WBAY-TV

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WBAY-TV
kW
HAAT372 m (1,220 ft)
Transmitter coordinates44°24′34.6″N 88°0′6.7″W / 44.409611°N 88.001861°W / 44.409611; -88.001861
Links
Public license information
Websitewww.wbay.com

WBAY-TV (channel 2) is a television station in Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Gray Television. The station's studios are located on South Jefferson Street in downtown Green Bay (across from the historic Brown County Courthouse), with a Fox Cities news bureau on College Avenue on the west side of Appleton, just south of Fox River Mall; its transmitter is located in Ledgeview, Wisconsin.

History

As a CBS affiliate (1953–1992)

Studios in 2007.

The only television station broadcasting in Wisconsin prior to the FCC's

De Pere. The priests run St. Norbert College in De Pere, and already operated WBAY radio (1360 AM, now WTAQ) in Green Bay and WHBY radio in Appleton. Like WTMJ when that station started in 1947 – as the only station in the market – WBAY originally carried programming from all four networks of the day – channel 2 was a primary CBS affiliate with secondary affiliations with NBC, ABC and DuMont
.

ABC moved to WNAM-TV (channel 42, now

Neenah when it started up in January 1954. Then, NBC moved to Marinette's WMBV-TV (channel 11, now Fox affiliate WLUK-TV) when it signed on in September of that year. With the shutdown of DuMont in August 1956, WBAY was left as an exclusive CBS affiliate. The station upgraded its transmitter and began broadcasting network programming in color in the fall of 1956.[2][3]
WBAY-TV would remain the only station licensed to Green Bay proper until the 1959 relocation of WLUK to the city. Locally produced programs were broadcast in color starting in 1966.

The station's studios in downtown Green Bay were built in 1924 as a former

high school during the Great Depression when the Norbertines took over the building. The former gymnasium/auditorium is now called the WBAY Auditorium and is used as the studio for the station's cerebral palsy telethon. During the early years of WBAY, it served as the main studio until 1954 when an addition was built behind the main building. The auditorium has also been used for local theatrical productions. The station's newsroom is in the basement of the building in an area that originally held a swimming pool and bowling alley. The WBAY building also served as the home of the WBAY radio stations (now WTAQ and WIXX), which were later purchased by Midwest Communications
in the late 1970s, but remained in the building until Midwest built a combined Green Bay operations facility/company headquarters in 2007 and a news-weather sharing agreement was maintained between WBAY-TV and its former radio sisters for many years before it was discontinued in favor of an agreement with WLUK-TV.

As a CBS affiliate, WBAY-TV benefited from that network's

Fox presently holding the rights to the NFC, acquired the syndication rights to the ESPN games under a multi-year agreement.[4] It was the first time that WBAY did not broadcast a Packers game during an NFL season in its 63-year history, and the station would not carry another Packers game until December 19, 2022, a home matchup with the Los Angeles Rams
, as ABC began to simulcast select Monday Night Football games with ESPN.

In 1974, WBAY was sold to Nationwide Communications, which operated the station until 1993, when it was sold to Young Broadcasting along with its two ABC-affiliated sisters WATE-TV in Knoxville, Tennessee, and WRIC-TV in Richmond, Virginia.

As an ABC affiliate (1992–present)

In 1991, CBS purchased the assets of Midwest Television to acquire its long-dominant affiliate in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, WCCO-TV. Midwest also owned channel 2's longtime competitor, WFRV. CBS considered WBAY a strong affiliate, and tried to sell WFRV and their Escanaba, Michigan–based satellite station, WJMN-TV, after the deal with Midwest closed. However, after FCC rules were relaxed at the time to allow one company to own more stations, the network decided to keep the two stations as a result and switched WFRV/WJMN to CBS in 1992 (CBS sold WFRV/WJMN to Liberty Media in 2007, the stations are now owned by the Nexstar Media Group).

After it was announced that WFRV would join CBS, channel 2 then decided to take WFRV/WJMN's ABC affiliation; WBAY management insisted that the change take place on or near the anniversary of its sign-on date, March 17. Since that date fell on a Tuesday in 1992, WFRV and WBAY swapped networks on March 15, which fell on a Sunday.[5] This brought WBAY-TV's ABC affiliation in line with sister stations WATE-TV in Knoxville and WRIC-TV in Richmond, which had recently renewed their ABC relationships.

The station formerly preempted the first hour of the ABC lineup (7–8 p.m.

The Insider and aired before prime time in a truncated half-hour format. The station's football coverage eventually was merged into the station's newscasts, along with occasional special coverage which is usually contained to Friday evenings and preempts Shark Tank.[citation needed
]

On August 7, 2005, WBAY launched their first permanent digital subchannel service, an internally-run full-time weather feed known then as "Stormcenter 2 24/7", now "First Alert Weather 24/7", featuring a four-pane display of rolling weather conditions, forecasts, traffic reports and advertisements; a seven-day outlook; current radar; and real-time current observations from the regional network of WeatherBug reporting stations. It has never been associated with a national weather network and is run and maintained by the station's meteorologists. It simulcasts the main WBAY channel and goes into a commercial-free format during severe weather events.

Previously, WBAY-DT2 had been activated in the summer of 2004, carrying ABC News Now during the Republican and Democratic conventions, along with that year's presidential election. It also broke format in the spring and summer of 2006 to carry gavel-to-gavel coverage of Steven Avery's trial for the murder of Teresa Halbach, and until the move of special coverage to a secondary webfeed, did so for other trials of interest.

WBAY was one of seven Young-owned stations whose management and operations were handled by Gray Television as part of a proposed takeover of Young Broadcasting by its secured creditors (a plan tentatively approved by a New York bankruptcy judge on July 22, 2009; it was approved in late April 2010[6]). Under Gray management, this made it a semi-sister station in Wisconsin to NBC affiliates WMTV in Madison and WEAU in Eau Claire, and CBS affiliate WSAW-TV in Wausau. The Gray management agreement ended in 2012 as Young returned to some financial stability and the pursuit of a sale partner.

In late January 2010, the station stopped signing off during the early morning hours on Saturdays and Sundays, after a major transmitter problem forced the station to reconsider this mode of operation. WBAY was the last commercial station in the state to start broadcasting 24 hours a day daily, the former off-hours on WBAY's main signal are now taken up by a simulcast of WBAY-DT2.

Sale to Media General, then Nexstar and resale to Gray Television (2013–present)

On June 6, 2013, Young Broadcasting announced that it would merge with Media General. The sale was approved on November 8, and consummated on November 12.[7] At that time it became both Media General's first station in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest, and the company's northernmost asset.

On March 21, 2014, LIN Media entered into an agreement to merge with Media General in a $1.6 billion deal. Because LIN already owned WLUK-TV and CW affiliate WCWF (channel 14), with WBAY and WLUK ranking among the four highest-rated stations in the Green Bay market in total day viewership, the companies were required to sell either WBAY or WLUK to another station owner in order to comply with FCC ownership rules as well as planned changes to those rules regarding same-market television stations which would prohibit sharing agreements.[8][9][10] On August 20, 2014, Media General announced that it would retain WBAY, trading WLUK and WCWF to Sinclair Broadcast Group as part of several exchanges between other broadcast groups.[11]

On January 27, 2016, Media General announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Nexstar Broadcasting Group.[12][13] Because Nexstar already owned WFRV, it was required to sell that station or WBAY to another owner, though with the financial outlay Nexstar had invested into WFRV since its 2011 purchase, a swap for WBAY was unlikely despite the latter's first-place market ranking.

On June 3, 2016, it was announced that Nexstar would retain WFRV, selling WBAY to Gray Television for $270 million; this time in addition to the original Gray stations in the 2010 management deal, WBAY also became a sister station to CBS affiliate WSAW-TV and Fox affiliate WZAW-LD in Wausau, and dual NBC/Fox affiliate WLUC-TV in Marquette (which had been an on-and-off sister station to WLUK over the years), which Gray acquired more recently.[14][15] The sale was closed on January 17, 2017, with a possible removal of WBAY on Dish Network due to Gray's previous retransmission consent deal ending averted with a renewal only hours later. The ownership transaction saw WBAY remove the Media General-mandated infotainment program Hollywood Today Live from their schedule (airing in late night on tape delay rather than in the mid-afternoon; the program was canceled at the end of April) after March 3, along with Gray taking control of the station's website and mobile apps. With WBAY now having sister stations statewide, Gray began to distribute WBAY's Sunday night sports show, Sunday Sports Night: Cover 2, to their other stations with the start of the 2017 NFL season.

The station sponsors the yearly "WBAY Boat Show" and the "WBAY

Marine Corps Reserve
.

Programming

Cerebral Palsy Telethon

WBAY holds the record for the longest running telethon on the same channel, as it airs the CP Telethon, which has been broadcast on the station since 1954 and benefits Cerebral Palsy, Inc., a local organization involved in the care of cerebral palsy patients and which provides a number of services from their facilities in Green Bay,

Suamico, Kimberly, and Two Rivers. The telethon airs for 22 hours from 8 p.m. Saturday to 6 p.m. Sunday during the first weekend in March, although prior to WBAY switching to 24-hour daily broadcasts in 2010, it broke between midnight and 6 a.m., as the station signed off in the overnight hours on weekends (the break allowed WBAY's Saturday syndicated programming to air without interruption). Past hosts of the telethon have included Gloria DeHaven, Raymond Burr, Dennis James (who would later host the United Cerebral Palsy national telethon), Dennis Weaver,[16] and Tom Wopat. Currently, the telethon is a local-only effort, using local broadcasters and people to host the broadcast, and the funds raised benefit the local organization. Before the sale of the WBAY stations by the Norbertine Fathers, the telethon was simulcast
over WBAY (AM) (later WGEE, now WTAQ) and WBAY-FM (now WIXX).

WBAY's cerebral palsy telethon both pre-dated and succeeded the national telethon for United Cerebral Palsy, which ran on numerous stations nationwide from the mid-1970s to 1997.

Sunday Mass

The station continues to air a

Sunday Mass on Sunday mornings, as it has since signing on under the ownership of the Norbertine Fathers. After the sale of the station, however, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay began producing the Mass at WBAY's studio. The Diocese provided a presider, choir, liturgical coordinator, and producer while WBAY provided camera operators, a technical director
and audio technician.

On December 27, 2009, the Diocese of Green Bay ended local production of the Mass, instead choosing to contract with the Passionist Spiritual Center to carry their nationally syndicated Mass program from Riverhead, New York by mutual agreement of the station and the Diocese, a transition that was planned two years before and took priority after the September 2009 death of the Diocese's communications director and Mass producer Tony Kuick.[17]

News operation

WBAY-TV presently broadcasts 36 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with six hours each weekday and three hours each on Saturdays and Sundays), along with a half-hour sports-focused extension of the Sunday late news known as Sunday Sports Night: Cover 2 in football season (as mentioned above, that program airs statewide on Gray's stations as of September 2017). The station currently exchanges news stories with

Austin Straubel International Airport
. It formerly maintained an older self-owned Doppler unit until it mothballed the unit and removed its radar dome atop the station's downtown building in 2015.

WBAY's logo for Action 2 News.

WBAY's news operation is branded under the Action News title as Action 2 News, and has used the title since the mid-1980s (with the HD suffix added upon its transition to high definition newscasts), predating its ABC affiliation. The station rarely refreshes its graphical imaging, having only done so four times since 1995, but has maintained long-term dominance in the local ratings for most of its history. Until September 2012, when WFRV debuted its 4 p.m. newscast, it was the only one in the market to have a late afternoon newscast in that timeslot. In late 2011, the station released mobile applications for iOS and Android devices, followed by a separate weather app for both platforms in February 2013.

Because the station decided to maintain its noon newscast, WBAY-TV was among the few ABC affiliates that carried

GMA3: What You Need To Know. The only times of year the station does not run a newscast are on Christmas morning, during the CP telethon, and the evening before Easter when ABC runs The Ten Commandments yearly (due to the film presentation ending after midnight; a one-year shift to an 11 p.m. show was made in 2020 in order to provide up-to-date coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic
; two days later, the station also added a special weeknight late night newscast from Gray, Full Court Press Now, to their late night schedule for the next month).

The station began the process of upgrading to full HD production with a control room upgrade in the second quarter of 2011, a process hamstrung by the Young bankruptcy until Gray was able to begin operating the company's stations. The news department's conversion began on October 15 after that morning's newscast when construction began on a new set and the relocation of the older set (which had been in use with constant refreshing since the late 1980s) to another part of the building; the new set was completed by mid-December after a training/rehearsal period, using a common set design and graphics package used by all of the New Young stations.

mobile apps
; likewise, weather is now branded as "First Alert Weather". A plan by Gray Television to build a new set to complement the rebranding was delayed to the last part of the second quarter of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the existing set moved to another part of the building, and the station taking advantage of most of the station's weather team presenting their forecasts from home through the early part of the pandemic during the build-out requiring no use of the weather center, allowing it to be constructed with full secrecy (those meteorologists who did need to be in the building stayed in front of the chyron, and their interactions with the anchors were adjusted to obscure there was a new set being built). The new set was unveiled on September 8, 2020.

On September 14, 2020, the station launched two additional newscasts; a 9 a.m. weekday newscast, along with a 4:30 p.m. newscast to create a 2+1⁄2-hour news block in the mid-afternoon, matching WFRV's scheduling in the same time period. The 4:30 p.m. show is hosted by sports director Chris Roth and has a different format from the station's traditional newscast where Roth checks in with the station's reporters and local subjects in the news for longer-form features regarding those stories, along with an extended weather and astronomy segment with meteorologist Brad Spakowitz entitled "Three Brilliant Minutes" (Spakowitz went into semi-retirement in July 2021, but remains with the station for that segment, along with maintaining its weather systems, and as a backup meteorologist).[21]

From 2019 until 2022, the station carried Full Court Press, a national Sunday morning talk show from Gray featuring Appleton native Greta Van Susteren, who regularly provided commentary to WBAY-TV regarding national and local politics as part of her role as the station group's chief national political analyst. The program ended with Van Susteren's departure to Newsmax TV.

Notable former on-air staff

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is

multiplexed
:

Subchannels of WBAY-TV[27]
Channel Res. Aspect Short name Programming
2.1 720p
16:9
 WBAY-HD Main WBAY-TV programming / ABC
2.2 480i WBAY-WX First Alert Weather 24/7
2.3 The365
The365[28] / MyNetworkTV
2.4 WBAY-HI Heroes & Icons
2.5 WBAYSTV Start TV
2.6 Catchy Catchy Comedy
14.3 480i 16:9 Charge! Charge! (WCWF-DT3)
  Broadcast on behalf of another station

The station currently features their main channel and six other subchannels, with one set aside for the ATSC 1.0 channel for WCWF's third subchannel, which carries Charge as WCWF serves as the market's ATSC 3.0 lighthouse station; likewise, WCWF carries WBAY's main channel in that format, still in 720p. WBAY-TV was the first commercial station in the market to carry subchannel services, doing so in July 2004 when ABC News Now was launched to cover that year's political conventions.

In late June 2010, WBAY-TV became the third commercial station in Green Bay to air syndicated programming (previously only the ABC schedule and ESPN HD broadcasts of Monday Night Football) in

standard definition
in mid-2010.

Since July 2013, the station uses the

dubs
of ABC network programming, along with a 2017 upgrade to allow automated description of on-screen weather warning scrolls per new FCC rules.

As of 2021, WBAY's secondary weather station transmits natively in 720p after an upgrade, and is available in high definition through the station's website and any simulcasts on WBAY's main channel.

In February 2023, the station added programming from MyNetworkTV to the overnight schedule of WBAY-DT3 after the E. W. Scripps Company declined to renew its affiliation agreement for WACY-TV in the summer of 2022. The move of MyNetworkTV's all-repeat schedule to overnights on a subchannel has become an increasingly common fate for the service, especially for Gray stations. MyNetworkTV programming airs Tuesday through Saturday mornings from 1 to 3 a.m.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WBAY-TV shut down its analog signal, over

UHF channel 23,[29] using virtual channel
2.

References

  1. ^ "Facility Technical Data for WBAY-TV". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.
  2. ^ "TV Laughter No Joke, Now Serious Problem". The Post-Crescent. May 30, 1956. p. 3. Retrieved October 9, 2020.
  3. ^ "Our Mr. Sun (advertisement)". The Post-Crescent. November 17, 1956. p. 5. Retrieved October 9, 2020.
  4. ^ "FOX 11 to air Hall of Fame Game, Packers MNF games". WLUK-TV. July 6, 2016. Retrieved July 7, 2016.
  5. ^ Gerds, Warren (February 6, 1992). "Get ready to flip channels". Green Bay Press-Gazette. pp. A-1, A-2. Retrieved November 20, 2020 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. ^ "Gray TV Back in Business With Young Stations".
  7. ^ "Media General, Young Now Officially One". TVNewsCheck. November 12, 2013. Retrieved November 12, 2013.
  8. ^ TV Station Mega Merger: Media General, LIN Set $1.6 Billion Deal from Variety (March 21, 2014)
  9. ^ Media General acquiring LIN Media for $1.6 billion, Los Angeles Times, March 21, 2014.
  10. ^ Media Gen/LIN To Sell/Swap In Five Markets, TVNewsCheck, March 21, 2014.
  11. ^ "Media General, LIN Sell Stations In 5 Markets". TVNewsCheck. August 20, 2014. Retrieved August 20, 2014.
  12. ^ "Nexstar-Media General: It's A Done Deal". TVNewsCheck. January 27, 2016. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  13. ^ Picker, Leslie (January 27, 2016). "Nexstar Clinches Deal to Acquire Media General". The New York Times. Retrieved January 27, 2016.
  14. ^ "Gray Buying Two Nexstar Spinoffs For $270M". TVNewsCheck. June 3, 2016. Retrieved June 3, 2016.
  15. LLC
    . Retrieved June 18, 2016.
  16. ISBN 0595313272
    .
  17. ^ "Diocese will no longer produce TV Masses; Televised Masses will now be produced by Passionist Communications". The Compass, Roman Catholic Diocese of Green Bay. December 16, 2009. Retrieved March 2, 2014.
  18. ^ "Tomorrow, after Action 2 News This Morning-Weekend Edition, we will be dismantling this news set to make way for our HD improvements. Stay tuned for some exciting improvements!". Station Facebook posting. Retrieved October 15, 2011.
  19. ^ "WBAY's switch to HD to be elaborate," from Green Bay Press-Gazette, February 5, 2011
  20. ^ "Channel 5 launches HD: Behind the scenes," Archived September 17, 2012, at archive.today from WFRV.com, June 23, 2011
  21. ^ Heyward, Andrew (February 18, 2021). "Is your best idea for newsroom innovation sitting just down the hall? Green Bay's WBAY cooks up a homegrown recipe for change". Knight-Cronkite News Lab (Knight Foundation and Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication). Retrieved April 20, 2021.
  22. ^ "Rob Fowler". Retrieved September 26, 2013.
  23. ^ TV Guide magazine, Wisconsin Edition dated September 23–29, 1972, WBAY-TV ad on page A-40
  24. ^ "Orion Samuelson biography". Radio Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on January 23, 2013. Retrieved September 26, 2013.
  25. ^ "Ben Tracy biography". CBS News. Retrieved September 26, 2013.
  26. ^ "Michelle Tuzee biography". KABC-TV. Archived from the original on November 27, 2010. Retrieved September 26, 2013.
  27. ^ "RabbitEars TV Query for WBAY".
  28. ^ "New network THE365 debuts New Year's Day on WBAY channel 2.3". WBAY.com. December 19, 2023. Retrieved December 19, 2023.
  29. ^ "DTV Tentative Channel Designations for the First and Second Rounds" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on August 29, 2013. Retrieved March 24, 2012.

External links

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