WNEM-TV - History

History

WNEM-TV was founded by the NorthEastern Michigan Corporation, hence the call letters, on February 16, 1954 as a NBC affiliate. Originally, its main studios were located on rented space at Bishop International Airport in Flint with auxiliary studios in its city of license, Bay City. In the 1960s, it moved its main studios to the transmitter site in Indiantown. During its first four years, WNEM-TV had a secondary affiliation with ABC sharing programming from that network with WKNX-TV (channel 57, now WEYI-TV channel 25) until 1958 when WJRT-TV signed-on and took that affiliation. WNEM-TV also aired programming from DuMont until that network dissolved.

James Gerity's, a professional violinist, Gerity Broadcasting bought the station in 1961 and sold it to the Meredith Corporation in 1969. In the mid-1980s, the station moved its primary studios to their current location in downtown Saginaw. Today, the Becker Road complex is home to Delta College's Buena Vista Campus in addition to WNEM-TV's transmitter. By the late 1980s, mirroring a trend in many other television markets, WNEM-TV was the dominant station in Mid-Michigan, helped by NBC's then-dominant prime time lineup.

On January 16, 1995, WNEM-TV and WEYI swapped networks, and WNEM-TV became a CBS affiliate (announced June 30, 1994). The move came because Detroit's longtime CBS affiliate, WJBK, had switched to the Fox network, and CBS was unable to get WXYZ-TV or WDIV to switch networks. Eventually, the network landed on WGPR-TV (now WWJ-TV) which did not have an adequate signal to much of the Detroit market until a signal upgrade in 1999. WNEM's signal penetrated further into the northern portion of the Detroit market than did WEYI. Channel 5 provides city-grade coverage in Lapeer County and grade B coverage in St. Clair, northern Oakland, and extreme northern Macomb as well as Sarnia, Ontario. Until 1999, the outer parts of the market relied on WNEM-TV, WLNS-TV in Lansing, and WTOL in Toledo, Ohio for CBS programming.

Also on January 16, 1995, WEYI took on secondary affiliations with both UPN and The WB and aired programming from the two networks late at night. The station relinquished the secondary WB affiliation in October 1999 to WEYI. It dropped CBS's daytime soap opera Guiding Light in 1996 due to low ratings which made it one of two CBS stations in the nation that did not carry the program for what would turn out to be its final 13 years (the other was KOVR in Sacramento, California). However, by 2007 the show was aired instead on My5 at 10am, and stayed there for the rest of its run.

WNEM-TV shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009, as part of the DTV transition in the United States. The station remained on its pre-transition channel 22 using PSIP to display WNEM-TV's virtual channel as 5. However, channel 5 analog did remain on-the-air for a short period afterward with a nightlight slide with phone numbers and information about the switch.

As of April 1, 2011, Comcast Cablevision subscribers in Holly, MI recently had WNEM-TV replaced with WWJ-TV as the main CBS network affiliate. My5 was also replaced with WMYD as the main MyNetworkTV affiliate. In August 2011, WNEM-TV began airing its syndicated programming in high definition.