WLWT

WLWT (channel 5) is a television station in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Hearst Television. The station's studios are located on Young Street, and its transmitter is located on Chickasaw Street, both in the Mount Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati.

History

The Crosley/Avco years

WLWT was established by the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, owners of WLW (700 AM), one of the United States' most powerful radio stations. Crosley Broadcasting was a subsidiary of the Crosley Corporation, which became a subsidiary of the Aviation Corporation (later known as Avco) in 1945. After starting experimental broadcasts in 1946 as W8XCT on channel 1, the station began commercial broadcasts on February 9, 1948, on VHF channel 4, making it Cincinnati's first television station and Ohio's second (after WEWS, Cleveland). The station's studios were housed with WLW in the Crosley Square building, a converted Elks lodge in downtown Cincinnati.

WLWT counts itself as the first television station outside the Eastern U.S. (other than network-owned stations) to become a primary NBC television affiliate, but originally carried programming from all the major television networks of the time: NBC, ABC, CBS and DuMont. WLWT later affiliated exclusively with NBC in 1949, after WKRC-TV (originally on channel 11, now on channel 12) and WCPO-TV (originally on channel 7, now on channel 9) signed on during that year. Following the release of the FCC's ''Sixth Report and Order'' in 1952, all of Cincinnati's VHF stations changed channels. WLWT was reassigned to channel 5, as the previous channel 4 allocation was shifted north to Columbus and given to sister station WLWC (now WCMH-TV), which began operations in April 1949.

In addition to WLWT and WLWC, Crosley also operated stations in nearby markets, WLWD (channel 2, now WDTN) in Dayton, which signed-on in March 1949; and WLWI (channel 13, now WTHR) in Indianapolis, which opened in October 1957. These four inter-connected stations were branded on-air as the "WLW Network", and their call letters were stylized with hyphens to further reflect their connections to each other—the Cincinnati station, the group's flagship, was known as "WLW-T". Crosley also owned WLWA (now WXIA-TV) in Atlanta (purchased in 1953 and sold in 1962) and WOAI-TV in San Antonio (acquired in 1965, sold in 1974).

The three WLW television stations in Ohio were NBC affiliates, and carried common programming along with WLWI in Indianapolis (an ABC affiliate). Most of these shows were produced at the WLWT studios on Crosley Square, and included ''The Ruth Lyons 50-50 Club'' (later hosted by Bob Braun after Lyons' retirement in 1967), the ''Paul Dixon Show'' and '' Midwestern Hayride''; some of these programs were syndicated regionally to other stations outside of the Crosley group.

In 1957, WLWT became the first station in the Cincinnati market to begin color television broadcasts. It later became the first station in the nation to broadcast entirely in color, giving Cincinnati the nickname "Colortown U.S.A." by 1962. For a period during the 1970s, the station's slogan was "5, The Originator", in reference to all of the local programming that was produced by the station.

The Crosley broadcast division took the name of its parent company in 1968, becoming Avco Broadcasting Corporation. In 1969, the FCC enacted its "one-to-a-market" rule, which enforced a ban on common ownership of AM radio stations and television stations with overlapping coverage areas under certain conditions while grandfathering some already existing instances. Avco's ownership of WLW radio (a 50,000-watt, clear-channel station) and WLWT, and the Columbus, Dayton and Indianapolis television stations was initially protected under the new rule. While WLWT's channel 5 potential coverage area covered a large amount of the Dayton and Columbus markets, the station was forced by the FCC to transmit with a shorter broadcast tower, thus reducing the signal overlap between WLWT, WLWC, and WLWD.

Later years

In the mid-1970s, Avco decided to exit broadcasting and sold all of its stations to separate buyers. WLWT was the next to last to be sold, going to Multimedia, Inc. in March 1976. As a result, the stations all lost their grandfathered protection, which led to an ownership conflict situation which Hearst-Argyle (predecessor to today's Hearst Television) would encounter two decades later (the FCC has since relaxed its adjacent-market ownership rules). All of the "WLW Network" TV stations except for flagship WLWT would change their call signs, leaving WLWT as the only one with any physical evidence that it was connected to WLW radio, a station that ironically would be a sister station to WLWT's rival WKRC-TV years later. Multimedia would later acquire Avco Program Sales and with it, the regional syndication rights to Braun's program, along with '' The Phil Donahue Show''; the resulting subsidiary, Multimedia Entertainment, was initially based at WLWT.

In July 1995, the Gannett Company

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