had last broadcast in 1991.

Speculation immediately pointed to Grant using channel 49 to bring The WB to Buffalo, which was confirmed in June 1996. While TCT began the process of building a new physical plant to bring channel 26 back into service and moved the WNYB call letters there, Grant returned channel 49 to commercial broadcasting as WNYO-TV in October 1996. The Sabres also briefly returned to channel 49, airing a 10-game package simulcast from Empire Sports Network in the 1997–98 season. However, channel 49 could not live up to the O in its new call sign, for Ontario. The Sabres had made the deal in part because the station had hoped to be added to southern Ontario cable systems beginning in January 1998. However, that approval never came. In April 1998, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission denied permission for the companies to add WNYO-TV to their lineups, siding with Toronto stations in finding that the addition of another non-Canadian service would deprive Canadian broadcasters of revenue. Grant Broadcasting expanded its relationship with The WB in 1999, when it ceased airing its programming on Superstation WGN nationally, by obtaining WB secondary affiliations for three of the company's other stations.

Sinclair ownership
Grant Broadcasting sold WNYO-TV to Sinclair Broadcast Group—the descendant of the original Baltimore group that had sought the channel in 1979—for $51.5 million in 2000. The company had previously reportedly turned down an offer from Granite Broadcasting, owner of ABC affiliate WKBW-TV. This formed a duopoly with WUTV and came after Sinclair had previously backed out of a plan to acquire channel 23 in the city. Unlike with channel 23, in acquiring WNYO-TV, it received an existing station with a building, programming, and staff. The deal also allowed Sinclair to program channel 49 with shows it had purchased with the intent of airing them on channel 23.

In 2006, when The WB and UPN merged to form The CW, Sinclair first elected to affiliate with MyNetworkTV, a new network started by Fox Television Stations, over The CW. On March 2, ten days after the network's existence was announced on February 22, Sinclair affiliated 17 stations it owned or managed, including WNYO-TV, with the network.

Newscasts
In 2003, WNYO-TV announced it would begin airing a 10 p.m. local newscast utilizing Sinclair's hybrid News Central format; a local anchor read stories from Buffalo, while national news and weather were provided from Sinclair's corporate office in Hunt Valley, Maryland. The hour-long program debuted on August 16, 2004. The primary competition for the newscast was WNLO, which aired a newscast produced by WIVB-TV; WUTV, unlike most Fox affiliates, had not bothered to begin airing local news programming because it aired successful syndicated shows in the 10 p.m. hour. The station had toyed with airing such a program since 2000. The program was later shortened to 30 minutes.

In January 2006, Sinclair ended its standalone news operation at WPGH-TV in Pittsburgh and triggered speculation about the future of the WNYO-TV newscast. The program was then wound down at the end of March, and WGRZ began producing a new half-hour news and sports program for the station in late April. The half-hour consisted of two programs: 2 News on 49, a 10-minute local newscast recapping the day's top stories, and Western New York Sports Zone, a 20-minute in-depth sports show. The change brought only a slight improvement in local ratings. The sports portion was later downsized, which did lead to a ratings increase.

The WGRZ-produced newscast moved to sister station WUTV on April 8, 2013, trading places with the reruns of Seinfeld that had aired in that time slot on WUTV since the mid-1990s. WNYO-TV continued to air news programming, as a rebroadcast of the 6 a.m. hour of WGRZ's morning newscast aired weekdays at 7 a.m. on WNYO-TV, which began on April 8; plans called for this rebroadcast to also move to WUTV at some point in the future. WGRZ continued to produce the newscast for air on channel 29 until July 2021, when Sinclair opted to produce the newscast itself using presentation resources at co-owned stations in nearby markets.

National news and current affairs programming on the station consists of Sinclair-produced The National Desk and Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson as well as The Armstrong Williams Show.

Subchannels
The station's ATSC 1.0 channels are carried on the multiplexed signals of other Buffalo television stations:

Analog-to-digital conversion
WNYO-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 49, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 34 to channel 49.

ATSC 3.0 lighthouse
WNYO-TV is Buffalo's ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) lighthouse station and hosts itself and the Big Four stations in the market in that format. The station converted on March 22, 2021.

{{legend|#ffe8d0|Subchannel broadcast with digital rights management}} {{legend|#ffffd0|Subchannel streamed via the Internet }}

title: WNYO-TV


text:
WUHF

WUHF (channel 31) is a television station in Rochester, New York, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which provides certain services to dual ABC/CW affiliate WHAM-TV (channel 13) under a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Deerfield Media. The two stations share studios on West Henrietta Road (NY 15) in Henrietta (with a Rochester mailing address); WUHF's transmitter is located on Pinnacle Hill on the border between Rochester and Brighton.

History
WUHF began operations on January 27, 1980, as a general entertainment independent station running cartoons, sitcoms (classic and recent), movies, drama series, and religious programs. It was, at the time, the only independent station in the Rochester market.

The station was owned by Malrite and the General Manager was Jerry Carr who was the former The Weather Outside personality. Apparently, by sheer coincidence, the station re-used a call sign which was previously used by a different and unrelated station which operated on the same channel 31, albeit in New York City. The latter station had only used the WUHF calls for its first year of experimental operation (1961–62); it is now Ion Television owned-and-operated station WPXN-TV.

In 1983, former underground cartoonist Brian Bram produced and hosted All Night Live, a program aired live from midnight to 7 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Bram's show was a showcase for regional bands including Personal Effects, Cousin Al and the Relatives, and The Degrads. On October 9, 1986, WUHF became a charter affiliate of Fox for Rochester and was branded as "Fox 31". Most of the religious shows were gone by then. However, WUHF was initially still programmed as an independent station since Fox would only air one program, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers until April 1987, and even then, would not present an entire week's worth of programming until 1993. In 1989, Act III Broadcasting bought the station from Malrite Communications Group.

Later that year, Act III Broadcasting bought out WUTV in nearby Buffalo. Because of a city-grade signal overlap (Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules normally prohibit one company from owning two stations with overlapping coverage, and the agency would not even consider a waiver until 2000), Act III applied for a cross-ownership waiver seeking that the two stations were to be co-owned. Act III tried to sell WUHF to a different company after only one year, but no buyer was found. In a group deal, Abry would become the owner in 1995, through Sullivan Broadcasting.

By 1998, it was controlled by Sinclair and was eventually sold to that company, as part of a group deal to purchase Sullivan. In the 1990s, classic sitcoms, movies, and drama shows made way for talk, reality, and court shows. The station ended weekday airings of cartoons at the end of 2001 when Fox canceled its weekday kids block nationwide. In 1999, the station changed its branding to "Fox Rochester" although it adopted a "Fox 31" logo from 1999 to 2005. Its digital signal signed on-the-air in 2004 under a special temporary authority from the FCC.

In August 2005, the Sinclair Broadcast Group entered into a shared services agreement with Nexstar Broadcasting Group, owner of CBS affiliate WROC-TV (channel 8). Sinclair agreed to be the subordinate entity allowing Nexstar to control programming for WUHF. The station then moved from its studios on East Avenue (NY 96) in Rochester to WROC-TV's facilities.

On May 15, 2012, Sinclair and Fox agreed to a five-year extension to the network's affiliation agreement with Sinclair's 19 Fox stations, including WUHF, allowing them to continue carrying the network's programming through 2017.

On December 3, 2012, Sinclair announced it would acquire the non-FCC assets of ABC affiliate WHAM-TV from Newport Television, with the license and other FCC assets being transferred to Sinclair-affiliated Deerfield Media. At the end of 2013, WUHF terminated its SSA with Nexstar and re-located its operations to WHAM-TV's facilities in Henrietta.

Newscasts
On November 30, 1997, WUHF established its own news department and aired a nightly prime time newscast (originally Fox News First; later renamed as The Ten O'Clock News) along with a Sunday night sports highlight show. In 2003, the station adopted Sinclair's centralized News Central format, which featured locally produced segments, and national segments and conservative commentaries produced from Sinclair's studios in Hunt Valley, Maryland.

After WUHF's operations were taken over by Nexstar, WUHF replaced News Central with the WROC-produced Fox First at 10 on September 1, 2005. The newscast initially aired for a half-hour; it was later expanded to 45 minutes, with the rest of the hour filled by the sports news segment Sports Extra.

On September 4, 2012, WROC-TV became the second Rochester area station to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. The 10 p.m. newscast on WUHF was included in the upgrade.

On January 1, 2014, WUHF's 10 p.m. newscast was taken over by new sister WHAM-TV. WUHF also began to air a morning newscast, Good Day Rochester, from 7 to 9 a.m.

Notable current on-air staff

 * Mike Catalana – sports director; weeknights

Notable former on-air staff

 * Jenna Wolfe – sports anchor (1998–1999; later with FS1's First Things First)

Subchannels
The station's ATSC 1.0 channels are carried on the multiplexed signals of other Rochester television stations: In 2006, WUHF added The Tube digital music video channel on a new second digital subchannel; the channel was removed when the network went out of business in 2007.

Analog-to-digital conversion
WUHF discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 31, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full-power television in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (like most Sinclair stations and was replaced by a "nightlight" loop that ran until March 3). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 28, using virtual channel 31.

ATSC 3.0
{{legend|#ffffd0|Subchannel streamed via the Internet }}

Cable carriage in Canada
In 1994, several cable systems in Canada started carrying WUHF via the Cancom communications satellite in out-of-market areas where Fox was not otherwise available. However, it had been carried on cable in Belleville, Ontario and other communities on the north shore of Lake Ontario since the 1980s. It was formerly carried by Eastlink (in SD only) and on Bell Aliant FibreOP TV (in both SD and HD) for viewers in Atlantic Canada until late 2012 (January 30, 2013, in Eastlink's case), when it was replaced with WFXT in Boston, a former Fox O&O (now owned by Cox Media Group). The station is also carried in the Thousand Islands region of the North Country in the town of Hammond (via Citizens Cable TV) as well as in the provinces of Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador. WUHF has been carried on satellite systems since 1996 and it is currently the only Rochester-based television station seen in Canada on the Shaw Direct satellite provider.

CF Cable in the western suburbs of Montreal used to carry the station in 1995 but replaced it with sister station WUTV from Buffalo the following year. That station was carried on Vidéotron for cable systems outside the West Island. It was also the first Fox station carried on Montreal cable. However, the northern suburbs of that city (particularly Saint-Jérôme) still carry the station, even though in Mont-Tremblant, WFFF-TV along with other Burlington, Vermont–Plattsburgh, New York stations are seen there instead.

title: WUHF


text:
Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa

Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (September 27, 1920 – September 3, 1982) was an Italian Carabinieri general, notable for campaigning against terrorism during the Years of Lead. He was assassinated in the Via Carini massacre by the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo.

Biography
Born in Saluzzo, Cuneo, he became commandant of the (military) region of Piemonte-Valle d'Aosta in 1974 and created an anti-terrorism structure in Turin, which succeeded in capturing in September 1974 Red Brigades members Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini, with the help of Silvano Girotto, also known as Frate Mitra ("Friar Machine Gun"), who infiltrated the organisation.

In the foreword of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons report on the Argentine Dirty War, dalla Chiesa was cited as having rejected the use of torture in Italy in response to the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the former prime minister killed by the Red Brigades in 1978. In response to a suggestion that torture be used in the investigation, dalla Chiesa stated, "Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture."

Death

On May 1, 1982, dalla Chiesa was appointed as prefect for Palermo to stop the violence of the Second Mafia War. He was murdered in Palermo on the orders of Mafia boss Salvatore Riina. On the evening of September 3, 1982 Dalla Chiesa and his second wife Emanuela Setti Carraro were in an Autobianchi A112 driven by her. They were on their way to dinner in a restaurant in Mondello, when at 9:15 pm a Bmw 520 driven by Calogero Ganci with next to him Antonino Madonia flanked dalla Chiesa's car and from the passenger side Madonia shot 30 rounds with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both of them. At the same time, from a Honda Cb motorbike driven by Giuseppe Lucchese, Giuseppe Greco shot and mortally wounded with another AK-47, police officer Domenico Russo (dalla Chiesa's escort that evening) while he was driving a blue Alfa Romeo Alfetta (he would die in coma from his injuries on September 15, 1982).

Pino Greco was later senteced for the crime to life imprisonment in absentia at the Maxi Trial in December 1987 (even though they didn't know at the time he was killed two years before). Antonino Madonia, who shot dalla Chiesa and his wife, was sentenced for the murder after his arrest in 1989. Giuseppe Lucchese was also sentenced for the crime after his arrest in 1990. Calogero Ganci became a government informant in 1996, three years after his arrest. Bernardo Provenzano, Salvatore Riina, Giuseppe Calò, Bernardo Brusca, Francesco Madonia, Nenè Geraci and Francesco Spadaro were later also sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

Dalla Chiesa was also investigating the death of Mauro De Mauro, a journalist who had himself been investigating the murder of Enrico Mattei, head of Agip, the Italian oil company.

Personal life
His son Nando, who is a sociology professor at the University of Milan and former member of Parliament, is the president honoris causa of the anti-Mafia organisation Libera founded by Luigi Ciotti. His daughters Rita and Simona are respectively a TV presenter and a journalist.

title: Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa


text:
WSYT

WSYT (channels 43 and 68) is a television station in Syracuse, New York, United States, affiliated with the Fox network and owned by Imagicomm Communications. The station's studios are located on James Street/NY 290 in Syracuse's Near Northeast section, and its transmitter is located near Maple Grove, a hamlet of Otisco.

WSYT operates a third digital subchannel affiliated with MyNetworkTV which brands as "My 43". It uses virtual channel 43.1, formerly utilized by separately-licensed WNYS-TV until January 2020, when then-owner Cox Media Group turned in WNYS-TV's license and merged its subchannels onto WSYT's spectrum as a condition of the 2019 acquisition of Northwest Broadcasting by Apollo Global Management.

History
The station was originally assigned the call letters WKAF and was on UHF channel 62 rather than 68. After being reassigned to channel 68, the owners of WKAF (Channel 62 Inc.) got the station on-the-air February 15, 1986, and the outlet aired religious programming for three hours a day. The station was sold to The Flatley Company in late-1986 at which point construction of its facility on James Street in Syracuse began. WSYT began full-time operation on April 5, 1987, with a general entertainment format of cartoons, classic sitcoms, recent sitcoms, movies, drama shows, and sports. The launch of WSYT coincided with the prime time launch of the Fox network of which the station has been an affiliate ever since. For the first six months of the network's operations, the network's programming (which only consisted of a late-night program at the time) was not available over-the-air in the Syracuse market.

Flatley owned WSYT until 1992 when the station was sold to Encore Communications, later known as Max Media Properties. In 1998, the Sinclair Broadcast Group bought the station. That company entered into a local marketing agreement with UPN affiliate WNYS-TV in 1995 and began operating that station out of WSYT's studios. It was carried on cable in the Kingston, Ontario, area until 2009. That market is currently served by WNYF-CD in Watertown (for over-the-air ATSC viewers) and on cable by WUTV in Buffalo and WUHF in Rochester.

Like other Sinclair-owned stations in the region, WSYT and WNYS-TV have been transmitting digital-only signals since February 17, 2009. Until August 2008, WSYT had the highest analog channel allocation of any Fox affiliate before being eclipsed by KSWB-TV in San Diego when that station swapped its CW affiliation with XETV. WSYT's analog power was limited to 1,000,000 watts due to its proximity to Canada. Until June 12, 2009 (the official day of the digital television transition in the United States), UHF analog stations in the country were licensed to transmit up to 5,000,000 watts. All of this changed back on February 17, 2009, when WSYT went digital-only and moved to a less power-hungry transmitter on UHF channel 19.

From 1987 through 2003, WSYT owned the local broadcast rights to Syracuse University men's basketball games when rights were acquired by Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) and began airing on their local sports channel. During the majority of those years, WSYT produced a live post-game show as well as a weekly basketball coach's show with Jim Boeheim. They also acquired the rights to Big East football in the 1990s and would air a post-game show after a Syracuse Orangemen game was shown. The coverage was expanded to include a football coach's show with Paul Pasqualoni and a football preview show hosted by Steve Hyder and Joe Zone. In the late-1980s, WSYT aired New York Yankees games that were produced and broadcast by WPIX in New York City.

On May 15, 2012, Sinclair and Fox agreed to a five-year extension to the network's affiliation agreement with Sinclair's nineteen Fox stations (including WSYT) allowing them to continue carrying the network's programming through 2017. In a YouTube video posted by WBFF in Baltimore in July 2012, it was revealed that WSYT would air Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune beginning September 17, 2012. WSYT is one of a handful of Fox affiliates to air the game shows along with WBFF, WXIX-TV in Cincinnati, WVUE-DT in New Orleans, WLUK-TV in Green Bay, KDVR in Denver, KVHP in Lake Charles, Louisiana, WALA-TV in Mobile, WLUC-DT2 in Marquette, Michigan, and WDAF-TV in Kansas City.

Sinclair announced the sale of WSYT, the LMA for WNYS-TV, and WYZZ-TV in Peoria–Bloomington, Illinois, to Cunningham Broadcasting on February 28, 2013, following its acquisition of Barrington Broadcasting. The sale was necessary due to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s ownership rules as Sinclair chose to keep Barrington's WSTM-TV in Syracuse. However, in an updated filing with the FCC, it was revealed that WSYT would instead be sold to Bristlecone Broadcasting, a company owned by Brian Brady, owner of Northwest Broadcasting. Those transactions were completed on November 25. Following the consummation of the sale, Sinclair continued to operate WSYT and WNYS-TV through a transitional service agreement for six months until May 2014. Sinclair would continue to own the station's studios on James Street and its transmitter site in Otisco for at least ten years. Bristlecone Broadcasting was incorporated into the Northwest Broadcasting corporate structure in a May 2015 restructuring of Brady's broadcast holdings, making WSYT and WNYS sister stations to WICZ-TV and WBPN-LP in Binghamton.

In 2019, Northwest Broadcasting was in turn acquired by Apollo Global Management, and was to be merged into a new group known as Terrier Media with another AGM acquisition, Cox Media Group. After expanding its purchase to include CMG's radio and advertising units, it was announced that the combined group would retain the Cox Media Group name.

On March 29, 2022, Cox Media Group announced it would sell WSYT and 17 other stations to Imagicomm Communications, an affiliate of the parent company of the INSP cable channel, for $488 million; the sale was completed on August 1.

Newscasts
From 1996 until 2000 through a news share agreement, NBC affiliate WSTM-TV produced a 30-minute prime time newscast on WSYT called Fox 68 News at 10. After WSTM-TV declined to renew the arrangement, WSYT then established a new outsourcing agreement with CBS outlet WTVH. As a result, a new nightly news program began airing on the station with the name Fox 68 Eyewitness News at 10. Eventually, an hour-long weekday morning show (also produced by WTVH) debuted and was called Fox 68 Eyewitness News at 7. Both of the programs featured the same branding as WTVH's newscasts did at the time.

Meanwhile, in 2003, in order to offer competition in the 10 o'clock slot, WSTM-TV brought back its own half-hour newscast for newly acquired sister station WSTQ-LP that was seen only on weeknights. In April 2006, WTVH ceased producing all local news programming for WSYT in order to focus on its own newscasts that were cemented in third place by this point. Ironically, the nightly 10 o'clock broadcasts were WTVH's most successful having soundly beat WSTM-TV's effort on WSTQ-LP in the ratings. Since dropping news programming from the CBS outlet, WSYT remains one of a handful of big four network-affiliated stations throughout the United States (and the largest Fox station in terms of market size, since former sister station WUTV in Buffalo, the previous largest market with a non-news Fox affiliate, added newscasts in 2013) that does not operate its own news department or air local newscasts through a partnership with a big three station.

Subchannels
The station's signal is multiplexed: On November 1, 2010, WSYT launched The Country Network on its second digital subchannel replacing a standard definition simulcast of its primary channel.

Translator

 *  16 Ithaca

Analog-to-digital conversion
WSYT shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 68, on February 17, 2009, the original date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 19, using virtual channel 68.

title: WSYT


text:
Lorna Wing

Lorna Gladys Wing (7 October 1928 – 6 June 2014) was an English psychiatrist. She was a pioneer in the field of childhood developmental disorders, who advanced understanding of autism worldwide, introduced the term Asperger syndrome in 1976 and was involved in founding the National Autistic Society (NAS) in the UK.

Early life
Lorna Gladys Tolchard was born at Gillingham, Kent to Royal Navy engineer Bernard Newberry Tolchard (1898–1968) and Gladys Ethel (died 1962), née Whittell. Following education at Chatham Grammar School for Girls, she commenced medical training at University College Hospital in 1949. After qualifying as a psychiatrist, her first post was at the Institute of Psychiatry, Maudsley Hospital, London (now part of King's College London).

Career
Although Wing trained as a medical doctor, specialising in psychiatry, her focus narrowed to childhood developmental disorders in 1959. At that time, autism was thought to affect between 1 in 2,000–2,500 children, but its prevalence in the 2010s was considered to be around 1 in 100 following the awareness raised by Wing and her followers. Her research, particularly with her collaborator Judith Gould, now underpins thinking in the field of autism. They initiated the Camberwell Case Register to record all patients using psychiatric services in this area of London. The data accumulated by this innovative approach gave Wing the basis for her influential insight that autism formed a spectrum, rather than clearly differentiated disorders. They also set up the Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, the first integrated diagnostic and advice service for these conditions in the UK.

Wing was the author of many books and academic papers, including Asperger Syndrome: a Clinical Account, a February 1981 academic paper that popularised the research of Hans Asperger.

Along with some parents of autistic children, she founded the organisation now known as the National Autistic Society in the UK in 1962. She was a consultant to NAS Lorna Wing Centre for Autism until she died. She was also President of Autism Sussex.

In the 1995 New Year Honours list Wing was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for 'services to the National Autistic Society'.

Personal life
Wing met her future husband John Wing (22 October 1923 – 18 April 2010) while they were dissecting the same body as medical students. Marrying in 1950, both specialised as psychiatrists, with John becoming a professor of psychiatry. It was following their realisation that their daughter Susie (1956–2005) was autistic that Lorna Wing became involved in researching developmental disorders, particularly autistic spectrum disorders.

Lorna Wing died on 6 June 2014 in Kent, aged 85.

Hans Asperger controversy
Wing has faced controversy since the publication of Edith Sheffer's 2018 book, Asperger's Children, due to Wing's previous defence of using Hans Asperger's name for the "Asperger's Syndrome" diagnosis. According to a 2018 article by John Donvan for The Atlantic, Yale psychologist Fred Volkmar, another major figure in the autism field, was on the committee appointed to investigate whether "Asperger's syndrome" merited inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1993. Volkmar made a phone call to the only person he knew who had ever met Asperger — Lorna Wing — and asked her whether she knew anything of Hans Asperger's rumored ties to the Nazis. Wing, "shocked" at Volkmar's inquiry, had defended Asperger as a "religious man". According to researcher Herwig Czech, Asperger "hailed from Roman Catholic circles, and his orientation during the period of the [previous Austrian] system was strictly Catholic".

Donvan, the author of The Atlantic article, also included this information in his 2016 book, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, in which he described Wing as "speaking of [Hans Asperger]'s deep Catholic faith and lifelong devotion to young people", and claimed that Wing had dismissed Asperger's Nazi ties on account that "he [Asperger] was a very religious man". Prior to Wing's popularization of "Asperger's Syndrome" in the 1980s and early 1990s, Donvan writes, "Asperger, dead for thirteen years [by 1993], [had] never [been] a great presence on the world stage, [and] remained a little-known figure".

Papers

 * Wing, L. & Gould, J. (1979), "Severe Impairments of Social Interaction and Associated Abnormalities in Children: Epidemiology and Classification", Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 9, pp. 11–29.
 * Wing, L. (1980). "Childhood Autism and Social Class: a Question of Selection?", British Journal of Psychiatry, 137, pp. 410–17.
 * Burgoine, E. & Wing, L. (1983), "Identical triplets with Asperger's Syndrome", British Journal of Psychiatry, 143, pp. 261–65.
 * Wing, L. & Attwood, A. (1987), "Syndromes of Autism and Atypical Development", in Cohen, D. & Donnellan, A. (eds.), Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Disorders, New York, John Wiley & Sons.
 * Wing, L. (1991), "The Relationship Between Asperger's Syndrome and Kanner's Autism", in Frith, U. (ed.), Autism and Asperger Syndrome, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
 * Wing, L. (1992), "Manifestations of Social Problems in High Functioning Autistic People", in Schopler, E. & Mesibov, G. (eds.), High Functioning Individuals with Autism, New York, Plenum Press.
 * Wing, L. (1992), "Manifestations of Social Problems in High Functioning Autistic People", in Schopler, E. & Mesibov, G. (eds.), High Functioning Individuals with Autism, New York, Plenum Press.

Books

 * 1964, Autistic Children
 * 1966, Physiological Measures, Sedative Drugs and Morbid Anxiety, with M.H. Lader
 * 1969, Children Apart: Autistic Children and Their Families
 * 1969, Teaching Autitistic Autistic Children: Guidelines for Teachers
 * 1971, Autistic Children: a Guide for Parents
 * 1975, Early Childhood Autism: Clinical, Educational and Social Aspects (editor)
 * 1975, What is Operant conditioning?
 * 1988, Aspects of Autism: Biological Research (editor)
 * 1989, Hospital Closure and the Resettlement of Residents: Case of Darenth Park Mental Handicap Hospital
 * 1995, Autistic Spectrum Disorders: an Aid to Diagnosis
 * 1996, The Autistic Spectrum: a Guide for Parents and Professionals
 * 2002, Smiling at Shadows: a Mother's Journey Raising an Autistic Child (with Junee Waites, Helen Swinbourne).

title: Lorna Wing