WLKY-TV - History

History

The station signed on September 16, 1961 as an ABC affiliate. Previously, the ABC affiliation in Louisville was shared between NBC affiliate WAVE-TV and then-CBS affiliate WHAS-TV. Although Louisville had been big enough since the early 1950s to support three full affiliates, it had a fairly long wait for full network service. The Louisville market is a fairly large market geographically, and also includes some rugged terrain. The nearest VHF allocations, channels 7 and 13, had been allocated to Evansville and Bowling Green, respectively. These factors caused the first attempt at a full-time ABC affiliate in the area, WKLO-TV, to shut down after only six months on the air. With this in mind, perspective owners were skittish about setting up shop on one of the available UHF allocations in the area.

WLKY was founded by a local group, Kentuckiana Television, who in 1967 sold it to Sonderling Broadcasting (which would acquire several medium-market radio and television stations such as WAST in Albany, New York (now WNYT) until that company merged with Viacom in 1979). In 1973, Sonderling sold the station to Combined Communications. In 1979, Combined Communications merged with the Gannett Company.

In the spring of 1983, Gannett sold WLKY and WPTA in Fort Wayne, Indiana (the two smallest stations in Gannett's television station portfolio at the time) to Pulitzer Publishing after it purchased WLVI-TV in Boston (currently owned by Sunbeam Television) from Field Communications and WTCN-TV (now KARE) in Minneapolis from Metromedia. This was because the WLVI and WTCN purchases left Gannett with two television stations over the Federal Communications Commission's seven-station limit in effect at the time. Pulitzer kept WLKY but sold WPTA to Granite Broadcasting in 1989.

From 1977 to 1986, WLKY was known as "32 Alive." At the time, Combined Communications used the "Alive" moniker on four of its stations-- WLKY, KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, WXIA-TV in Atlanta and WPTA in Fort Wayne. Gannett-owned WXIA still uses the "Alive" moniker, as does WPTA, although that station is no longer owned by Gannett.

In September 1990, just over seven years after Pulitzer completed its purchase of the station, WLKY swapped network affiliations with WHAS (by then owned by the Providence Journal Company, now owned by Belo), with WLKY taking the CBS affiliation and WHAS becoming the ABC affiliate—much to that station's chagrin. This came after then-second-place ABC became dissatisfied with the viewership ratings at some of its affiliates (while CBS was in distant third at this midpoint of the Laurence Tisch era of the network's history), and ABC wanted a stronger affiliation. WLKY had long been one of ABC's weaker affiliates, while WHAS had been the dominant station in Louisville for almost 20 years at the time.

By this time, however, cable television had gained significant penetration in the Louisville area. Indeed, to this day, cable and satellite are all but essential for acceptable television in much of Kentuckiana. Combined with a low universal cable channel number (Channel 5 on both Comcast and Insight), WLKY's former weakness of being a UHF station was almost completely nullified.

Pulitzer sold its entire broadcasting division, including WLKY, to what was then Hearst-Argyle Television in 1999. Hearst's aggressive marketing helped make the station a factor in the ratings for the first time in memory, and by the dawn of the new millennium it was waging a spirited battle with WAVE for the runner-up slot in the market behind long-dominant WHAS-TV.

On September 1, 2011, WLKY added Weigel Broadcasting's classic television network Me-TV to the station's 32.2 digital subchannel.

On July 9, 2012, WLKY's parent company Hearst Television was involved in a dispute with Time Warner Cable, leading to WLKY being pulled from Time Warner Cable and temporarily replaced with Nexstar Broadcasting Group station WROC-TV of Rochester, New York; Time Warner chose the Rochester station as they do not own the rights to carry any of the other regional CBS affiliates. The substitution of WROC in place of WLKY lasted until July 19, 2012, when a deal was reached between Hearst and Time Warner.