| Green Bay, Wisconsin | |
|---|---|
| Branding | Channel 5 (general) Channel 5 News HD |
| Slogan | The Area's First HD Newscast |
| Channels | Digital: 39 (UHF) Virtual: 5 (PSIP) |
| Subchannels | 5.1 CBS |
| Owner | Nexstar Broadcasting Group (Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc.) |
| First air date | May 21, 1955 |
| Call letters' meaning | Wisconsin's Fox River Valley |
| Sister station(s) | WJMN-TV |
| Former callsigns | WNAM-TV (1955-1959) |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: 42 (UHF, 1955-1959) 5 (VHF, 1959-2009) |
| Former affiliations | ABC (1955–1959 and 1983-1992) NBC (1959–1983) DuMont (secondary, 1955) |
| Transmitter power | 1,000 kW |
| Height | 364 m |
| Facility ID | 9635 |
| Website | WeAreGreenBay.com |
WFRV-TV is a CBS-affiliated television station licensed to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and serving Green Bay, the Fox Valley, and Northeastern Wisconsin. The station broadcasts a high definition digital signal on UHF channel 39 (PSIP channel 5.1) from a transmitter north of the Brown County town of Morrison. The station is currently owned and operated by Nexstar Broadcasting Group.
WFRV also operates semi-satellite WJMN-TV (UHF digital channel 48 or virtual channel 3), which is licensed to Escanaba, Michigan and covers the central Upper Peninsula of Michigan. WFRV/WJMN's master control and all internal operations for both stations originate from WFRV's Green Bay facilities; WJMN does maintain an engineering operation and an advertising sales office in Marquette.[1]
Programming on WFRV and WJMN includes the full CBS lineup; syndicated programming including Entertainment Tonight, Anderson, Ellen, and Live with Regis and Kelly; and Green Bay Packers-related programming (WFRV is the Packers' "official station" and carries Packers' pre-season broadcasts and the weekly Larry McCarren's Locker Room during the season).
Contents |
| Channel | Format | Aspect | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | 1080i | 16:9 | main WFRV-TV programming / CBS |
In September 2008, WFRV became the first station in Green Bay to upgrade their master control for pre-recorded network and syndicated high definition programming; Oprah, Ellen, and Entertainment Tonight are currently aired in HD on WFRV, while a character generator allows the station to place 16:9 bulletin crawls for weather and news over the programming.[2] WFRV would transition to digital-only broadcasting at midnight on February 17, 2009 (during a Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson commercial break); it would air a lop of nightlight programming until March 3, when their analog service was completely discontinued. As of October 2009, WFRV gained the capability to create and air 16:9 advertising, promotions, and news graphics, though standard definition cameras were used for newscasts until their June 2011 conversion to high-definition; before that newscast upgrade, graphics were displayed in the 16:9 format with weather conditions filling the left and right pillarbox spaces during 4:3-formatted newscasts.
The station began life on May 21, 1955 as ABC affiliate WNAM-TV, originally broadcasting on UHF channel 42 from Neenah / Menasha and serving as sister to the radio station with the same call sign. By the late 1950s, the station moved their city of license to Green Bay and their studios to Little Chute. The station would also change frequency (to VHF channel 5), call sign (to WFRV), and, in 1959, network affiliation (to NBC). (In 1958, the station was also part of the short-lived Badger Television Network alongside Milwaukee's WISN-TV and Madison's WKOW-TV.)[3] WFRV's early claims to fame included being the first TV station in Northeastern Wisconsin to broadcast in color (doing so after joining NBC), the first station to cover a live lunar eclipse in 1959 (a studio camera was wheeled to the station parking lot and aimed at the moon), and Green Bay's first color local news broadcasts (beginning in 1965).
In the mid-1960s, WFRV was acquired by the Norton Group, a company owned by the Norton family of Kentucky, who also owned Louisville's WAVE. (The Norton Group would change its name to Orion Broadcasting by 1969.) One of the Norton Group's early decisions was to move WFRV's transmitter: Other Green Bay stations had their transmitters on Scray's Hill in the Ledgeview section of the town of Glenmore, located just south of Green Bay and one of the highest geographical points in the area; WFRV's transmitter, however, was located further south (a legacy from its original days in Neenah/Menasha), so turning antennas southward to pick up WFRV inconvenienced viewers—and in turn put the station at a disadvantage. Accordingly, the Nortons gained permission from the Federal Communications Commission to move Channel 5's transmitter to Glenmore.
On October 7, 1969, WFRV expanded into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan by signing on semi-satellite WJMN-TV in Escanaba. WJMN's creation was the result of The Norton Group's earlier agreement with the FCC to move WFRV's tower, as the station had to address short-spacing issues with another Channel 5 station, Chicago's WMAQ-TV (every analog channel allocation in the Green Bay and Wausau media markets was shared by a Chicago television station). As part of the agreement to transmit from Glenmore, Orion Broadcasting launched WJMN so that WFRV's service to the U.P. and far Northeastern Wisconsin could continue, and so that a 2nd station in central Upper Michigan could be added (before WJMN, WLUC-TV was the only commercial station serving the U.P.).
Orion Broadcasting would merge with Cosmos Broadcasting (a subsidiary of The Liberty Corporation) in 1981. Two years later, in April 1983, WFRV would affiliate with ABC for the second time (NBC would move to WLUK-TV). Later in the 1980s, WFRV was sold to Midwest Radio and Television, owned by the Murphy and McNally families, who also owned the WCCO stations in Minneapolis-St Paul. The Murphys and McNallys would announce a sale of Midwest to CBS in summer 1991; the sale was completed in early 1992, and on March 15 of that year, WFRV became become a CBS owned-and-operated station (ABC would move to Green Bay's longtime CBS affiliate, WBAY-TV); this swap would make WFRV one of the few stations in the United States to be affiliated with all of the Big Three television networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) during its lifetime.
By 2001, WFRV would change its longtime Orion Broadcasting-era logo, used since the mid 1970s, for an earlier version of their current logo. One year later, in 2002, WFRV would become the first station in the Green Bay market to begin digital broadcasts. By 2003, WFRV would adopt the mandate CBS dictated for its stations, identifying themselves as "CBS 5" and adopting a green-and-gold logo to reflect their connection to the Green Bay Packers (WFRV would begin airing Packer pre-season broadcasts in 2003). The station's current blue-and-yellow logo and graphic scheme was unveiled on July 10, 2006, along with a new news set to coincide with the return to the station of former reporter/anchor Tammy Elliott.
The week of April 16-18, 2007, Liberty Media (a media company unrelated to The Liberty Corporation) completed an exchange transaction with CBS Corporation pursuant to which Liberty Media exchanged 7.6 million shares of CBS Class B common stock valued at $239 million dollars for a subsidiary of CBS that held WFRV and approximately $170 million in cash.[4][5] WFRV and WJMN would then become owned-and-operated stations of Liberty Media, the only over-the-air TV properties they have owned. In May 2007, operations of the stations' websites would move from CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group to a redesigned site powered by Inergize Digital Media (then a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications now a division of Newport Television). By Summer 2007, WFRV would drop the CBS Mandate, slowly transitioning from "CBS 5" to simply "Channel 5," their identifier before 2003.
On April 7, 2011, Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced it would acquire WFRV and WJMN-TV from Liberty Media.[6] The $20 million deal was approved by the FCC on June 28, 2011[7] and closed 3 days later on July 1, when Nexstar tapped Joseph Denk to become vice president and general manager of both stations;[8] Denk replaces Perry Kidder, who announced his retirement shortly after the sale was announced (Kidder had spent 37 years with WFRV and WJMN).[9] The web site URL and operations of WFRV and WJMN also changed to Nexstar's in-house format (they had been maintained by Broadcast Interactive Media since April 2010); in the case of WFRV, the web address changed from "wfrv.com" to "wearegreenbay.com".[10]
In addition to their main studios on East Mason Street in Green Bay, WFRV also has a Fox Valley bureau in Little Chute, located on Patroit Drive near US 41 freeway. The Valley bureau also has a second Doppler weather radar tower to provide extended radar coverage for the station's weather operation.
WFRV's 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts have audio simulcasts on radio stations in the Fond du Lac-Oshkosh areas (on WRPN 1600 AM) as well as in the Marinette-Menominee area (on WHYB 103.7 FM). All WFRV newscasts are simulcast live on WJMN, which apart from occasional on-location reports from the Upper Peninsula currently has no separate news programming for the U.P.; when Nexstar completes its purchase of the stations, it plans for separate U.P. newscasts on WJMN.[11]
On June 23, 2011, after a six-month upgrade process, WFRV became the first station in the Green Bay market to broadcast newscasts in high-definition; the changeover to HD includes an upgrade in the "Storm Team 5" weather technology, including real-time street-level radar.[12][13]
For most of its history, WFRV-TV's newscasts have been competitive with longtime leader WBAY-TV and runner-up WLUK-TV in most time slots although WFRV's newscasts have usually been in third place.
"Channel 5 hits Big 5-0". Green Bay News-Chroniclearticle. Archived from the original on November 12, 2005. http://web.archive.org/web/20051112152649/http://www.wisinfo.com/newschronicle/gbnclocal/283341425406556.shtml. Retrieved November 12, 2005.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||