WPTA - History

History

The station began broadcasting on September 28, 1957 and aired an analog signal on UHF channel 21. It was founded by Sarkes Tarzian, an Indianapolis engineer whose company owned Bloomington's WTTV and several other Indiana stations. It was the third station to launch in Fort Wayne. The call letters come from the long tradition of other Tarzian stations including once former sister station WPTH having a family members initials inside the call letters. On its launch, channel 21 took all ABC programming from NBC affiliate WKJG-TV (now WISE-TV) and CBS affiliate WANE-TV.

Under Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rules at that time, the market was deemed too small for three full-power stations so Tarzian's application listed WPTA's city of license as the small town of Roanoke. This town is just across the Allen and Huntington county line approximately fourteen miles to the southwest of its studios and transmitter on Butler Road in Fort Wayne. It was possible because the FCC had by this time allowed a station to have its main studio in a different location from its city of license. WPTA identified itself as "Roanoke/Fort Wayne" on-air until the license was officially transferred to Fort Wayne sometime in the 1970s.

In addition to ABC programming, it also originally aired seven and a half hours of local, live programming per week. In 1957, the station showed a spin-off of American Bandstand called Teen Dance and afternoon kids show Popeye and the Rascals. In 1964, a 2,226-square-foot (206.8 m2) addition to its studios was added to accommodate an expanding sales staff. On April 4, 1973, the station was sold to Combined Communications for $3.6 million. Under new management, WPTA purchased new cameras and a more modern switcher. On June 7, 1979, Combined merged with Gannett.

On May 12, 1983, Gannett sold WPTA (along with WLKY in Louisville, Kentucky) to Pulitzer Publishing for an undisclosed amount. The station was sold again to the Granite Broadcasting Corporation on September 25, 1989 for $22.15 million. In late-1998 alongside the launch of The WB 100+ and its cable-only affiliates, WPTA began managing and promoting "WBFW". Since its was cable-exclusive, the channel used the calls in a fictional manner.

When WSJV in South Bend (which signed on three years before WPTA) switched to Fox in 1995, WPTA became the longest-tenured ABC affiliate in Indiana. At one time (according to Granite Broadcasting's web site), WPTA was among the ten strongest ABC affiliates in the country, ranking up with WISN-TV in Milwaukee, KMBC-TV Kansas City, and KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City.

In 2005, after Granite bought NBC affiliate WISE-TV, it sold WPTA to the Malara Broadcast 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-TV is nominally the senior partner in this LMA, the stations' combined operation is based at WPTA's studios and the bulk of the news staff came from WPTA (see below).

Malara jointly files its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports with Granite which lead to allegations that the company uses Malara as a shell corporation for Granite. If thee allegations are proven to be true, Granite would be guilty of evading 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—too few to legally allow duopolies in any case.

After emerging from bankruptcy in Summer 2007, Granite stock was taken over by Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Connecticut which is a privately owned hedge fund. Silver Point Capital now controls Granite according to a Buffalo, New York news article printed 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 twenty percent.

On January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced 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 as sister network to Fox. It 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.

WANE-TV offered UPN on a second digital subchannel. An announcement in March said "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. Meanwhile on September 5, WISE-TV moved NBC Weather Plus from its second digital subchannel in order for it to become the area's affiliate of MyNetworkTV. Weather Plus then began airing on WISE-DT3. On September 18, The CW debuted on "WBFW" which officially began using the WPTA-DT2.

On September 28, 2007, WPTA unveiled a 3D version of its current logo to commemorate the station's 50th anniversary and conjunction with ABC's new image campaign, but did not fully switch to it until August 4, 2008. On January 10, 2009, it went online with a new digital master control center which will service WPTA, WISE, and Granite's other Midwestern stations. After the station shut down its analog signal, it remained on its pre-transition digital channel (24). Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WPTA's virtual channel as 21.