WJW (TV)


WJW, virtual and VHF digital channel 8, is a Fox-affiliated television station licensed to Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Its second digital subchannel serves as an owned-and-operated station of the classic TV network Antenna TV. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group. WJW's studios are located on Dick Goddard Way just northeast of downtown Cleveland near the shore of Lake Erie, and its transmitter is located in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio.

History

As WXEL

The television station first signed on the air on December 19, 1949 as WXEL, originally broadcasting on VHF channel 9. It was founded by the Empire Coil Company, a wartime manufacturer of radio coils and transformers. In its early years, WXEL was a primary DuMont affiliate, and later became a secondary provider of ABC programs, sharing that affiliation with WEWS. WXEL also carried a number of CBS programs that WEWS declined to air. Some of the daytime shows originated at Cinecraft Productions on Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City. WXEL also carried an affiliation with the short-lived Paramount Television Network, and in fact was one of that network's strongest affiliates. The station aired such Paramount Network programs as Hollywood Wrestling, Bandstand Revue, and Time for Beany. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
Following the 1952 release of the Federal Communications Commission' s Sixth Report and Order, a realignment of VHF channels in the Midwest forced WXEL to move to channel 8 on December 10, 1953. Its former channel 9 allocation was moved to Steubenville and given to a new station, WSTV-TV ; the switch took place only two weeks before WSTV-TV went on the air.
In 1954, Empire Coil sold two of its television interests—WXEL and KPTV in Portland, Oregon, the United States' first UHF station—to Storer Broadcasting. George B. Storer, the company's founder and president, was a member of the board of directors of CBS, and used his influence to take the CBS television affiliation from WEWS in March 1955. WEWS became an exclusive ABC affiliate, while the DuMont network shut down operations in 1955.

As WJW-TV (1956–1977)

Storer changed channel 8's call letters to WJW-TV on April 15, 1956, to complement WJW radio, respectively. All three stations later moved to the former Esquire Theater building at 1630 Euclid Avenue, near Playhouse Square.
On November 16, 1963, approximately 30 WJW radio and television personalities went on strike, forcing both stations to use supervisory and production personnel in those roles, many from parent company Storer Broadcasting stations in Atlanta and Miami. The main bargaining point was Storer's attempt to institute a new, drastically reduced fee schedule for performers. On November 20, WJW-TV broadcast a taped panel segment that offered the striking performers the opportunity to state its case, since management had presented its side two nights earlier. After nearly reaching agreement on November 23 before talks collapsed, the two sides finally came to an agreement on November 27.

As WJKW-TV, then back to WJW

On November 2, 1975, the station moved to its present studios at 5800 South Marginal Road, which were built with a more modern approach than Storer's usual exterior studio design; the building features a number of columns framed by windows in the front, though the large front was not of the usual Georgian or Colonial mansion-esque design common with WJW's sister stations. While WJW-FM was sold in the late 1960s, Storer kept WJW until late 1976, when the group sold the radio station to Lake Erie Broadcasting. The AM station's new owners were allowed to keep the WJW call letters, forcing channel 8 to change theirs, per a since-repealed FCC rule that prohibited radio and television stations in the same city, but with different owners from sharing the same base call letters. As a result, channel 8 changed its callsign to WJKW-TV on April 22, 1977.
On September 16, 1985, the station reacquired the WJW-TV callsign, as had changed its callsign following the radio station's own transfer of ownership to Booth American Broadcasting. After Storer Broadcasting was bought out by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1985, the station underwent a series of ownership changes. KKR sold the stations to Gillett Communications in 1987; shortly thereafter, SCI Television was spun off from Gillett to take over the stations after Gillett's bankruptcy.
On February 17, 1993, one day after SCI purchased WTVT in Tampa from Gillett Holdings in a separate agreement for $163 million, New World Pictures purchased a 51% ownership stake in SCI Television from Gillett for $100 million and $63 million in newly issued debt; the film and television production company folded WJW and its six sister stations—fellow CBS affiliates WTVT, WAGA-TV in Atlanta, WJBK-TV in Detroit and WITI-TV in Milwaukee, NBC affiliate KNSD in San Diego and independent station WSBK-TV in Boston—into a new broadcasting subsidiary, New World Communications.

Switch to Fox

On May 23, 1994, as part of an overall deal in which network parent News Corporation also purchased a 20% equity interest in the group, New World signed a long-term affiliation agreement with Fox to switch 13 television stations that it owned or was acquiring from one of the three major broadcast networks to Fox once their existing affiliation contracts expired. The deal was motivated by the National Football League 's awarding of the rights to the National Football Conference television package to Fox on December 18, 1993, in which the conference's broadcast television rights moved to the network effective with the 1994 NFL season, ending a 38-year relationship with CBS.
At the time the agreement was signed, the affiliation contract of WJW-TV was set to expire on or shortly after September 1, 1994, giving CBS only five months to land another Cleveland affiliate. The agreement with New World concerned CBS executives, as New World planned to switch several of the network's stronger-performing affiliates in other markets to Fox, a move that often forced CBS to affiliate with either a former Fox affiliate or a lower-profile independent station. To prevent such a situation from happening in Cleveland, CBS approached Scripps-Howard Broadcasting in an attempt to sign its WEWS as the network's new Cleveland affiliate.
On June 16, however, Scripps-Howard signed a long-term deal with ABC that would keep WEWS as its Cleveland outlet; this deal resulted in Scripps' sister stations in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Tampa switching their affiliations. CBS would reach an agreement with Malrite Communications to move its programming to Fox charter affiliate WOIO. WJW switched to Fox on September 3, 1994, becoming the first New World station to switch to the network under the agreement; WOIO concurrently switched to CBS.
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On July 17, 1996, News Corporation announced that it would acquire New World in an all-stock transaction worth $2.48 billion, bringing its ten Fox affiliates under network ownership. Under Fox ownership, WJW added stronger first-run syndicated shows as well as stronger off-network sitcoms to the programming mix. It was the only fully network owned-and-operated station among the "Big Four" network outlets in the Cleveland area, and was the only Fox-owned station to carry a historic 1920s three-letter call sign. It remains the only Fox television affiliate to utilize a three-letter call sign.
On December 22, 2007, Fox sold WJW-TV and seven other owned-and-operated stations to Local TV for $1.1 billion; the sale was finalized on July 14, 2008. On July 1, 2013, the Tribune Company acquired the Local TV stations for $2.75 billion; the sale was completed on December 27.

Aborted sale to Sinclair; sale to Nexstar

On May 8, 2017, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it would acquire Tribune Media for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in debt held by Tribune. Under its original structure, the deal – following regulatory approval by the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division – would have given Sinclair ownership or operational management of television stations in six of Ohio's nine television markets, with Lima and Zanesville and Youngstown becoming the only remaining markets in the state where it does not have a presence.
On April 24, 2018, Sinclair announced that WJW would be one of 23 stations sold to obtain approval for the merger, though it was one of seven stations for which a buyer was not disclosed. On May 9, 2018, it was officially announced that Fox Television Stations would buy back WJW, as part of a $910-million deal that also involved six other Tribune-owned stations. With eight different owners since 1985, the deal would result in WJW having had the most successive owners of any television station in the Cleveland market.
Three weeks after the FCC's July 18 vote to have the deal reviewed by an administrative law judge amid "serious concerns" about Sinclair's forthrightness in its applications to sell certain conflict properties, on August 9, 2018, Tribune announced it would terminate the Sinclair deal, intending to seek other M&A opportunities. Tribune also filed a breach of contract lawsuit in the Delaware Chancery Court, alleging that Sinclair engaged in protracted negotiations with the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division over regulatory issues, refused to sell stations in markets where it already had properties, and proposed divestitures to parties with ties to Sinclair executive chair David D. Smith that were rejected or highly subject to rejection to maintain control over stations it was required to sell. The termination of the Sinclair sale agreement places uncertainty for the future of Fox's purchases of WJW and the other six Tribune stations included in that deal, which were predicated on the closure of the Sinclair–Tribune merger. Sinclair ultimately entered Cleveland via its acquisition of Fox Sports Networks, bringing Fox Sports Ohio and SportsTime Ohio under the Sinclair umbrella.
On December 3, 2018, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Media Group announced it would acquire the assets of Tribune Media for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. The deal—which would make Nexstar the largest television station operator by total number of stations upon its expected closure late in the third quarter of 2019—would put WJW under common ownership with Nexstar's existing properties elsewhere in Ohio and Huntington, West Virginia ; additionally, it would also make WJW sister stations with adjacent-market ABC affiliate WJET-TV and Fox-affiliated LMA partner WFXP in Erie, Pennsylvania. However, reports preceding the purchase announcement stated that, as it did during the group's failed purchase by Sinclair, Fox Television Stations may seek to acquire certain Fox-affiliated stations owned by Tribune—with WJW potentially being a candidate for resale—from the eventual buyer of that group. It was later reported that, as part of Fox's affiliation renewal with Nexstar-owned stations, it was indeed looking at reacquiring WJW alongside KDVR and KCPQ from the previous Sinclair-Tribune-Fox deal, with the remaining stations either remaining with Nexstar or being sold to WEWS parent E. W. Scripps Company ; WKYC parent Tegna Inc. is also buying stations from Nexstar. The sale was approved by the FCC on September 16 and was completed on September 19, 2019. After the sale closed, it was reported that Fox had decided against reacquiring WJW, keeping the station with Nexstar permanently.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
8.1720pWJW FOXMain WJW programming / Fox
8.2480iWJW ATVAntenna TV
8.3480iWJW CMTComet
8.4480iWJW CHGCharge!

Analog-to-digital conversion

WJW shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 8, on June 12, 2009, the official date in 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 31 to VHF channel 8.

ATSC 3.0

The former temporary channel 31 transmitter has remained in a functional, though dormant state since the transition; Tribune Broadcasting donated the transmitter to the National Association of Broadcasters, which it used to conduct a six-month test of the "Futurecast" ATSC 3.0 standard advanced by LG Electronics and GatesAir beginning in May 2015, as WI9X3Y. The transmitter remained active for the duration of the 2016 World Series, broadcasting in 4K UHD to the Cleveland area using the ATSC 3.0 standard with Dolby AC-4 Audio. This station also broadcasts brief, intermittent ATSC 1.0-compatible signals during parts of the day for reception comparisons under the callsign of WI9XJY.

Programming

In addition to the Fox network schedule, syndicated programs broadcast on WJW include Judge Judy, Daily Mail TV, The Big Bang Theory, The Real and The Dr. Oz Show.

Past program preemptions and deferrals

Since it joined the network in September 1994, channel 8 has only aired Fox's prime time, late night, news and sports programming, with the only content it has aired involving Fox's children's programming having been of fall preview specials and network promotions for those blocks that aired within the network's prime time lineup for the final twelve years that Fox carried programming aimed at that demographic. The only notable program preemption outside of the network's children's blocks has been that of the secondary Sunday morning NFL pre-game show Fox NFL Kickoff, of which WJW has declined carriage on the station's main channel since the program moved to Fox from Fox Sports 1 in September 2015; WJW instead airs a half-hour extension of its Sunday morning newscast and paid real estate programming in the program's network-recommended time slot, deferring Fox NFL Kickoff to the station's second digital subchannel.
Like most of its sister stations, channel 8 preempted portions of the CBS schedule, usually the late morning daytime shows. In the 1990s, WJW-TV and its fellow New World stations prepared to launch their own morning newscasts, and as a result, channel 8 began to preempt CBS This Morning as well. The station also gained notoriety in September 1993 by being one of the few CBS affiliates that chose to air the Late Show with David Letterman on a half-hour tape delay, in favor of airing Murphy Brown reruns immediately following its 11:00 p.m. newscast. Despite the preemptions, CBS was generally satisfied with WJW, which was one of the network's strongest affiliates.
As with most of its sister stations under its former New World ownership, WJW has always declined carriage of Fox's children's programming; it opted not to run the Fox Kids weekday and Saturday blocks when it affiliated with the network, airing children's programs acquired via syndication on Saturday mornings instead. WBNX-TV carried Fox Kids – along with its successor blocks FoxBox and 4Kids TV – from the September 1994 switch until Fox ceased supplying children's programming within the network's schedule on December 28, 2008. On September 13, 2014, WJW began carrying Xploration Station, a live-action educational program block distributed by Steve Rotfeld Productions that is syndicated primarily to Fox stations, on Saturday mornings through an agreement involving Tribune's Fox-affiliated stations.

Local programming

In its early years, the station lagged behind its competitors in producing local programming, perhaps because its studio was located at the transmitter in Parma, while the other stations had studios downtown. A young Alan Freed, previously at WAKR radio in Akron, worked for WXEL starting in 1949. Freed hosted an afternoon movie and performed live commercials for several years before he became the self-titled father of "rock and roll" while as an evening host on WJW radio, before moving on to radio jobs in New York City. Soupy Sales, then known as Soupy Hines, had a weekday variety program called Soup's On where he started his pie-in-the-face routines. In 1961, WJW-TV became the broadcast rights holder of the Cleveland Indians. Channel 8's partnership with the team continued through 1979, when the Indians moved to then-independent station WUAB. WJW also carried Indians games that were part of the CBS, and later, Fox network packages of Major League Baseball games.
One of the most memorable programs produced by WJW-TV was the Friday late night horror movie hosted by "Ghoulardi", a character created by Ernie Anderson. Wearing a bad fright wig and phony beard and a pair of sunglasses with only one lens, he interacted with the movies and created an ongoing patter and rehearsed skits during the movie breaks. The program began on January 11, 1963 as "Shock Theater" and created a generation of fans who could recite catch phrases such as "Turn Blue", "Stay Sick", "Camera Four" and "Ova Dey." Before Ghoulardi, Anderson had a weekday morning program on channel 8 starting in 1961 called Ernie's Place with sidekick Tim Conway, that included live skits reminiscent of Bob and Ray.
When Anderson left for lucrative voice-over work in Hollywood in September 1966, the Friday night movie slot was succeeded by The Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show—cohosted by Bob "Hoolihan" Wells, who did the station weather forecasts as "Hoolihan the Weatherman"; and Charles "Big Chuck" Schodowski, a station engineer who had risen to director and had appeared in some of Ghoulardi's skits. After Bob Wells departed channel 8 in September 1979, his position was filled by local jeweler and little person "Lil' John" Rinaldi, who had also previously performed in skits on the show. The program was renamed The Big Chuck and Lil' John Show, and it continued airing on Friday nights before moving to Saturday nights in the early 1990s. The show ended its run on June 16, 2007, as Chuck Schodowski retired after a 47-year career at channel 8. At the time of its conclusion, The Big Chuck and Lil' John Show had been the only locally produced television show in the Cleveland market that was primarily entertainment, that is not news or informational.

Sports programming

WJW-TV has long history of broadcasting Cleveland sports teams, whether it is produced in-house or broadcast through CBS or Fox.
Channel 8 was one of two stations involved in the deal between Fox and New World which was located in a market served by an NFL franchise that is not a member of the National Football Conference ; the Cleveland Browns—whose games had occasionally aired on the station dating back to its tenure with CBS—are part of the American Football Conference, which at the time of the switch, had most of their over-the-air game telecasts carried on WKYC-TV by way of NBC's broadcast rights to the AFC. Channel 8 first broadcast Browns games in 1956, when CBS, gained the TV broadcast rights to the pre-merger NFL; all Browns games would exclusively on channel 8 until 1969. Since 1970, channel 8 has carried at least two Browns games per year, usually consisting of interconference games in which the team plays host to an NFC team at FirstEnergy Stadium; in addition, with the institution of the league's "cross-flex" broadcast rules in 2014, any games that are arbitrarily moved from WOIO will be shown on WJW if Fox acquires the regional telecasting rights.
Channel 8 was also the home station for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers from 1976 to 1980; it also aired Cavaliers games aired via CBS' NBA broadcast contract from 1973 to 1990.
In addition, the station has aired Cleveland Indians games via CBS' MLB coverage from 1990 to 1993, and since 1996, through Fox's broadcast rights.

News operation

WJW presently broadcasts 68 hours of locally produced newscasts each week ; in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the largest local newscast output among any station in the state of Ohio, and one of the highest weekly newscast totals of any television station in the United States.

News department history

During its early years of operation, channel 8 broadcast a popular and unique 11:00 p.m. newscast, The Sohio Reporter, featuring a Western Reserve University speech professor named Warren Guthrie who delivered the entire newscast from memory, speaking directly into the camera long before the days of the teleprompter. In September 1963, WJW-TV was one of the first stations to employ a two-man news anchor team, Joel Daly and Doug Adair, in the studio together. The station retitled its evening newscasts as City Camera News, in a format which had reporters equipped with Polaroid cameras to photograph news events, so that pictures could be quickly broadcast when they returned to the studio. Station programming also featured Adventure Road, hosted by Jim Doney, which presented filmed travelogues narrated by the filmmakers.
Dick Goddard came to channel 8 as its chief weatherman in 1966, following a prior five-year tenure at WKYC-TV. Goddard said that the incentive for joining WJW-TV was the fact that CBS carried Cleveland Browns games through its contract with the National Football League. Goddard later became the team's statistician, a position he held until 2011. Goddard—who was honored for his 50 years of broadcasting in the Cleveland market, with the renaming of the stretch of South Marginal Road that runs in front of the WJW studios as "Dick Goddard Way" in May 2011—remained with WJW until his retirement on November 22, 2016.
Daly and Adair reigned as Cleveland's top news team until June 1967, when Daly was hired away by ABC-owned WBKB in Chicago. Adair remained at channel 8 through July 1970, when he joined WKYC, which was then owned by NBC. Later in 1964, WJW-TV was the first full CBS affiliate in Ohio, and the first Cleveland TV station, to start local color broadcasts. Following Daly's departure, Martin Ross became Adair's on-air news partner for the next three years, then teamed with Murray Stewart when Adair left. The duo worked together until Ross's death from cancer in April 1973. Jeff Maynor had filled in when Ross was undergoing treatment, and continued in that role for the next four months until Jim Hale teamed with Stewart beginning on September 11, 1973. Just over a year later, Stewart asked to be taken off the broadcast, citing health problems, and was later reassigned to the noon news, with Maynor taking his place on the nightly broadcast. Stewart committed suicide on August 3, 1976, overdosing on Nembutal in a suburban Cleveland motel.
Shortly after the callsign change to WJKW, the station hired former WKYC-TV and NBC Radio news anchor Virgil Dominic as its news and public affairs director, and also began to pump considerable money into its news operation. The name of the newscasts even underwent a transition as well, going from City Camera News to Newscenter 8 around the summer of 1977. Within a year, channel 8 had overtaken longtime leader WEWS as the highest-rated news station in Cleveland – a lead it kept for almost 20 years. Tim Taylor joined WJW-TV as consumer reporter in the summer of 1977, having been hired away from WEWS, where he held a similar role. The following year, Taylor became Judd Hambrick's partner on the station's 6:00 and 11:00 p.m. weeknight newscasts. For much of Taylor's 27-year run as an anchor at WJW, he served alongside several female anchors. Taylor retired from broadcasting on December 23, 2005, after which he was replaced by fellow longtime Cleveland TV newsman Lou Maglio; one month prior, Taylor and Goddard were reunited with Swoboda and former sports anchor Casey Coleman in a special segment during Fox 8 News in the Morning. The foursome has been quoted as one of "Cleveland's most successful news teams" during the 1980s, and helped lead Newscenter 8 to number one in the Cleveland market during that decade.
In 1991, WJW implemented the "24-Hour News Source" concept that was originally developed the year prior by rival WEWS, positioning itself as "Cleveland's Own 24 Hour Newsroom". At that time, the station began producing news updates of 30 seconds in length during local commercial break inserts within syndicated and CBS network programs at or near the top of each hour in time periods when the station was not carrying regularly scheduled, long-form newscasts or the half-hourly updates it aired during CBS This Morning. After WJW became a Fox affiliate on September 3, 1994, the station underwent a major shift in its programming philosophy that more heavily emphasized its local news programming. The station initially expanded its news production to over 40 hours a week, and through the years continued expanding, eventually reaching 65½ hours per week by 2015.
In October 1995, WJW retired the "Newscenter 8" branding and the "24-Hour News Source" concept, and adopted a hard-hitting format that saw the implementation of the phrase "ei8ht is News" as the title of its newscasts. Consequently, the station used "Fox is ei8ht" as a generalized branding to promote the station's non-news programming, in particular, those offered through its new Fox affiliation. This accompanied a change in format for harder-edged news; viewers did not respond positively to either the format changes, or the constant branding reinforcement. They instead turned to the more traditional WEWS; WKYC was likewise busy trying to find an audience after years of being used as NBC's 'farm' station. The "ei8ht is News" branding ended upon Fox's purchase of the station, after which it was replaced by "Fox 8 News", which remains in use to this day as the station's news branding.
One triumph for WJW was its weekday morning newscast, as, without a national morning news program supplied by Fox, WJW could produce an all-local, 3½-hour-long program to fill part of the time period. Many Cleveland viewers preferred the local show over the national broadcasts aired on WKYC, WEWS and WOIO. This was especially true since WEWS' long-running local show The Morning Exchange was moved to 9:00 a.m. around the time of the Fox/CBS switch. With the exception of a brief period from late 1994 through late 1995 when it was titled Good Day Cleveland, Fox 8 News in the Morning has constantly been Cleveland's top rated morning newscast since the time of its debut. Another advantage of the affiliation switch was the shift of the late newscast from 11:00 p.m. to 10:00, which also resulted in the program's expansion into a one-hour-long broadcast; with conversion of the news department launched six years earlier by WUAB to serve as a joint operation with newly minted CBS outlet WOIO and the balancing act of managing both stations, along with the unproven lead-in of WUAB's new UPN and WB network programming, WJW quickly overtook WUAB's longer-established prime time newscast at 10:00 p.m. without much issue.
In news programming, the station retook the top position from WEWS in 2001. By mid-2002, all of WJW's newscasts placed first. This continued until January 2004, when viewers began turning away from WJW's hard-hitting style to the more traditional WKYC-TV. Even Fox 8 in the Morning lost its top spot to WKYC's morning newscast for about two months. As a result of the overall decline, WJW replaced longtime 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. lead anchors Wilma Smith and Tim Taylor, with Bill Martin and Stacey Bell at 10:00 p.m., hoping the two would attract a younger audience to the program. The change paid off for channel 8, and today its newscasts frequently rank number-one in the ratings.

Notable current personalities