WNYW

For the former shortwave radio station WNYW, see WYFR

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WNYW, channel 5, is the flagship television station of the News Corporation-owned Fox Broadcasting Company, located in New York City. The station's transmitter is atop the Empire State Building, and its studio facilities are in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. WNYW is a sister station to Secaucus, New Jersey-based WWOR-TV (channel 9), the New York area's MyNetworkTV affiliate.

In the few areas of the eastern United States where viewers cannot receive Fox network programs over-the-air, WNYW is available on satellite via Dish Network and DirecTV, which also provides coverage of the station to Latin American countries and on JetBlue's LiveTV inflight entertainment system. WNYW is also available on cable in the Caribbean.

History

The station traces its history to 1938, when television set and equipment manufacturer Allen B. DuMont founded W2XVT (re-named as W2XWV in 1944), an experimental station. On May 2, 1944, the station received its commercial license -- the third in New York City -- as WABD, after DuMont's initials. It was one of the few stations that continued broadcasting during World War II, making it the fourth-oldest continuously broadcasting commercial station in the United States. The station originally broadcast on channel 4 (now occupied by WNBC-TV) and moved to channel 5 on December 15, 1945.

Soon after channel 5 received its commercial license, DuMont Laboratories began a series of experimental coaxial cable hookups between WABD and W3XWT, a DuMont-owned experimental station in Washington, D.C. (now WTTG). These hookups were the beginning of the DuMont Television Network, the world's first licensed commercial television network. DuMont began regular network service in 1946, with WABD as the flagship station. In 1954, WABD and DuMont moved into the $5 million DuMont Tele-Centre at 205 East 67th Street, inside the shell of the space formerly occupied by Jacob Ruppert's Central Opera House. A half-century later, the station is still headquartered in the same building, which was later renamed the Metromedia Telecenter, and is known today as the Fox Television Center.

By February 1955, DuMont realized it could not continue in network television, and decided to shut down network operations and operate WABD and its Washington sister station, WTTG (also operating on channel 5), as independents. After DuMont aired its last network broadcast in August 1956, DuMont spun off WABD and WTTG as the "DuMont Broadcasting Corporation", which later changed its name to Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation. In 1958, Washington-based investor John W. Kluge acquired controlling interest in Metropolitan Broadcasting, and installed himself as the company's chairman. WABD's operations were merged with Kluge's New York radio stations, WNEW (1130 kHz., now WBBR) and WNEW-FM (102.7 MHz., now WWFS), and channel 5's call letters were subsequentially changed to WNEW-TV to match its new radio sisters. Metropolitan Broadcasting would change its name to Metromedia in 1961.

In the 1960s, WNEW-TV ran on a low budget like the other two major New York independents, WOR-TV (now WWOR-TV) and WPIX. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, channel 5 benefited from Metromedia's aggressiveness in acquiring movies, cartoons, and first-run syndicated shows, some of which were produced by Metromedia. By the 1970s the station was New York's leading independent, and WNEW-TV was also popular as well in most of upstate New York, and portions of New Jersey, Connecticut, and eastern Pennsylvania, where the station was available on cable until the late 1980s.

In 1986 Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, who owned a controlling interest in the 20th Century Fox film studio, purchased the Metromedia television stations, including WNEW-TV. The station's call letters were changed to WNYW, and it and the other Metromedia stations formed the cornerstone of the Fox network, with WNYW as the flagship station. Initially, WNYW's schedule didn't change that much, as Fox only aired network programming on weekends.

Murdoch had one local obstacle to overcome before his purchase of channel 5 could become final. The News Corporation had been publishing the New York Post since 1976, and Federal Communications Commission rules of the time did not allow common ownership of newspapers and broadcast licenses in the same city. Murdoch was granted a temporary waiver of this prohibition in order to complete the Metromedia television purchase. The News Corporation would sell the Post in 1988, but reacquired the paper five years later with a permanent waiver of the cross-ownership rules.

Starting in the late summer of 1986, WNYW produced the nightly newsmagazine A Current Affair, one of the first shows to be labeled under the tag "tabloid television". Originally a local program, it was first anchored by Maury Povich, formerly of WTTG (and who would later do double-duty, albeit briefly, on WNYW's newscasts as an anchor). Within months of its launch, A Current Affair was on the other Fox-owned stations, and in 1988 the series went into national syndication, where it remained until its cancellation in 1996.

On August 2, 1988, the station abruptly dropped the morning cartoons in favor of a morning newscast called Good Day New York. WNYW became the first Fox-owned station with a weekday morning newscast, and within five years of its launch it became the top-rated morning show in the New York market. Today it remains a viable competitor to the network morning shows, and the success of Good Day New York led to other Fox-owned stations launching morning shows of their own, including: Fox Morning News on WTTG, Fox News in the Morning on WFLD-TV in Chicago, and Good Day L.A. on KTTV in Los Angeles.

As Fox continued to expand its primetime hours to an eventual seven nights by 1992, WNYW's schedule continued to feature children's programs from Fox Kids during afternoons, and sitcoms in early evenings. As the decade progressed, the station added talk/reality shows and court shows during middays. From 1999 until 2001, WNYW was the broadcast home of the New York Yankees, displacing long-time incumbent WPIX.

In 2001, Fox bought most of the television interests of Chris-Craft Industries, including WNYW's former rival, WWOR-TV. In the fall of 2001, WNYW dropped the Fox Kids weekday block and moved it to WWOR-TV, where it ran for a few more months before being cancelled at the end of the year. Some office functions have been merged, but most of the stations' operations remain separate. Fox announced plans to merge the two stations' operations in 2004, with WWOR-TV moving from its studios in Secaucus, New Jersey to the Fox Television Center. However, it backed off later in the year under pressure from New Jersey's congressional delegation.

On September 11, 2001, the transmitter facilities of WNYW as well as eight other local television stations and several radio stations were destroyed when two hijacked airplanes crashed into and destroyed the World Trade Center towers. Since then, WNYW has been transmitting its signal from the Empire State Building.

News

The station is home to one of America's longest-running primetime local newscasts. The 10 O’Clock News (now Fox 5 News at Ten) premiered on March 13, 1967, as New York's first primetime newscast. The news was home to the world-famous announcement: "It's 10PM... Do you know where your children are?" was used in this program first, and while its exact origins are unknown , Tom Gregory was one of the first people to say this famous line. Other television stations in the country have adopted this for their own 10 p.m. slots. Celebrities were often used in the 1980s to read the slogan.

WNYW also aired a 7:00 p.m. newscast from 1987 to 1993, known as Fox News at Seven.

In August 1988, WNYW launched Good Day New York, a program comparable to the Today Show, Good Morning America or The Early Show. In 1991 a new and eventually very popular music package was composed for the show by Edd Kalehoff, a New York composer who is best known for composing the themes and music cues for several game shows, notably The Price is Right.

Since the Fox takeover, WNYW's newscasts have become more tabloid in style and has been fodder for jokes, even to the point of being parodied on Saturday Night Live, and the consumer reporting segment The Problem Solvers receiving the same treatment on The Daily Show.

WNYW was portrayed in an episode of the Fox animated comedy Futurama, titled "When Aliens Attack", in which the station was accidentally knocked off the air by Philip J. Fry. That resulted in angry Omicron Perseins invading Earth and demanding to see the end of a program which had been cut off for them.

In 2002, WNYW added a 90-minute block of newscasts from 5 to 6:30 p.m on weekdays, giving the station just under 40 hours of local news per week, which is the most of any television station in New York City. In 2004, two events occurred involving the WNYW news department. Longtime anchor John Roland, a 35-year veteran of channel 5, retired from the station on June 4, 2004. Len Cannon, a former NBC News correspondent who had joined WNYW as a reporter and anchor some time earlier, was initially named as Roland's replacement. Then, several months later, veteran New York City anchorman Ernie Anastos signed a multi-year contract with WNYW, despite the fact that he was at the time anchoring at WCBS-TV. The signing would displace Cannon as lead anchor, and shortly after it was announced, he asked for, and was granted, a release from contractual obligations with the station. Anastos joined WNYW in July 2005, and Cannon joined KHOU-TV in Houston as its lead anchor in the spring of 2006.

In areas of New Jersey where the New York and Philadelphia markets overlap, both WNYW and sister station WWOR-TV share resources with Philadelphia sister station WTXF-TV. The stations share reporters for these stories.

On April 3, 2006, WNYW revamped their entire on-air appearance with a new set, new music, new graphics, and a new logo (first used by WTVT in Tampa). The new graphics and logo package will eventually be standardized for all of News Corp.'s Fox stations. Channel 5 is also one of the first Fox owned-and-operated stations to launch a MyFox powered website, which features video, more detailed news, and new community features such as blogs and picture galleries.

Personalities

Anchors

Anchors

• Dari Alexander - weeknights 6 p.m.
• Ernie Anastos - weeknights 5 and 10 p.m.
• Jodi Applegate - Good Day New York
• Ron Corning - Good Day New York
• Rick Folbaum - weeknights 6 p.m.
• Karen Hepp - weekends
• Reid Lamberty - weekdays, Fox 5 Live
• Lynda Lopez - Good Day New York and Fox 5 Live
• Rob Malcolm - weekends
• Rosanna Scotto - weeknights 5 and 10 p.m.

Weather

• Vanessa Alfano - substitute morning meteorologist
• Craig Allen - substitute weekend meteorologist
• Nick Gregory - chief/weekday evening meteorologist
• Tracy Humphrey - weekend meteorologist
• Mike Woods - weekday morning meteorologist

Sports

• Reischea Canidate - weekend sports anchor; co-anchors Sports Extra
• Duke Castigione - weeknight sports anchor; co-anchors Sports Extra
• Carl Reuter - reporter for Sports Extra/substitute sports anchor

Reporters

Vanessa Alfano Dick Brennan (politics) Lisa Cabrera Chris Cristie Anne Craig Katherine Creag Andrea Day John Deutzman Arnold Diaz (consumer affairs) Lisa Evers Mary Garofalo Andre Hepkins

Karen Hepp Tracy Humphrey Charles Leaf Rob Malcolm Sapna Parikh Carla Quinn Linda Schmidt Toni Senecal (entertainment) Mike Sheehan Kai Simonsen

Notable alumni

Tex Antoine (D) Mario Bosquez Sandy Becker Bill Boggs [2] Lyn Brown Jack Cafferty Len Cannon [3] Penny Crone Naamua Delaney [4] John Discepolo Dr. Frank Field James Ford Sonny Fox Chris Gailus Stacy Ann Gooden Dr. Max Gomez Tom Gregory (D) Pablo Guzman Fred Hall Donna Hanover Magee Hickey Larry Hoff Carol Jenkins Mike Jerrick Bill Jorgensen Christopher Jones Mark Joyella Stewart Klein (D) Ed Ladd (D) Matt Lauer Judy Licht Lee Leonard

Carol Martin Harry Martin Bill Mazer Bob McAllister (D) Chuck McCann Bill McCreary [5] Tom McDonald Curt Menefee Cora-Ann Mihalik Ed Miller John Miller Joe Moreno Lucy Noland Gabe Pressman Maury Povich Steve Powers Dave Price Bobby Rivers Roxie Roker (D) John Roland Jim Ryan Soupy Sales Cynthia Santana George Scharmen Fred Scott Marvin Scott Rolland Smith Lou Steele (D) Mike Wallace Cheryl Washington Marian Etoile Watson Lynne White

(D) -- deceased

Branding and station identity

The station is also known for starting the trend of stations using their network and channel number (or cable channel number) as their on-air name in the United States. After Fox bought the station, it began calling itself Fox Television Channel 5 New York. Soon after the Fox network premiered, the station shortened its on-air name to Fox Channel 5 and later shortened that to the current Fox 5. However, this practice dated in another form to its days as WNEW. For much of the time from at least the 1970s until the Fox takeover, its main ID was "WNEW-TV, channel 5, Metromedia New York."

In the early days after Fox took control, WNYW reporters would end their reports by saying "I'm (name) Fox News, Channel 5". This sign off would later be shortened to Fox News, then later it became Fox 5 News, as to avoid confusion with the Fox News Channel. Ironically, recent changes made to WNYW's logo and newscasts (effective April 2006) bear a close stylistic resemblance to the Fox News Channel.

Successful branding campaigns for WNEW-TV include the long-running "Choice" campaign. Well-known station jingles in the late 1970s and early 1980s included "Take Five!", "The Choice is Channel 5, Metromedia New York 5" and later, "Your Choice is 5."

Channel 5's public service announcements were also a key part of its image for decades. The phrase, "It's 10PM...Do you know where your children are?" was coined in 1969. Variations of the phrase would spread to television stations nationwide. In addition, WNEW-TV, used PSAs during the 1970s and 1980s that aired during different day parts, such as "Have you done your homework yet?"; "Have you hugged your child today?"; and "It's 6 p.m do you know where your children are?", using a simple slide and staff voiceover.

When it became a Fox affiliate in 1986, the station was rebranded as Fox 5.

In 2001, the slogan was "What New Yorkers Watch" derived from the call letters, and was used until the logo was changed in early 2006.

Newscast Titles

• The 10 O'Clock News (March 13, 1967-January 21, 2001)
• Channel 5 News (1980s)
• Fox News (1987-94)
• Fox 5 News (1998-present)

References

• History of WNYW Fox 5 Including historical video clips. myfoxny.com

• 10 O'Clock News 40th Anniversary Coverage. myfoxny.com

External links

• WNYW Website

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