WISE-TV - History

History

The station was founded on November 21, 1953 as WKJG-TV and aired an analog signal on UHF channel 33. It was the first television station in Fort Wayne and affiliated with NBC. The station was owned by William Kunkle, publisher of The Journal Gazette, along with WKJG radio (AM 1380 and FM 97.3); the call letters stood for Kunkle Journal Gazette. Veteran Indiana sportscaster Hilliard Gates was the first person seen on the new television station. On September 30, 1971, the radio stations were sold. Their call letters became WMEE-AM and WMEF-FM respectively. Today, the FM station has the calls WMEE. The AM station went through a variety of call signs including WQHK, WHWD, and WONO. It went back to the original WKJG on November 3, 2003 and is currently Fort Wayne's ESPN Radio affiliate.

This station long with WFIE-TV (which signed on six days before WISE) in Evansville, are the longest-tenured NBC affiliates in the state of Indiana.

For a time in the 1970s, WKJG-TV was owned by Tony Hulman along with WTHI-TV in Terre Haute. When Hulman died in 1977, WKJG was bought by Joseph R. Cloutier, a longtime executive with Hulman's company. After Cloutier's death, the station was bought by a trust fund called the Corporation for General Trade. Cloutier's son, Joseph A. Cloutier, became the majority share holder with 51%. That company continued to own WKJG until it was sold in 2003. Through all these changes in ownership, Gates remained General Manager until 1990, doubling for most of that time as sportscaster. John Siemer, a newscaster and announcer at the station, was known at that time as "Engineer John" who introduced cartoons.

On January 13, 2003, the Corporation for General Trade was sold for $20 million to New Vision Television. The station changed its call letters to WISE-TV on May 26 to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. WISE-DT went on-the-air in 2003 on UHF channel 19 becoming the first commercial digital channel in Fort Wayne. A new transmitter with a stronger signal and new high definition options was installed on the tower. The station was sold again in March 2005 to the Granite Broadcasting Corporation for $44.2 million. Since the company already owned WPTA, it divested the channel to the Malara Broadcasting Group for $45.3 million. A local marketing agreement was established that called for Granite to provide operation services to WPTA as well as for Malara's other new station, KDLH in Duluth, Minnesota Although WISE is nominally the senior partner in the LMA, the merged operation moved to WPTA's studios, and most of WISE's news staff was laid off.

Malara files its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports jointly with Granite which has led to allegations that Granite uses Malara as a shell corporation to evade Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules on duopolies. The FCC does not allow common ownership of two of the four largest stations in a single market. Additionally, Fort Wayne has only six full-power stations, which are too few to allow duopolies in any case. After emerging from bankruptcy in Summer 2007, Granite stock was taken over by privately owned hedge fund Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Connecticut. Silver Point Capital now controls Granite broadcasting according to a Buffalo, New York news article printed on September 16, 2007. According to the same article, Granite will be sold to other parties and many of its stations have been laying-off employees or cutting salaries up to 20%.

On January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced that the networks would end broadcasting and merge. The new combined service would be called The CW. The letters would represent the first initial of corporate parents CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. On February 22, News Corporation announced that it would start up another new network called MyNetworkTV. This new service, which would be sister to Fox, would be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division Twentieth Television. MyNetworkTV was created in order to give UPN and WB stations, not mentioned as becoming CW affiliates, another option besides becoming Independent. It was also created to compete against The CW.

CBS affiliate WANE-TV aired UPN on a second digital subchannel. The Fort Wayne affiliate of The WB was cable-only "WBFW" (provided through The WB 100+) and co-owned with WPTA by the Malara Broadcast Group. It was announced in March 2006 that "WBFW" would affiliate with The CW via The CW Plus (a similar operation to The WB 100+). WPTA decided to create a new second digital subchannel to simulcast "WBFW" and offer access to CW programming for over-the-air viewers. On September 18, The CW debuted on that station which began using the WPTA-DT2 calls officially. On September 5, 2006, WISE-TV moved NBC Weather Plus from its second digital subchannel to WISE-DT3 in order for it to become the area's affiliate of MyNetworkTV.

On December 1, 2008, NBC Weather Plus was shut down and WISE-DT3 (known on-air as "Indiana's NewsCenter Weather Plus") reverted to a 24-hour local news and weather channel called "INCnow". Carrying local and state news, weather radar, and sports headlines, the channel allowed Indiana's NewsCenter to air breaking news without disrupting regular network programming. It had been possible after the national service folded that WISE-DT3's function would be assumed by the preexisting "Pinpoint VIPIR HD Channel" on WPTA-DT3. This featured rotating weather maps with audio from the National Weather Service.

On December 3, 2008, it was announced that viewers in Grant County, Indiana would no longer be able to view WISE-TV on Bright House Networks in Marion, Gas City, and Jonesboro after December 31, 2008. The station shut down its analog signal on February 17, 2009. Its existing digital signal on UHF channel 19 was moved to a post-transition digital channel (18). Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WISE-TV's virtual channel as 33.

On July 25, 2011 Nexstar Broadcasting (owners of WFFT-TV) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Granite Broadcasting, claiming the company is trying to monopolize ad sales through its shared services agreement with WPTA (owned by Malara Broadcasting) and the five network affiliations that will be shared between WPTA and WISE (WPTA already carries ABC and CW programming, while WISE added Fox programming to its MyNetworkTV-affiliated digital subchannel). Nexstar is seeking a judgment that would force Granite to give up at least one of the three Big Four affiliations in Fort Wayne. On February 6, 2013, Nexstar settled its lawsuit against Granite; the settlement resulted in the Fox affiliation for the Fort Wayne market returning to WFFT on March 1, 2013, effectively reversing the switch.