| City of license | Ottawa, Ontario |
|---|---|
| Branding | CTV Ottawa |
| Slogan | Ottawa's News Leader |
| Channels | Digital: 13 (UHF) Virtual: 13.1 (PSIP) |
| Translators | see below |
| Affiliations | CTV |
| Owner | Bell Media |
| First air date | March 12, 1961 |
| Call letters' meaning | CJ Ottawa-Hull |
| Sister station(s) | CHRO-TV, CFGO, CFRA, CJMJ-FM, CKKL-FM |
| Former callsigns | CJOH-TV (1961-2011) |
| Former channel number(s) | 13 (Analog, 1961-2011) |
| Former affiliations | Independent (1961) |
| Transmitter power | 19 kW |
| Height | 373.4 m |
| Website | CTV Ottawa |
CJOH-DT (on-air identity is CTV, or alternatively CTV Ottawa when disambiguation is needed) is a television station serving Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and the surrounding region. Owned by Bell Media, it is part of the CTV Television Network.
CJOH provides CTV network coverage for all of Eastern Ontario, a large segment of Western Quebec and portions of Northern New York, USA. The station broadcasts on Channel 13 from the Ryan Tower at Camp Fortune in Gatineau, Quebec (serving Ottawa-Gatineau); Channel 8 from Lancaster, Ontario (serving Cornwall and, indirectly, Montreal); Channel 6 from Deseronto (serving Kingston and, indirectly, Watertown, New York) and Channel 47 from Pembroke. The station is seen on Cable 7 in Ottawa and Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
Since early 2010, the station's studios and offices, including newscast production, have been co-located with CTV Two Ottawa and Bell Media's Ottawa radio properties in the "Market Media Mall" building in Downtown Ottawa's ByWard Market, following a massive fire at the station's previous longtime home on Merivale Road in Nepean.[1][2] Newscasts are aired weekdays at noon, 6 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., with the 6 p.m. newscast anchored by Carol Anne Meehan and Graham Richardson.
Like other CTV-owned stations, CJOH no longer identifies itself on-air by its call letters, having adopted the unified CTV network brand, and its newscasts are also branded CTV News.
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Founded by Ernie Bushnell, CJOH signed on for the first time on March 12, 1961. Initially, studio facilities were located at 29 Bayswater Ave () until that September when operations were shifted over several weeks to a $2 million (CAD) complex at 1500 Merivale.[3]
It acquired former Cornwall, Ontario CBC affiliate CJSS as a rebroadcaster in 1963, making CJSS the first station in Canada to cease operations. The Channel 6 transmitter in Deseronto became operational in 1972 to serve the Kingston and Belleville markets. Standard Broadcasting owned the station from 1975 to 1988, when it was sold to Baton Broadcasting. Baton was renamed CTV Inc. in 1998 after gaining control of the CTV network the preceding year. CTV in turn would be purchased by Bell Canada and folded into Bell Globemedia, now Bell Media, in 2001.
In the 1980s and early-1990s, when CTV offered Toronto Blue Jays baseball, CJOH's channel 8 transmitter in Lancaster/Cornwall had to show alternate programming instead, since the area was considered Montreal Expos territory. This substitute programming often had no commercials, and often had no definite end, as the length of baseball games varied. This was discontinued when the Blue Jays left CTV.
From 1990 to 1997, the station was co-owned with Pembroke-based CHRO-TV, which was for the majority of that period a CTV affiliate for the Upper Ottawa Valley. In 1997, as part of a major trade, CHRO was transferred to CHUM Limited, and became a NewNet (later A-Channel) station primarily serving Ottawa. In 2007, CTVglobemedia received Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approval to acquire CHUM; while CTV did not originally plan to keep A-Channel, it decided to do so following a CRTC requirement to sell the Citytv system. This once again made CJOH and CHRO sister stations in a market with only one other local English-language station, CBOT. Interestingly, while the CRTC forced the Citytv sale because of concerns about media concentration with multiple stations in the same city, it had no problem allowing the Ottawa twinstick, apparently due to the precedent set by the stations having common ownership in the 1990s.
CJOH was available on cable in Montreal for most of the 1980s and 1990s, as the Cornwall transmitter's footprint reaches the western Montreal suburbs.
Well-known celebrities who first appeared on CJOH include Rich Little, The Amazing Kreskin, Alanis Morissette, Sandra Oh and Peter Jennings. Jennings started his professional career with the station during its early years, anchoring the local newscasts and hosting a teen dance show, Saturday Date, on Saturdays.
Morissette was briefly part of the cast on a local sketch comedy show, You Can't Do That On Television, aimed at the pre-teen and teen demographics. Originally conceived as a local and partially live production in 1979, the series became a huge success in the United States for the cable channel Nickelodeon starting in 1982 and was subsequently screened in many other countries.
The station's newsroom was destroyed by a four-alarm fire during the early morning hours of February 7, 2010, destroying equipment and the station's news archives. The building itself remained intact until it was demolished in December, 2011. CJOH's news operations were permanently re-located to CTV's ByWard Market building. This would be the first time the ByWard Market studios would have an evening newscast since the cancellation of sister station CHRO-TV's A News in March 2009. An adjacent office building housing former sister station CKQB-FM was not affected by the fire.[4][5]
You Can't Do That On Television was derided by parents from its very beginning as a local show on CJOH in 1979 for its ubiquitous bathroom humour and for breaking with the Canadian tradition of kind, gentle and educational shows for children, as well as for the shock value of certain sketches such as the show's infamous "green slime." The controversy did not stop the show from becoming a huge hit, locally and eventually globally.
On August 1, 1995, the station's longtime sports anchor Brian Smith was shot in the station's parking lot by Jeffrey Arenburg, a released mental patient with a past history of threatening media personalities, who claimed the station was broadcasting messages inside his head. Smith died in hospital the following day.[6] The incident led to renewed calls across Canada for strengthening of the Canadian government's gun control legislation and provided the impetus for Brian's Law (Ontario Bill 68) - an amendment of the Mental Health Act and Health Care Consent Act which introduced community treatment orders and new criteria for involuntary commitment to psychiatric facilities.[7] Arenburg was released from a mental hospital in Penetanguishene in 2006, then imprisoned for two years for assaulting a U.S. border guard in 2008.[8]
On March 26, 2010, long-time evening anchor Max Keeping delivered his final news broadcast after 39 years behind the desk and was replaced by Ottawa's CTV national correspondent Graham Richardson. In late October 2010, CJOH introduced a new permanent set in the ByWard Market studios.[9]
On September 10, 2011 CJOH expanded the Saturday edition of its 6 p.m. newscast to one hour; as a result effective September 11, Regional Contact moved from Saturday evenings to Sunday evenings, retaining its 6:30 p.m. timeslot.[10]
Anchors/Hosts
Weather team
Sports team
Reporters
| Station | City of licence | Channel | ERP | HAAT | Transmitter Coordinates |
| CJOH-TV-6 | Deseronto | 6 (VHF) | 100 kW | 204.5 m | |
| CJOH-TV-8 | Cornwall | 8 (VHF) | 260 kW | 187.5 m | |
| CJOH-TV-47 | Pembroke | 47 (UHF) | 492 kW | 125.7 m |
All of these, and a long list of other CTV rebroadcasters nationwide, were to shut down on or before August 31, 2009, as part of a political dispute with Canadian authorities on paid retransmission consent requirements for cable television operators.[12][13] A subsequent change in ownership assigned full control of CTV Globemedia to Bell Canada Enterprises; as of 2011, these transmitters remain in normal licensed broadcast operation.[14]
CJOH has made its network programming available in standard definition on Bell TV (ch.229) and in high definition through Videotron (ch. 607) and Rogers Digital Cable (ch. 518),[15]. On August 31, 2011, as part of the analog television shutdown and digital conversion, the analog services of CJOH-TV stopped on channel 13, and the digital services of CJOH-DT began on the same channel.
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