West Lafayette; its transmitter is located on County Road 700 in rural northwestern Clinton County (southwest of Rossville
).
History
The station first signed on the air at 6 p.m. on June 15, 1953, as WFAM-TV,
UHF channel 59. It was founded by O.E. Richardson, owner of radio station WASK (1450 AM).[4] The station originally operated as a primary CBS and DuMont affiliate. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.[5]
WFAM-TV's transmitter had originally broadcast at low power, making it unreceivable in parts of west-central Indiana outside of the immediate Lafayette area. Out of its original 20-person staff, only one person had any experience in television; the rest were radio personalities who pulled double duty.
In 1957, both the television station and the radio station were sold to assistant station manager Henry Rosenthal and his partners, who filed with the
(LIN TV later sold off its remaining 33% interest in WAND to Block Communications).
WLFI's broadcasts became digital-only, effective June 12, 2009.[6]
On March 21, 2014,
Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced on January 27, 2016, that it would merge with Media General in a $4.6 billion acquisition;[10] it then announced on June 13, 2016, that it would sell WLFI-TV and four other stations to Heartland Media, through its USA Television MidAmerica Holdings joint venture with MSouth Equity Partners, for $115 million, to comply with FCC ownership caps following the merger.[11]
WLFI was one of the Lafayette area's two commercial network television broadcasters between its launch in 1953 and the 2016 launch of WPBI-LD, a Fox and NBC affiliate; the other station was WTTK (channel 29), a satellite station of WTTV that began broadcasting in 1988.[12] Cable providers have long supplemented the area with stations from Indianapolis. Comcast Xfinity dropped the Indianapolis stations from its lineup on March 7, 2018,[13] but resumed carriage of NBC affiliate WTHR and ABC affiliate WRTV two days later.[14]
Programming
WLFI-TV carries the entire CBS network schedule; however, it airs the
CBS Dream Team lineup in two blocks—with the first two hours airing on Saturday mornings (leading into the Saturday edition of CBS Mornings
, which itself airs two hours later than most CBS stations that carry the broadcast) and the final hour airing on Sunday mornings.
News operation
WLFI-TV presently broadcasts 22+1⁄2 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with four hours each weekday, 1+1⁄2 hours on Saturdays and one hour on Sundays); unlike most CBS affiliates in the Eastern Time Zone, the station's early evening newscast at 5 p.m. runs only for a half-hour, with the station opting to run syndicated programs during the 5:30 p.m. half-hour.
Even after cable systems began piping in Indianapolis stations in the 1970s, the station's newscasts have performed well in the
ratings
; its success was largely attributed to the longevity of most of its news staff, some of whom had been at the station for over 20 years, including former anchors Jeff Smith and Chris Morisse, sports anchor Larry Clisby and meteorologist Steve Scherer.
In September 2012, WLFI became the third television station in
Central Indiana to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; as part of the upgrade, the station unveiled a new graphics package (a modified version of the package used by CBS owned-and-operated stationWBBM-TV
in Chicago from when it upgraded its newscasts to high definition in 2008 until 2010) and a new set for its newscasts.
GetTV to a new DT4 subchannel and leading to the CBS feed on their main channel being downscaled into 720p for the time being (presumably due to bandwidth limitations resulting from their encoding equipment, which is only capable of using a "Constant" Bitrate Allocation, versus "Variable"); however, by November 2021 CBS and CW+ programming was upgraded to 1080i full HD, at the expense of bandwidth on the remaining subchannels.[18] WLFI-DT2 is being identified on-air as Lafayette's CW18.[19]
(*) – indicates station is in one of Indiana's primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Indiana
(*) – indicates station is in one of Indiana's primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Indiana
(*) – indicates station is in one of Indiana's primary TV markets (**) – indicates station is in an out-of-state TV market, but reaches a small portion of Indiana