WWOR-TV

WWOR-TV, channel nine, is currently the New York City affiliate station of the UPN television network. Licensed to Secaucus, New Jersey, the station serves the New York City metropolitan area. WWOR is owned by Fox Television Stations, a division of the News Corporation, but goes by its legal name WWOR-TV, Incorporated. In areas of the United States where UPN programs are not available over-the-air, WWOR is seen via satellite to subscribers of Echostar's Dish Network. Prior to 1995, it was one of the leading independent stations in the country, as well as a cable superstation.

On February 22, 2006, Fox announced that WWOR-TV will be the New York affiliate of a new primetime network called My Network TV, which is scheduled to launch on September 5 2006. My Network TV will be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division, Twentieth Television.

As WOR-TV

Channel nine signed on the air on October 11, 1949, as WOR-TV, owned by the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, which also operated WOR-AM (710 kHz.) and WOR-FM (98.7 MHz., later WXLO and now WRKS). Bamberger Broadcasting was a division of R. H. Macy and Company, and was named after the Bamberger's department store chain. Exactly ten months earlier, Bamberger launched Washington, D.C.'s fourth television station, WOIC-TV (now WUSA), also on channel nine. On WOR-TV's opening night, a welcome address was read by WOR radio's morning host, John B. Gambling. The only problem was the audio portion of the speech wasn't heard because of a technical glitch. The gremlin was fixed, and Gambling repeated the message later that evening, prior to sign-off. That first broadcast, and other early WOR-TV shows, emanated from the New Amsterdam Roof Theatre, located near Times Square.

WOR-TV entered the New York market as the last of the city's VHF stations to sign-on, and one of three independents -- the others being WPIX (channel 11) and Newark-based WATV (channel 13, later WNTA-TV). However, plans were underway to make both channel nine and its Washington sister station charter affiliates of the Mutual Television Network. WOR radio had enjoyed a long relationship with the Mutual Radio Network, and WOR-TV was chosen to be the New York outlet for Mutual television, which never went to air. Channel nine remained an independent, while WOIC-TV was sold to a joint venture of the Washington Post and CBS in 1950.

WOR-TV didn't get a network affiliation, but it did get a new owner in 1952, when Macy's/Bamberger's sold the WOR stations to the General Tire and Rubber Company, which had already broadcasting interests in four cities: in Boston, with the regional Yankee Radio Network and WNAC-AM-FM-TV there; in Memphis, with WHBQ radio (who would launch a new television station a year later); and KHJ-AM-FM-TV in Los Angeles and KFRC-AM-FM in San Francisco. The outlets in the latter two cities were operated by General Tire subsidiary Don Lee Broadcasting, and the WOR stations were assigned to this subsidiary. In 1955, General Tire purchased RKO Radio Pictures, giving the company's TV stations access to RKO's film library, and soon after General Tire merged its broadcast interests as General Teleradio. In 1957, General Tire's broadcasting and film divisions were renamed as RKO General.

During the 1950s, all three of New York's independents struggled to find acceptable programming. The field would increase by one in 1956 when former DuMont flagship station WABD (channel 5, later WNEW-TV and now WNYW) became an independent. Through this era, WOR-TV's programming was comparable to its rivals, with a blend of movies, children's programs, and public affairs shows. In 1962 the independent field was narrowed to three, as WOR-TV and its competition benefitted from the sale of WNTA-TV to the non-profit Educational Broadcasting Corporation, who would convert channel 13 into a non-commercial educational station (now WNET).

Channel nine was heavy on sports programming as an independent. WOR-TV was the home of National League baseball in New York, carrying games of the Brooklyn Dodgers (beginning in 1950) and the New York Giants (beginning in 1951) until both teams moved to California following the 1957 season. From 1958 to 1961, the station aired Philadelphia Phillies telecasts. In 1962, the station began a relationship with the expansion New York Mets that would last until 1998. Later in the 1960s, WOR-TV would gain rights for the NHL's New York Rangers and the NBA's New York Knicks, holding onto both teams until 1989. The New York Islanders, New York/New Jersey Nets, local college basketball, New York Cosmos soccer, and WWWF/WWF wrestling also shared airtime on channel nine.

By 1970, WNEW-TV became the leading station for cartoons and sitcoms, while WPIX aired a similar format with more movies. As a result WOR-TV sought a different programming strategy, one that was more adult-oriented, with a heavy emphasis on films and sports. The station dropped all children's programming with the exception of the local version of Romper Room, which moved from WNEW-TV several years earlier. Later in the decade, WOR-TV looked towards the United Kingdom for alternative offerings. On the week of September 6, 1976, channel nine offered programming from Thames Television during primetime, completely presented as if Thames was actually running WOR. Many of these shows had never before been seen on American television, and one of them provided America's first look at Thames' greatest export -- The Benny Hill Show. Also included that week was an episode of Man About The House, which would be reinvented the following year on ABC as Three's Company. WOR-TV aired episodes of the BBC's science-fiction series Doctor Who during this period as well.

Despite its ambitious programming, WOR-TV was perceived as an also-ran, even though the station was very profitable for RKO General. But with the advent of cable and satellite-delivered television, independent stations were being uplinked for regional and national distribution, thus gaining the title of "superstations". In April 1979, Syracuse, New York-based Eastern Microwave, Inc. began distributing WOR-TV to cable and C-band satellite subscribers across the United States, joining WTBS in Atlanta and WGN-TV in Chicago as national superstations.

Move to New Jersey

While WOR-TV was gaining national exposure, a battle for the station's survival -- and that of its licensee -- was well underway. In 1975, RKO applied for renewal of its license to operate WOR-TV. The Federal Communications Commission conditioned this renewal on that of its sister station, WNAC-TV in Boston. In 1980, the FCC stripped RKO of WNAC-TV's license due to a litany of offenses dating back to the 1960s, but ultimately because RKO had lied to the FCC about corporate misconduct by General Tire. The decision meant that RKO lost WOR-TV's license and that of another sister station, KHJ-TV in Los Angeles (RKO General, Inc. (KHJ-TV), 3 FCC Rcd 5057 (1988)). However, an appeals court ruled that the FCC had erred in tying WOR-TV and KHJ-TV's renewals to WNAC-TV, and ordered new proceedings.

In order to buy itself some time, RKO (with the help of New Jersey senator Bill Bradley) persuaded the U.S. Congress to pass a law requiring the FCC to automatically renew the license of any VHF station that moved its license to New Jersey, a state which for many years complained of being "underserved" by VHF stations from the New York City and Philadelphia markets. (With the 1962 conversion of Newark's channel 13 to non-commercial, New Jersey had no commercial VHF allocations located within the state.) RKO was able to retain WOR-TV by moving the channel nine license to Secaucus (seven miles west of Manhattan) in April 1983. WOR-TV established a physical presence in Secaucus as well, moving its studios from their longtime home in Times Square to a new facility called Nine Broadcast Plaza, where the station is still located today. In return, WOR had to step up its coverage of events in New Jersey. For all practical purposes, however, WOR remained a New York City station. A month later, the New Jersey state senate petitioned the FCC to approve an extension of the channel nine signal into southern New Jersey. However, Because of various other issues, the request was denied.

The move to New Jersey did little to relieve the regulatory pressure on RKO, which opted to put WOR-TV up for sale. Westinghouse Broadcasting and MCA/Universal emerged as the leading suitors for WOR-TV, and the station was sold to MCA in late 1986. The announcement of this deal came just in the nick of time for RKO: in 1987, an administrative law judge recommended that RKO be stripped of its remaining broadcast properties due to a litany of misconduct. RKO would retain its New York radio stations for a brief time afterward; eventually WOR radio would be sold to Hartford, Connecticut-based Buckley Broadcasting, and WRKS-FM would go to Summit Broadcasting.

As WWOR-TV

After assuming control of channel nine in the early spring of 1987, MCA not only had to change the call letters, but they also gave the station a facelift and a major programming overhaul. That fall, WWOR-TV was relaunched as a station almost different from a year prior. The station dropped most public affairs shows; Romper Room, now in reruns, was cut back to 30 minutes and moved to 6 AM; religious shows on weekdays were cancelled; cartoons were added to the station's weekday morning lineup; and sitcoms were added to the early evenings. The afternoons continued to consist of drama shows and movies held over from the RKO days. In primetime, the Million Dollar Movie was relegated to weekends in favor of the controversial Morton Downey Jr. talk show; and the 8:00 newscast was moved to 10:00 PM, and expanded to an hour. The overhaul continued in 1988, when it added reruns of NBC's The Cosby Show. WWOR-TV also borrowed program formats used on the Westinghouse stations: a short-lived version of Evening Magazine aired in primetime, and a talk show called People Are Talking ran in late mornings. That show would later change its title to 9 Broadcast Plaza (named after the station's Secaucus studio location), and then to The Richard Bey Show for syndication.

In 1989, the FCC created the "Syndicated Exclusivity Rights" rule, otherwise known as "SyndEx." This rule stated that when a station in any market had the rights to air certain syndicated programs, the cable company had to block it out on out-of-town stations. Due to this rule, and to lighten the burden on cable companies, Eastern Microwave picked up broadcast rights to shows that were considered "SyndEx-proof" and could be inserted into WWOR's cable feed to replace programming that could not be aired nationally. Most of the programs came from the Universal and Quinn Martin libraries, along with some shows from the Christian Science Monitor's television service. Eastern Microwave would eventually launch a separate feed for satellite and cable subscribers on January 1, 1990, known as the "WWOR EMI Service".

In the fall of 1990, WWOR-TV began using Universal 9 for its on-air branding, highlighting its association with the MCA/Universal entertainment empire. However, MCA's ambitious ownership of the station ended when it was bought by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. of Osaka, Japan. Since the FCC does not allow foreign companies to own more than 25 percent of television stations, channel nine had to be sold. On January 1 1991, MCA spun-off the assets of WWOR-TV into a new company called Pinelands, Incorporated.

UPN affiliation

In 1993 Pinelands was acquired by boat maker Chris-Craft Industries and its broadcasting subsidiary, United Television. A year later, Chris-Craft/United and Viacom's newly-acquired subsidiary Paramount Pictures banded together to form the United Paramount Network, the nation's sixth television network. At the network's launch, WWOR-TV was UPN's "flagship" station. However, UPN used SyndEx to keep UPN programming off the EMI Service. (In contrast the WB allowed WGN-TV, one of WWOR's superstation counterparts, to air network programming on its cable feed during that network's early years.) On January 1 1997, with only a month's advance warning, AEC, which had purchased the satellite distribution rights to WWOR from Eastern Microwave a few months earlier, decided to cease uplinking the national version. A few weeks later, another company, National Programming Services, uplinked the station again exclusively for satellite subscribers, and the national feed was back to being the same feed as the New York market. In 1999, the station lost the Mets broadcast rights to rival WPIX who, in turn, had just lost the Yankees to WNYW. NPS discontinued WWOR in 1999, in favor of Pax.

In 2000, Chris-Craft announced that it was selling its television stations. It was believed that Viacom, which had gained complete control of UPN a year earlier by purchasing Chris-Craft/United's half of the network not long after buying CBS, would end up buying the group as a whole. However, Viacom lost the bid for Chris-Craft/United to Fox Television Stations Group, making WWOR-TV a sister station to longtime rival WNYW. This created a unique situation in which the largest affiliate station of one network was owned by the operator of another network. While some cast doubt on UPN's future, Fox quickly cut a new affiliation deal with UPN.

On September 11, 2001, the transmitter facilities of WWOR-TV and eight other New York City television stations, and several radio stations, were destroyed when two hijacked airplanes crashed into and destroyed the World Trade Center towers. The attacks delayed the closing of the Chris-Craft deal for several days. With its broadcast signal shut down, WWOR fed its signal directly to cable and satellite systems, running wall-to-wall 9/11 news coverage from CNN and later the Fox News Channel. Channel nine resumed regular programming September 17, 2001 at 1 AM. The transmitter has since been relocated to an antenna located atop the Empire State Building.

Fox began integrating the operations of its two stations soon afterwards. In late September of 2001, WWOR-TV aired a number of Yankee games that were originally scheduled to air on WNYW. In the fall of 2001, WWOR-TV began running Fox Kids programs that were moved from WNYW. The afternoon Fox Kids block would be short-lived, as Fox cancelled all weekday kids programming several months later. The station still runs syndicated kids shows for one hour (7 to 8 AM) on weekdays, and is the only commercial station remaining in New York City to air children's programming on weekdays. WNYW also placed several of its underperforming programs on WWOR, and cherry-picked channel nine's stronger-performing programs for placement on channel five's schedule. Currently, WWOR offers several "double-runs" of WNYW programming, but the two stations' individual schedules (outside of network programming) are much different.

In April 2005, WWOR-TV picked up baseball once again, this time airing Yankee games. Produced by the team-owned YES Network, channel nine's Yankee contests air mostly on Friday evenings. In the spring of 2006, the New Jersey Nets returned to WWOR, as channel nine aired four regular-season games, along with all first-round playoff games. These were games that could not be carried by YES due to conflicts with YES's Yankees coverage. As YES produces the games, in both cases, there is virtually no difference between games broadcast by YES and WWOR.

My Network TV affiliation

On January 24, 2006, the UPN and WB networks announced that they would merge. The newly combined network would be called The CW, the letters representing the first initial of its corporate parents CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. The merger will take effect in September 2006, and current WB affiliate WPIX, owned by Tribune Broadcasting, was announced as the CW's New York station.

On January 25, 2006, the day following the announcement of the creation of the CW Network, WWOR-TV changed its branding from UPN 9 to WWOR 9, and revamped its logo to just feature the boxed "9". Oddly, WWOR introduced a new news graphics package and a revised logo almost three weeks prior. The station also announced that they would no longer promote any UPN programing. Similar changes were also made to Fox's other UPN affiliates, as the CW network list does not include WWOR or its sister stations.

With the impending switch to My Network TV, WWOR's on-air branding was changed to My9. Starting on April 4, the My 9 moniker was used for broadcasts of Nets basketball and Yankees baseball. Two weeks later, on April 17, WWOR incorporated the My 9 brand into its news broadcasts and other non-UPN elements of the channel. On June 2, WWOR changed its logo again, this time adopting one similar to the logo presented at the My Network TV launch announcement, and this logo will likely be the one used when the new network launches in September.

Logo gallery

Image:wor50s.jpg|WOR-TV logo from 1950s to early-1960s. Image:wor60s.gif|WOR-TV logo from early-1960s. Image:Wor0967.jpg|WOR-TV logo from the mid-1960s. This logo was also used in the same period by sister station KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. Image:wor70s.gif|WOR-TV "New York 9" logo, from 1969 to 1970. Image:wortv1978.jpg|WOR-TV's cut-out, "stylized 9" logo, used from 1971 to 1987
(modified in 1983 for their new Secaucus city of license). Image:wor86.jpg|WOR-TV/RKO copyright endcap, from 1986. Image:Wwor87_edited.JPG|The first WWOR logo, used from April to September 1987, after MCA took over the station. Image:IDWWOR1989.jpg|The second WWOR logo, used from September 1987 to January 1995. Image:wwor90.jpg|WWOR "Universal 9" logo from 1990 to 1992. The "9" of this logo was retained after 1992 until UPN's launch. Image:wwor95.jpg|The first "UPN 9" logo, used from 1995 to 2002 (similar to the "stylised 9" logo used from 1971 to 1987). Image:Wwortv2002.jpg|The second "UPN 9" logo, used from 2002 to 2005. A variation of this logo, with the color behind the UPN logo being red, was used for a short time between December 2005 and January 2006. Image:WWOR.png|WWOR logo, sans the "UPN" half, used from January 2006 to April 2006
(introduced the day after plans for CW were announced, which did not include WWOR). Image:My 9 New York.png|Interim logo implementing the "My 9" moniker used from April 2006 to June 2006. Image:Wwor_mntv.jpg|WWOR introduced its new "My 9" logo with the MNTV background in June 2006.

Newscasts

WWOR has a nightly newscast called My9 News at Ten airing every night at 10 PM. Ironically, WWOR has been able to compete with its sister WNYW's 10:00 newscast simply because both use separate studios. Had WWOR moved in to share studios with WNYW, WWOR's newscast would have been cancelled very easily due to direct competition with WNYW.

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

Office locations

WOR-TV's first studio location was in the New Amsterdam Roof Theatre, located on 42nd Street west of Times Square. This was a temporary setup; some time later the station moved uptown to a new facility on West 67th Street, near the present-day location of WABC-TV.

During the early years of RKO General ownership, WOR-TV moved back to Times Square, and closer to its sister radio stations. Channel nine's studios were based at 1481 Broadway, while their offices were co-located with WOR-AM-FM's studios and offices three blocks south, at 1440 Broadway.

When the WOR-TV license was moved to New Jersey in 1983, a modern complex was constructed in Secaucus, known as Nine Broadcast Plaza. In 2004, three years after News Corp. bought the station, it announced that WWOR would leave Secaucus and move back to Manhattan, to be consolidated with WNYW at the Fox Television Center on East 67th Street in Yorkville. News Corp. planned to keep Nine Broadcast Plaza as a satellite relay station for WNYW and WWOR (the facility also performs master control operations for Fox-owned UPN station WUTB in Baltimore). While some office functions have been merged, plans for a full move back across the Hudson River were scuttled in late 2004 due to pressure from New Jersey Congressman Steve Rothman (whose congressional district includes Seacaucus) and Senator Frank Lautenberg. [http://www.house.gov/rothman/news_releases/rel_100804.htm The two lawmakers contended that any move to Manhattan would violate the conditions of WWOR's license.

Trivia

WWOR is the second New York area station to have been an owned-and-operated station of two different networks (UPN and My Network TV), after sister WNYW (first DuMont, then Fox).
Upon moving to Secaucus, channel nine became the second VHF station licensed in New Jersey, after WNET in Newark -- which was commercial until 1962 as WATV and later WNTA-TV.
In 1962, nostalgia maven Joe Franklin moved his daily talk program to WOR-TV from WABC-TV, where it had run for the previous 12 years. When The Joe Franklin Show ended on August 6, 1993, its host had interviewed over 350,000 guests on over 28,000 episodes, making it one of the longest-running programs in television history, local or national.
In the 1971 film Shaft, a sign for WOR-TV's studios can be seen for a brief second in the opening sequence (look for the "stylised 9" logo as Richard Roundtree, playing the film's title character, walks around Times Square).
From 1988 to 1993, then-unknown comedian Mario Cantone hosted Steampipe Alley, a weekly children's show which combined live skits with Looney Tunes and Popeye cartoons. Cantone would appear, years later, in HBO's very adult-oriented comedy Sex and the City.
Today host Matt Lauer was a co-host of the talk show 9 Broadcast Plaza before being replaced by Richard Bey -- whose own program, People Are Talking, had been replaced by 9 Broadcast Plaza.
During the early 1990s, radio shock jock Howard Stern hosted a weekly series from the WWOR-TV studios. The short lived variety show (which was later syndicated) is commonly referred to by his fans as the "channel nine show".
The callsign WWOR originally belonged to a station operating on channel 14 in Worcester, Massachusetts. The station was an ABC/DuMont affiliate. The station has since gone off-the-air.

External links

WWOR-TV Website
WOR/WWOR-TV Classic and Current Station IDs/Promos
Two articles about WOR-TV's premiere night on the air in 1949
"Thames on 9" -- WOR-TV's prime-time schedule from 6-10 September 1976, when Thames took over channel nine

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