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| - WLWT was established by the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, owners of WLW radio, one of America's most powerful radio stations. Crosley Broadcasting Corporation was a subsidiary of the Crosley Corporation, which became a subsidiary of the Aviation Corporation (laterAvco) in 1945. After airing experimentally from 1946 as W8XCT on channel 1, the station began commercial broadcasts on February 9, 1948. Its studios were housed with WLW in the Crosley Square building, a converted Elks Lodge No. 5 in downtown Cincinnati. WLWT counts itself as the first station outside the eastern U.S. (other than network-owned stations) to join the NBC television network as a primary affiliate, but originally carried programming from all the major television networks of the time: NBC, ABC, CBS and DuMont. It later affiliated solely with NBC in 1949, after WKRC-TV and WCPO-TV signed on. For many years, the station's IDs and advertising used a hyphen in its callsign ("WLW-T"), but that was dropped in the mid-1960s. The hypenated "T" referred to Television, as it did in WLW-C (now WCMH-TV, Columbus), WLW-D (now WDTN, Dayton) and WLW-I (nowWTHR, Indianapolis), making up the Tri-State's only interconnected network. Crosley also owned WLW-A (now WXIA-TV) in Atlanta, Georgiaand WOAI-TV in San Antonio, Texas. "WLW Television" boasted a million dollars worth of talent resulting in such programs as The Ruth Lyons 50-50 Club (later hosted by Bob Braun after Lyons' retirement in 1967), the Paul Dixon Show, and Midwestern Hayride. For a period during the 1970s, the station's slogan was, "5, The Originator" in reference to all of the local programming that was produced by the station. In 1957, WLWT introduced color television broadcasts to the Cincinnati market. It later became the first station in the nation to broadcast entirely in color, giving the Cincinnati the nickname "Colortown U.S.A." by 1962. The broadcast division continued to operate as the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, until it took the name of its parent company in 1968, becoming Avco Broadcasting Corporation. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enacted in 1969 its "one-to-a-market" rule, which enforced the ban on common ownership of two or more television stations with overlapping coverage areas while grandfathering some already existing instances, the common ownership of WLWT, WLWC, WLWD and WLWI was among those combinations which were grandfathered under the new rule. WLWT provided city-grade coverage of Dayton itself and grade B coverage to most of the Dayton and Columbus markets. But in the mid-1970s, Avco decided to leave broadcasting and sold all of its stations to separate buyers. WLWT was among the last to be sold, going to Multimedia, Inc. (along with Avco-Embassy Television, Avco's production division) in 1976. As a result, the stations all lost their grandfathered protection, which led to an ownership conflict situation which Hearst-Argyle (predecessor to today's Hearst Television) would encounter two decades later (see next paragraph). The FCC has since relaxed its adjacent-market ownership rules. The Gannett Company bought the Multimedia group in 1995. As Gannett had owned The Cincinnati Enquirer since 1979 (and remains the newspaper's owner to this day), the company had to obtain a temporary waiver of an FCC cross-ownership rule which prohibited common ownership of a television station and a newspaper in the same market in order for Gannett to close on the Multimedia group. When the waiver expired in late 1996, Gannett opted to keep the Enquirer and swap WLWT and KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City to Argyle Television Holdings II in exchange for WGRZ in Buffalo, New York and WZZM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a deal which was finalized in January 1997. Argyle merged with the broadcasting unit of the Hearst Corporation to form Hearst-Argyle Television in August 1997. Hearst had owned WDTN (the former WLWD) since 1981, but the merged company opted to keep the larger WLWT and sell WDTN the next year. WLWT's licensee name under Multimedia and Gannett ownership, Multimedia Entertainment, Inc., survives to this day as the licensee name for WGRZ. WLWT briefly aired UPN programming in the early morning hours on weekends during parts of 1998 and 1999 after that netlet was displaced from its previous affiliate WSTR-TV by WBprogramming, before UPN finally affiliated with the former WB affiliate WBQC-CA later in 1999. It is one of two Cincinnati stations to have never changed its primary affiliation; the other is Fox affiliate WXIX-TV. In June 1999, WLWT moved its studios to Taft Broadcasting's former headquarters in the Mount Auburn neighborhood (coincidentally, Taft once owned WGRZ as WGR-TV). The station found it necessary to move because Crosley Square, with its two-story ballrooms and basement newsroom, was built more for live entertainment broadcasts than a news operation. In June 2007, WLWT announced that it would partner with WLW (AM) to provide news and weather for the radio station. As a consequence, WLWT's news and weather was heard nationwide on WLW's XM Satellite Radio channel, at channel 173. The agreement with XM ended in the summer of 2008. WLWT and WLW shared news and weather operations for years when they were both owned by Crosley Broadcasting, but eventual separate ownerships of the two stations (WLWT Argyle then Hearst Television - WLW Clear Channel) led to WLW radio using the resources of WKRC-TV for several years until the renewed partnership with its former television sister. The modern WLW-WLWT partnership ended March 31, 2010. As of April 1, 2010, this partnership moved to WXIX-TV. The transmission tower seen at the beginning of CBS's popular sitcom, WKRP in Cincinnati, actually belonged to WLWT — it was located at the WLWT transmitter on 2222 Chickasaw Street. That red and white tower stood side-by-side with WLWT's current strobed tower until 2005, when it was dismantled. [1] WLWT sponsors an annual race in the Automobile Racing Club of America, a stock car racing series similar to NASCAR, at Kentucky Speedway. The station simulcasts the live coverage from the Speed Channel. WLWT is the only Cincinnati station to remain with its primary affiliation (NBC) since sign on.
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