WLWC - History

History

WLWC began broadcasting April 14, 1997 as an affiliate of The WB. It was owned by Fant Broadcasting and operated by NBC-owned WJAR under a local marketing agreement (LMA). For the first two years of The WB's existence, Boston's WLVI-TV, which had been carried on cable in Rhode Island for decades, doubled as the WB affiliate for Providence/New Bedford as well. The station launched with various syndicated shows as well as a WJAR-produced 10 p.m. newscast, known as TV 28 News at 10, which began airing a few months after the WPRI-TV-produced effort on Fox affiliate WNAC-TV.

Fant had signed an LMA with WJAR's previous owner, Outlet Communications, on December 14, 1994, prior to Outlet's 1996 merger with NBC. Earlier in 1994, on March 18, Fant's station in Columbus, Ohio, WWHO, became the junior partner in an LMA with Outlet-owned NBC affiliate WCMH-TV. The LMA arrangement allowed channel 28 to come to the air; the station's original construction permit was granted to Metrovision Inc., a company controlled by Franklin D. Graham, on November 8, 1982, but financial problems and difficulties in securing a transmitter location prevented channel 28 (which was assigned the call letters WFDG, referring to Graham, on December 22, 1982; it became WLWC on August 1, 1995) from signing on. After several ownership changes, Fant purchased the permit on January 3, 1995.

Although both of Fant's LMAs with Outlet were intended to expire after ten years, by the time channel 28 signed on, NBC had let it be known that it did not want to run stations outside its core owned-and-operated (O&O) outlets, and pushed Fant to sell WLWC and WWHO. On July 31, 1997, NBC announced a three-way swap in which Fant exchanged WLWC and WWHO to Viacom's Paramount Stations Group subsidiary, while Paramount/Viacom-owned NBC affiliate WVIT in Hartford became an NBC O&O.

With the ownership change, WLWC added a secondary affiliation with UPN, and became a sister station to Boston's UPN affiliate, WSBK-TV, which until then had doubled as the UPN affiliate for Providence/New Bedford and (as with WLVI) had long been carried on Rhode Island cable systems. WLWC's master control and some internal operations were thus relocated from WJAR's studios in Cranston to WSBK's studios in Boston, with sales and public affairs offices remaining in Providence. In addition, TV 28 News at 10 was canceled by September 1997. Channel 28 became more or less a UPN O&O in May 2000, as UPN became its primary affiliation while The WB was relegated to secondary status.

For most of the television era, the FCC had not allowed common ownership of stations with overlapping city-grade signals. Just months earlier, WNAC-TV had to be sold because its previous owner, Argyle Television, had merged with Hearst Broadcasting, owner of Boston's WCVB-TV—the second time in three years that a Rhode Island station had to be sold after its owner merged with the owner of a Boston station. Due to these rules, WLWC's license was thus acquired by Straightline Communications, with WSBK operating the station through an LMA (earlier in 1997, Straightline acquired WTVX in West Palm Beach, Florida on behalf of Paramount/Viacom's Miami–Fort Lauderdale station WBFS-TV; the company later purchased and operated WVNY in Burlington, Vermont separately from Viacom); in 2001, Viacom bought WLWC outright.

After Viacom and CBS merged in 2000, the operations of WLWC and WSBK were integrated with those of WBZ-TV at WBZ's facility on Soldiers Field Road in the Brighton section of Boston. When Viacom split into two companies in 2005, WLWC, along with the rest of Viacom's television stations, became part of CBS Corporation. On January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced that they would end broadcasting and merge into a new combined network called The CW which launched on September 18. At the same time, the new network signed a 10-year affiliation agreement with 11 of CBS' UPN stations, including WLWC. However, it was a near-certainty that WLWC would become an affiliate of The CW in any event, given that it was a dual UPN/WB affiliate.

On February 7, 2007, CBS announced it was selling WLWC and seven other stations in Austin, Texas, Salt Lake City, Utah, and West Palm Beach, Florida to Cerberus Capital Management for $185 million. Cerberus then formed a new holding company for the stations, Four Points Media Group, who took over the operation of the stations through local marketing agreements in late-June 2007. On November 26, master control of WLWC moved from WBZ-TV to KUTV's studios on Main Street in Downtown Salt Lake City. The entire group deal officially closed on January 10, 2008.

WLWC permanently turned off its analog transmitter at midnight on December 9, 2008. The last minutes of transmission were uneventful with the conclusion of Malcolm in the Middle, some commercials, and the opening title of That '70s Show. WLWC remained on its pre-transition channel 22 (using PSIP to display its virtual channel as 28) following the February 2009 analog shutdown. Nexstar took over the operations of all of the Four Points stations in March 2009. At one point, the station had studios on State Street in Downtown Providence.

On June 30, 2010, WLWC invoked the FCC's network non-duplication rule. This resulted in Comcast blacking out primetime CW programming on WLVI-TV in Fall River, Massachusetts. This did not impact the rest of the communities in Bristol County, due to the fact that WLVI-TV still has "significantly viewed" status across Bristol County. However, WLWC filed a request with the FCC to exempt Fall River from significantly viewed status. On August 2, 2010, the station added LATV on a new second digital subchannel. This is also seen on Comcast digital channels 299 and 702, Verizon FiOS digital channel 469, and Cox digital channel 809.

On September 8, 2011, Four Points Media announced the sale of its television group, including WLWC, to Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair was expected to begin operating the stations via a local marketing agreement following antitrust approval and prior to the closing expected in the first quarter of 2012. Sinclair owns one other television station in New England: Portland, Maine's CBS affiliate WGME-TV. Sinclair was also a former owner of Springfield, Massachusetts's ABC affiliate WGGB-TV. The deal was completed on January 3, 2012.