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WISE-TV, channel 33, is the NBC-affiliated television station for Fort Wayne, Indiana. Owned by SagamoreHill Broadcasting, WISE-TV is operated under a shared services agreement with Quincy Newspapers (which owns ABC affiliate, WPTA (channel 21)). Both stations share studios and transmitter facilities located on Butler Road in Northwest Fort Wayne. ==History== The station was founded on November 21, 1953 with the call letters WKJG-TV. It was the first television station in Fort Wayne and affiliated with NBC. The station was owned by William Kunkle, owner of ''The Journal Gazette'' newspaper (with both entities forming the call letters), WKJG radio (AM 1380 and FM 97.3), and other television stations. On September 30, 1971, the radio stations were sold. Their call letters became WMEE-AM and WMEF-FM respectively. Today, the FM station has the calls WMEE. The AM station went through a variety of call signs including WQHK, WHWD, and WONO. It went back to the original WKJG on November 3, 2003 and to this day, is Fort Wayne's ESPN Radio affiliate. However, both radio stations are owned by a different company and have no connection with the television station. The first person seen on television in Fort Wayne was Hilliard Gates, who doubled as a sportscaster for the station until his retirement in 1993. John Siemer, a newscaster and announcer at the station, was known at that time as "Engineer John" who introduced cartoons. For a time, WKJG-TV was owned by Thirty Three Inc, a Tony Hulman company. That broadcaster also owned two other television stations in Indiana, WTHI-TV in Terre Haute and WNDY-TV in Indianapolis. When Hulman died in 1977, WKJG became owned by Joseph R. Cloutier, who had been a Terre Haute-based long time employee of Hulman's company. After Cloutier's death, a trust fund called the Corporation for General Trade was formed, with Cloutier's son Joseph A. Cloutier as majority owner with a 51% stake. That company continued to own WKJG until it was sold in 2003. On January 13, 2003, the Corporation for General Trade was sold for $20 million to New Vision Television. The station changed its call letters to the current WISE-TV on May 26 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. A new transmitter with a stronger signal and new high definition options was installed on the tower. The station was sold again in March 2005 to Granite Broadcasting Corporation for $44.2 million. Granite sold ABC station WPTA to 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. Malara files its Securities and Exchange Commission reports jointly with Granite which lead to allegations that Granite uses Malara as a shell corporation to evade the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules on duopolies. The FCC does not allow common ownership of two of the four largest stations in a single market. Fort Wayne has only six full-power stations which is too few to allow duopolies in any case. After emerging from bankruptcy in the Summer of 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 broadcasting according to a Buffalo, New York news article printed on 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 20%. Back on January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced that they would end broadcasting and merge. The new combined network would be called The CW. The letters would represent the first initial of its corporate parents, CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. On February 22, News Corporation announced that they would start up another new network called MyNetworkTV. This new service, which would be a sister network to Fox, 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. CBS affiliate WANE-TV aired UPN on a second digital subchannel. The Fort Wayne affiliate of The WB was cable-only "WBFW" which was part of The WB 100+. The station was co-owned with WPTA by Malara Broadcasting. It was announced in March 2006 that 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 sub-channel to simulcast WBFW and offer access to CW programming for over-the-air viewers. On September 18, The CW debuted on WBFW (which became officially known as having the WPTA-DT2 calls). The station became known on-air as "Fort Wayne's CW". 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-TV's third digital subchannel. On February 11, 2014, Quincy Newspapers agreed to purchase WPTA from the Malara Broadcast Group as part of a deal to purchase Granite Broadcasting's stations in four markets (the other stations were KBJR-TV in Superior, Wisconsin and its satellite KRII in Chisholm, Minnesota, WEEK-TV in Peoria, Illinois and WBNG-TV in Binghamton, New York). The WISE-TV license would be acquired by SagamoreHill Broadcasting; however, WPTA (which would be acquired by Quincy outright, making it the senior partner in the Fort Wayne duopoly) would operate WISE-TV through a shared services agreement. In a presentation submitted to the FCC in August 2014, Quincy said that the existing joint sales agreement would be terminated, allowing WISE-TV its own sales staff, and that it would spend $2 million on the construction of a new studio facility at the WPTA site, after which both stations would produce competing live newscasts.〔() (Referenced p. 43)〕 In November 2014, the deal was reworked to remove SagamoreHill from the transaction; Quincy will now acquire WISE, with WPTA remaining with Malara. In July 2015, the deal was reworked yet again to have SagamoreHill acquire WISE, the SSA between WISE and WPTA (owned by Quincy) wound down within nine months of its closure, and have all of WISE's network affiliations moved to WPTA in exchange for its The CW Plus affiliation.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=https://licensing.fcc.gov/cdbs/CDBS_Attachment/getattachment.jsp?appn=101683852&qnum=5120©num=1&exhcnum=2 )〕 On September 15, 2015, the FCC approved the deal.〔(Letter, ''CDBS Public Access'' Federal Communications Commission, Retrieved 15 September 2015 )〕 And the sale was completed on November 2. 〔(Quincy Newspapers Inc. acquires four TV stations ) ''Quincy Herald-Whig'', Retrieved 2 November, 2015〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WISE-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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