History
On May 16, 1965, WNJU-TV signed on as the first commercial UHF station in the New York City television market. Its initial schedule was a mix of English, Asian, Spanish and Italian shows. During the mid-1960s, the station broadcast a live teenage dance show in the New York market called Disc-O-Teen, hosted by John Zacherle; and a folk music program, Rainbow Quest, hosted by Pete Seeger. The station was owned by Henry Becton (son of Maxwell Dickinson founder of Becton Dickinson) and Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. (son of Fairleigh S. Dickinson Sr. the founder of Fairleigh Dickinson University and also the co-founder of Becton Dickinson. The general manager in the station's early years was pioneering UHF broadcaster Edwin Cooperstein. WNJU was involved in some controversy when it aired bullfights, which some critics believed were too violent. The station was not profitable due to the lack of awareness of UHF stations in the New York metro area, being that the market had seven VHF stations and six of those were commercial stations. Most cities had an average of three commercial stations at the time. WNJU already had two strikes against it, so it basically served minority audiences with much brokered programming.
WNJU was sold in the fall of 1970 for $8,000,000 (a fairly large price for a UHF station back in 1970) to Screen Gems Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Columbia Pictures. It was thought that WNJU would now become competitive because Screen Gems had deep pockets, but the brokered ethnic format would ultimately continue. It maintained an English-speaking audience a few hours a week during the 1970s when it was the only New York broadcast outlet for the World Wide Wrestling Federation.
By the late 1970s, WNJU had evolved into mostly Spanish programming, along with some weekend ethnic brokered programming. During the week, WNJU ran English-speaking religious programming until noon. From 12:00 on they ran Spanish programming. On Sundays they also ran English-speaking religious shows in the mornings. WNJU was sold in 1979 to Jerry Perenchio, Bud Yorkin, and Norman Lear. While owning WNJU, these people formed another broadcasting company known as Act III Broadcasting and bought English-speaking commercial independent stations in medium and small markets.
By the early 1980s, the other brokered foreign language programs disappeared, and WNJU ran English language religious programming in the morning and Spanish programming the rest of the day.
In 1984, WNJU joined with two Spanish television stations not affiliated with Spanish International Network (now Univision) and formed NetSpan, the United States' second Spanish-language television network. NetSpan's original group of affiliates included WNJU, KSTS in San Jose, California, and WBBS in Chicago, Illinois (evenings and late nights only). The latter two stations were locally owned. In 1985, KVEA in Corona, California, WSCV in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (both of which were owned by Blair broadcasting), and locally owned WCIU in Chicago (after 5 p.m. only) joined Net Span. Net Span acquired these stations, excluding WCIU but including WNJU, outright in 1986. WNJU's owners continued on with Act III Broadcasting, buying more commercial stations.
In 1987 Net Span added more affiliates, and changed its name to Telemundo. In Chicago, WSNS dropped Univision and joined Telemundo, with WCIU becoming the Univision affiliate after 5 p.m. only. In the early 1990s, WNJU dropped its English-language religious shows and became a full-time Telemundo station.
At sign-on in 1965, WNJU was located at Symphony Hall (previously known as The Mosque Theatre), 1020 Broad Street in Newark, in the former studios of WATV (later WNTA, now WNET) Channel 13. In 1989, the studios moved to 39 Industrial Avenue in Teterboro, New Jersey. In 2003, WNJU relocated to the 6th Floor at 2200 Fletcher Avenue in Fort Lee, New Jersey, utilizing the former studios and offices of the NBC Cable network, CNBC, which around the same time moved to a state-of-the-art new studio complex at 900 Sylvan Avenue (Route 9W) in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
In 2001, NBC Universal purchased Telemundo. WNJU witnessed major overhauls, adopting similar opening graphics to those used at New York City's WNBC, and adopting a tweaked version of its opening music sequence.
In 2007, WNJU launched the slogan Tu Canal.
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