WNED

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WNED
Buffalo, New York
Branding	WNED Buffalo - Toronto
Channels	17 (UHF) analog, 43 digital
Affiliations	PBS
Owner	Western New York Public Broadcasting Association
Founded	1953 (as WBUF) 1959 (as WNED-TV), 1975 (AM/FM)
Call letters meaning	Western New York EDucational television
Former affiliations	Independent, NBC (1956-1958), NET (1959-1969)
Transmitter Power	2510KW
Website	www.wned.org

WNED is the callsign for three public broadcasting stations in Buffalo, New York. WNED-TV is a PBS affiliate, broadcasting on Channel 17 from a tower at 870 Whitehaven Road, Grand Island, NY. WNED-AM radio broadcasts on 970 AM as a commercial-free newsradio station and WNED-FM 94.5, a classical music station. All three stations are owned by the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association.

[edit] WBUF-TV

WNED's channel position was originally held by a station known as WBUF-TV. WBUF-TV Channel 17 was a UHF TV station in Buffalo, New York. It signed on on August 17, 1953, and was owned by Sherwin Grossman, Gary Cohen and a group of local investors. The first studios were located at 184 Barton Street, which would later house WGR AM-FM-TV. WBUF-TV went off the air for a time in 1955. UHF was not easy to receive in those days and many TV sets did not have UHF. The owners could no longer afford to operate the station. The FCC later required TV set makers to include UHF on all sets made after 1964. Channel 17 WBUF was sold to NBC for $312,500 in September 1955. NBC changed WBUF's studio location to 2077 Elmwood Avenue, the home (since 1960) of then WBEN AM-FM-TV (now WIVB-TV). Channel 17 ceased operations on September 30, 1958; not even the network could make a go of UHF broadcasting at the time. In March 1959 Channel 17 came alive again as WNED-TV, a non-commercial educational TV station.

[edit] Debut of WNED

WNED made its broadcast debut on March 30, 1959, as a commercial license station operating as an educational broadcaster. Channel 17 had previously been WBUF-TV, an early UHF commercial staton launched in 1953 but which only aired for a few months before going dark. It was sold to NBC in 1955 and returned to the airwaves the next year. The network owned and operated Channel 17 as an experiment to see if a UHF station could compete with VHF. The station was closed on September 30, 1958, due to NBC's perception that the public lacked interest in UHF (it was not until 1964 that the FCC required all new television sets to be equipped to receive UHF). NBC donated its license and some equipment to the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association, and the new educational broadcaster, the first in New York State, went on the air six months after its predecessor went dark, while NBC contracted WGR-TV Channel 2 as its Buffalo affiliate.

WNED-AM and WNED-FM were acquired by the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association in 1975. They were founded as WEBR-AM, which began broadcasting in 1924, and WEBR-FM, which first signed on in 1960. The FM station was renamed WNED-FM in 1977, when it adopted a classcial music format. In 1977, WEBR-AM became the nation's first public all-news radio station and was the US's top-rated public radio station by 1978. In 1993 it was renamed WNED-AM after cutbacks in government funding forced it to dramatically cut its local programing in favour of network and syndicated content.

From 1987 to 2000, WNED-TV operated a sister station, WNEQ/Channel 23. The operation of two PBS television stations proved unviable. The station's deathblow was the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission's 1997 rejection of an application to allow WNEQ to be carried by cable television providers in Toronto, Canada, [1] which was a major source of donations to WNED and had been anticipated as a similar source of funds for WNEQ. In 2000 the station was sold to Lin Broadcasting and was renamed WNLO, a commercial station and UPN affiliate. Until this time WNED-TV had maintained the old commercial license it had inherited from WBUF-TV, while WNEQ had operated on an educational license. Lin Broadcasting needed WNED's commercial license in order to make it's acquisition viable and, at one point, it seemed likely that the broadcaster would actually purchase WNED/17 from the Western New York Public Broadcasting Association. However, the long-standing presence of Channel 17 as an educational broadcaster as well as the fact that Channel 17 was carried by cable systems in Toronto while Channel 23 was not, made another solution to the licensing problem desirable. The FCC was persuaded to allow Channel 23 and Channel 17 to swap licenses, allowing WNEQ to be sold to a commercial broadcaster. After 42 years of operating as a commercial licensee operating as a non-commercial broadcaster, WNED acquired an educational license in 2000.

WNED-TV has produced several original programs that have been carried throughout the PBS network such as the Mark Russell comedy specials and Reading Rainbow, produced in association with GPN until early 2006. Starting in May 2006, co-production of Reading Rainbow continued with Educate Inc. of Baltimore, Maryland, after The University of Nebraska Regents (the owners of GPN and NET) sold its long-time production interest to WNED. [2]

Despite marketing their programming to Canadians, WNED defended fellow public broadcaster TVOntario amid fears the Canadian station might be privatized by the provincial government of Ontario.

[edit] External links

• www.wned.org
• History of WBUF-TV Channel 17's earlier incarnation.
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WNED