Field Communications

Field Communications was a division of Field Enterprises, which owned the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. The company owned independent television stations in the United States, with WFLD-TV in Chicago as its largest-market station.

History

The broadcasting arm of Field Enterprises began in January 1966 with the initial sign-on of WFLD. In 1972, Field sold a majority ownership (about 77.5 percent) of WFLD to Kaiser Broadcasting, owners of KBSC-TV in Corona, CA (serving Los Angeles), WKBG-TV in Cambridge, MA (serving Boston, and in tandem with the Boston Globe), WKBS-TV in Burlington, N.J. (serving Philadelphia), WKBF-TV in Cleveland, WKBD-TV in Detroit, and KBHK-TV in San Francisco. Field retained the remainder of WFLD's shares (about 22.5 percent), and in return, received a minority stake in Kaiser Broadcasting (also about 22.5 percent).

In 1975 Kaiser shut down WKBF, returning its license to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and merging most of its programming with WUAB, of which Kaiser purchased a minority ownership from United Artists Broadcasting.

In 1977, Kaiser sold its majority stake of their stations, sans KBSC (which was sold to Oak TV), to Field. This gave Field one-hundred percent ownership of WFLD again. Field did not acquire Kaiser's share of WUAB, which United Artists sold to Gaylord Broadcasting that same year. The new owners also updated the look of all of the former Kaiser stations.

The beginning of the end

In 1982, half-brothers Marshall Field V and Frederick W. Field, who each controlled half of Field Enterprises, got into a dispute on how the company should operate which left them unable to work together.^[1] As a result of the dispute, Field Communications was put up for sale with the 5 stations as a packaged deal. With no takers the TV stations were individually put up for sale, as Field opted to dissolve the company. All of them were sold successfully except for the stations in Philadelphia and Detroit. However, WKBD in Detroit was eventually sold to Cox Communications in 1984. Many companies offered Field money for WKBS in Philadelphia, however, none of the bids were high enough. Meanwhile, the FCC gave Field a mandate which meant they had until July 15, 1983 to either sell WKBS, shut the station down, or remove it from the selling block and continue to broadcast. The Providence Journal Company, owners of rival Philadelphia independent WPHL-TV, offered to buy WKBS and merge the assets of the two stations. Their bid was still too low, so WPHL offered to buy only equipment and programming from Field contingent upon the passing of their deadline and the exercising of their second option . The deadline had passed and Field decided to go through with the deal, and on August 30, 1983, Field signed WKBS-TV off the air for good and surrendered the license back to the FCC.

What became of the stations

Footnotes:

• ¹Returned to the air in 1992 as WGTW-TV, purchased by/affiliated with TBN in 2004
• ²Originally sold to Viacom Television Stations Group
• ³Originally sold to Paramount Stations Group (later Viacom Television Stations Group following several mergers, now part of CBS Corporation as CBS Television Stations Group).

References

External links

Field Communications' 1980-1981 video sales presentation (part 1) (part 2)