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WPTA, virtual channel 21 (UHF digital channel 24), is an ABC-affiliated television station located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States. The station is owned by Quincy Newspapers; through a shared services agreement, it is a sister station to NBC affiliate WISE-TV (channel 33, owned by SagamoreHill Broadcasting). The two stations share studios and transmitter facilities located on Butler Road in Northwest Fort Wayne. The station can also be seen on Comcast and Frontier FiOS channel 7, and in HD on Frontier FiOS digital channel 506 and Comcast digital channel 1007. ==History== The station first signed on the air on September 28, 1957 and was founded by Sarkes Tarzian, an Indianapolis engineer whose company owned Bloomington's WTTV and several other stations in Indiana. The WPTA call letters come from the long tradition of other Tarzian stations, including once former sister station WPTH, that base the call letters upon the initials of family members of company management. Upon its launch, channel 21 took all ABC programming from NBC affiliate WKJG-TV (channel 33, now WISE-TV) and CBS affiliate WANE-TV (channel 15). Under Federal Communication Commission (FCC) rules at that time, the market was deemed too small to support three full-power stations, so Tarzian's application listed WPTA's city of license in the small town of Roanoke, located just across the Allen and Huntington county line approximately 14 miles to the southwest of its studios and transmitter 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 live local programming each week. In 1957, the station aired a spin-off of ''American Bandstand'' called ''Teen Dance'' and the afternoon kids show ''Popeye and the Rascals''. In 1964, a 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 the Gannett Company. 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 providing promotional services for "WBFW", which used that callsign in a fictional manner since it was a cable-exclusive service. 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 website), 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. On March 9, 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 in which Granite would provide operational 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 led to allegations that the company uses Malara as a shell corporation for Granite. If the allegations are proven to be true, Granite would be guilty of evading FCC duopoly rules. The FCC does not allow common ownership of two of the four highest-rated stations in a single market. Additionally, Fort Wayne has only six full-power stations (only four of which are licensed as commercial outlets) – too few to legally allow duopolies in any case. After emerging from bankruptcy in the summer of 2007, Granite stock was taken over by the privately owned hedge fund Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Connecticut. Silver Point Capital now controls Granite according to a Buffalo, New York news article printed September 16, 2007. According to the same article, Granite planned to sell its properties to other parties and many of its stations laid off employees or cut salaries up to 20 percent. 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, WPTA brought a new digital master control center online which services the station, WISE-TV and Granite's other stations in the Midwest. 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). Quincy opted to purchase WPTA's license instead of WISE's license because WPTA has been the higher-rated of the two stations in the local viewership ratings. In addition to acquiring WPTA outright (which would make it the senior partner in the Fort Wayne duopoly), Quincy Newspapers would operate WISE-TV (whose license would be acquired by SagamoreHill Broadcasting) through a shared services agreement. In November 2014, the deal was reworked to remove SagamoreHill from the transaction, with Quincy acquiring WISE, and WPTA remaining with Malara. In July 2015, the deal was reworked yet again; it will return to its previous structure with Quincy and SagamoreHill acquiring WPTA and WISE respectively. The SSA between WPTA and WISE will be maintained, but wound down within nine months of the acquisition's closure, after which The CW's affiliation will be moved to WISE, WISE's NBC and MyNetworkTV affiliations will move to subchannels of WPTA, and the two stations will begin operating independently.〔(【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 )〕 which was completed on November 2. 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「WPTA」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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