WXIA-TV

WXIA-TV (channel 11) is a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate WATL (channel 36). Both stations share studios at One Monroe Place on the north end of midtown Atlanta, while WXIA-TV's transmitter is located in the city's east section, near Kirkwood. Atlanta is the largest television market where the NBC station is not owned and operated by the network.

WXIA-TV is popularly known within the Atlanta metropolitan area by its longtime on-air brand, 11 Alive, which the station has used since 1976.

History

What is known today as WXIA-TV originally signed on the air September 30, 1951, at 5 p.m., as WLTV on VHF channel 8. It was the first full time ABC affiliate for Atlanta, taking it over from WSB-TV and WAGA-TV (channel 5), both originally primary NBC and CBS affiliates respectively that previously shared ABC programming as a secondary affiliation. It was the third Atlanta television station to sign-on after WSB-TV and WAGA, all signing on within a three-year time frame.

Owned and operated by a group of Atlanta businessmen organized as Broadcasting, Inc., WLTV was indirectly born from the 1950 merger of Atlanta's two newspapers. ''The Atlanta Journal'' had originally owned channel 8 as WSB-TV, while ''The Atlanta Constitution'' held a construction permit for channel 2 as WCON-TV. Construction had already begun on the WCON-TV facilities when the Howell family, longtime owners of the ''Constitution'', sold their paper to Cox Enterprises, owners of the ''Journal''. However, Cox had a problem. At the time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did not permit the sale of television station construction permits, considering it "trafficking". Cox had little option but to keep the WCON-TV construction permit rather than the already-operating WSB-TV. As such, it announced plans to move the WSB-TV intellectual unit to the stronger channel 2 facility when it was completed and sell its channel 8 license, which was acquired by Broadcasting, Inc., for $525,000. The sale was challenged by applicants for additional stations that were affected by the then-ongoing freeze on new construction permits, including Georgia Tech (owners of WGST radio) and Decatur radio station owner E.D. Rivers, in part because planned allocation changes meant that there would be no further commercial VHF stations for Atlanta, and they sought to operate the channel as well.

The FCC dismissed the complaints and approved the sale of the channel 8 license to Broadcasting, Inc., in August 1951. Testing for the new channel 2 began on September 25, 1951, and WSB-TV moved there on September 30. Channel 8 returned at 5 p.m. that day as WLTV. Due to the way the transfer was structured legally, WXIA operates under the license originally granted to WSB-TV, while the current WSB-TV license dates from 1951. Thus, the present-day channel 11 is the second-oldest broadcasting facility in the South; WSB-TV signed on in 1948, four months after WTVR-TV in Richmond, Virginia.

Several more large changes would come for WLTV in the years that followed. When the FCC lifted its freeze on new TV stations with the Sixth Report and Order in April 1952, it made several changes to television allocations and substituted channel 11 for 8 at Atlanta, modifying WLTV's license to specify channel 11. The change coincided with the reallocation of channel 8 to non-commercial educational use at Athens and mitigated interference with channel 9 at Rome. The station would not change channels until September 1953, by which time Broadcasting, Inc., had sold WLTV to Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corporation. In line with its other television stations, Crosley changed the call letters to WLWA (often rendered as "WLW-A") on March 3, 1953.

In 1962, WLWA was purchased by Indianapolis businessman Richard Fairbanks, via his WIBC, Inc., as part of a settlement between Crosley and Fairbanks. Crosley had started WLWI (now WTHR) in Indianapolis in 1957, but Fairbanks insisted that the last VHF allocation in Indianapolis should go to a local owner. Eventually, the two companies agreed to what amounted to a trade, in which Crosley kept WLWI while Fairbanks bought WLWA. The Atlanta station's call sign then became WAII-TV, using the slogan "The Eyes of Atlanta" and the calls standing for "Atlanta's 11" (II). The station was sold to Pacific & Southern Broadcasting in 1968 and on March 23 became known as WQXI-TV, aligning it with WQXI AM and FM (the calls had originally been used on channel 36, currently WATL, from 1954 to 1955). Pacific & Southern later merged with Combined Communications Corporation; the merged company could not purchase both WQXI radio and television, as the FCC had barred new radio-television combinations in top 50 markets. The radio stations were sold to Jefferson-Pilot Broadcasting; as a result of the split, the station assumed the WXIA-TV call letters on December 24, 1973.

On September 20, 1976, WXIA first adopted "11 Alive" as its on-air branding, as part of Combined's practice of using the word "Alive" as part of the brand of most of their stations (two stations not owned by Combined also adopted the "11 Alive" branding that same year, then-independent station WPIX (now a CW affiliate) in New York City—which used the brand until 1986, and NBC affiliate WIIC in Pittsburgh, now WPXI—which used it until 1979). In 1979, Combined merged with the Gannett Company

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