WOWT - History

History

Channel 6 signed on the air on August 29, 1949 as WOW-TV, the first television station in Nebraska and one of the oldest in the Upper Midwest. It also claims to be the first television station in four other Midwestern states (Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota).

The station was operated by Radio Station WOW, Inc. alongside WOW radio (AM 590, now KXSP, and 92.3 FM, now KEZO) The owners operated under a United States Supreme Court ruling which had forced the Woodmen of the World, who had founded WOW in 1923, to divest itself of the radio stations because they threatened the Woodmen's tax-exempt status.

The station was originally an NBC affiliate, but carried a secondary affiliation with ABC until 1953, when KOLN-TV signed on from Lincoln as an ABC affiliate. However, in 1954, Lincoln was broken off from the Omaha market, and WOW-TV resumed sharing ABC programming with KMTV until 1957, when KETV signed on as an ABC affiliate.

Meredith Corporation bought WOW-AM-FM-TV in 1951. The station claims it was bought by former Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews in 1954, but this is false; Matthews died two years earlier.

In 1956, after the radio stations dropped their long-time affiliation with NBC in favor of CBS, WOW-TV switched affiliations with KMTV and became Omaha's CBS television affiliate. When Meredith sold channel 6 to Chronicle Publishing Company of San Francisco in 1975, it changed its call letters to WOWT, due to FCC restrictions regarding call letter use by different owners at the time. Channel 6 later rejoined NBC under a special agreement with KMTV in 1986. In 1999, Chronicle sold its media holdings and WOWT was sold to Benedek Broadcasting via LIN TV in a three-way deal for WWLP in Springfield, Massachusetts; three years later, Benedek Broadcasting was bought out by current owner Gray Television.

WOWT was the first station to broadcast locally in color, starting in the mid-1950s; it was the first station to provide live reports during its daily newscasts; it was the first of the three local stations to broadcasts three live daily newscasts, at 5, 6, and 10pm; and in 1993, WOWT was the first of all local stations to offer a web site.

WOWT's most famous former employee is former The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who worked at WOW-TV in the early 1950s as his first television job. He hosted a show called The Squirrel's Nest where he told jokes. Another prominent former employee is former ABC Good Morning America reporter Steve Bell, who worked for Channel 6 in the early and mid-1960s. He was the only local reporter to go to Dallas in November 1963 to cover the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Bell left channel 6 in 1967 to join ABC News, where he stayed until 1986. During the analog era, WOWT-TV was relayed on a UHF repater, K58AE, which has since been shut down and deleted from the FCC database.