Westinghouse Broadcasting
The Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, also known as Group W, was the broadcasting division of Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It owned several radio and television stations across the United States and distributed television shows for syndication.
Westinghouse Broadcasting was formed in the 1920s as Westinghouse Radio Stations, Inc. After expanding into television, it was renamed as Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in 1954, and adopted the Group W moniker on May 20, 1963. It was a self-contained entity within the Westinghouse corporate structure; while the parent company was headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Westinghouse Broadcasting maintained headquarters in New York City. It kept national sales offices in Chicago and Los Angeles. After its merger with CBS in 2000, the majority of the broadcast assets today are owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation.
Group W stations are best known for using a distinctive corporate typeface, introduced in 1963, for their logos and on-air imaging. Similarly styled typefaces had been used on some non-Group W stations as well and several former Group W stations still use it today. The Group W corporate typeface has been digitized and released freely by John Sizemore; Ray Larabie's font "Anklepants borrows heavily from the typeface and is occasionally used as a substitute. The font is also used in the video game Damnation.
Westinghouse Broadcasting was also well known for two long-running television programs, the Mike Douglas Show and PM Magazine.
History
Radio origins
The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company entered broadcasting with the November 2, 1920, sign-on of KDKA radio in Pittsburgh. The oldest surviving licensed commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA was an outgrowth of experimental station 8XK, a 75-watt station that was located in the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg, and founded in 1916 by Westinghouse assistant chief engineer Frank Conrad.Westinghouse launched three more radio stations between 1920 and 1921: WJZ, originally licensed to Newark, New Jersey; WBZ, first located in Springfield, Massachusetts; and KYW, originally based in Chicago. WBZA in Boston, a station which shared WBZ's frequency and simulcasted WBZ's programming, signed on in November 1924.
Westinghouse was one of the founding owners of the Radio Corporation of America in 1919, and in 1926 RCA established the National Broadcasting Company, a group of 24 radio stations that made up the first radio network in the United States. Westinghouse initially owned a 20 percent stake in NBC, and as a result, all of Westinghouse's stations became affiliates of NBC's Blue Network when it was launched on January 1, 1927. Most of the Blue Network's programming originated at WJZ, which in 1923 had its license moved to New York City, and its ownership transferred to RCA.
In 1931, Westinghouse switched the call letters of its two Massachusetts stations, with WBZA moving to Springfield and WBZ going to Boston. The two stations had suffered from interference problems, though the Boston facility was the more powerful of the two. In 1934, KYW was moved from Chicago to Philadelphia following a Federal Communications Commission-dictated frequency realignment. Westinghouse's next station was its first purchase: WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana, joined the group in August 1936.
The North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement of 1941 saw all of Westinghouse's original stations move to their current frequencies. With WOWO's power increase to 50,000 watts later that year, the Westinghouse stations were now also clear-channel stations. A decade later, the FCC forbade common ownership of two or more clear channel stations with overlapping nighttime coverage, though the commission allowed Westinghouse to keep WBZ, KYW, KDKA, and WOWO together under a grandfather clause. Among them, the four stations' nighttime signals blanketed almost all of the eastern half of North America. Despite the assignments which resulted from NARBA, WBZA became a 1,000-watt daytime-only operation as it continued to share a frequency with WBZ.
The Westinghouse group survived the government-dictated split of NBC's radio division in 1943. WBZ/WBZA, KDKA, and KYW became affiliates of NBC's Red Network while WOWO, which had a secondary affiliation with the Blue Network, fell back on its primary relationship with CBS. Westinghouse expanded to the West Coast in 1944 with its purchase of 5,000-watt KEX in Portland, Oregon, a station which also shared a frequency with WOWO. Westinghouse would increase KEX's power to 50,000 watts in 1948.
Later in the 1940s, Westinghouse moved on to develop FM and television stations as the FCC began to issue permits for those services. Westinghouse built FM sister stations for WBZ/WBZA, KDKA, KYW, KEX, and WOWO, all of which were on the air by the end of the decade. FM radio was, initially, an unsuccessful venture for Westinghouse, and the company would silence most of its FM stations during the 1950s. Of the early Westinghouse FMs, only the original KDKA-FM and the second WBZ-FM facility proved to be worth keeping, and Westinghouse sold those outlets in the early 1980s.
Moving back to AM radio, Westinghouse returned to Chicago with its 1956 purchase of WIND. In 1962, Westinghouse re-entered the New York market when it bought WINS, then a local Top-40 powerhouse, from J. Elroy McCaw. Having reached the FCC's then-limit of seven AM stations, Westinghouse sold KEX to actor and singer Gene Autry, and later decided to shut down WBZA and return its license to the FCC. In 1966, Westinghouse agreed to buy another top-rated music station, KFWB in Los Angeles.
On April 19, 1965, WINS dropped music and instituted a 24-hour, all-news format. KYW went all-news six months later on September 12, three months after Westinghouse regained control of the station. KFWB would adopt the format on March 11, 1968. The three stations all prospered with their new formats, usually ranking among the five highest-rated stations in their markets. During the 1970s and 1980s, WIND also tinkered with a part-time news format, though it had little success against the dominant all-news station in Chicago, CBS-owned WBBM.
In the 1970s, Westinghouse Radio also developed a prodigious reputation for its innovation in analytical techniques and tools for radio sales and buying. Using sophisticated mathematical modeling, the group promoted its "New Math Calculator" which became extremely popular in ad agencies for planning radio campaigns. This was no simple look-up table; it introduced innovative measures such as "reach index" and "gross cume" to operationalize its core models. Westinghouse later introduced an even more comprehensive tool, stylized as the "Numa Radio Planner". In the days before desktop computers, these "slide rules" were state-of-the-art in audience planning research.
Over the next quarter-century, Westinghouse would purchase several other radio stations, including KFBK in Sacramento, California; WNEW-FM in New York, KTWV in Los Angeles, and WMMR in Philadelphia. WOWO was sold to other interests in 1982 and WIND was spun off in 1985, two years before Group W bought WMAQ from NBC after that network announced it was closing its radio division.
Expansion into television
Westinghouse entered television on June 9, 1948, with the sign-on of WBZ-TV in Boston; it is the only television station to have been built by the company. Westinghouse's first station purchase was with WPTZ in Philadelphia, in 1953. KPIX in San Francisco was bought in 1954; WDTV in Pittsburgh was added in 1955; and WAAM in Baltimore was purchased in 1957. Westinghouse's only other outright television station purchase was in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it purchased WRET-TV from Ted Turner in early 1980, and changed its call letters to WPCQ-TV. Turner used the proceeds from the sale of the Charlotte station to help him launch CNN.In 1961, the company expanded into television production by launching television and radio distributor WBC Productions. In 1980, the company bought out a majority share of Home Theater Network from Diversified Communications. The company also purchased cable TV system operator TelePrompTer in 1981, which it renamed Group W Cable the following year. Also that year, the company formed Group W Satellite Communications to maintain operations of its satellite business through its TelePrompTer acquisition, as well as that of Home Theater Network. The TelePrompTer acquisition also brought animation producer Filmation into the Group W fold. However, Westinghouse would leave the cable TV system business in 1986, and would later sell the Filmation library to L'Oréal in 1989. During that period, Group W was known in full as Westinghouse Broadcasting and Cable, Inc.
The 1956 trade with NBC
In June 1955, Westinghouse announced that it would sell its Philadelphia stations, KYW radio and WPTZ, to NBC. In exchange Westinghouse received NBC's Cleveland stations, WTAM radio and WNBK television, along with $3 million in compensation. The deal was approved in January 1956; one month later Westinghouse moved the KYW call letters to Cleveland and NBC renamed the Philadelphia stations WRCV and WRCV-TV. Both companies also transferred much of their respective management and some on-air personnel to their new cities. Most notably, both The Mike Douglas Show and the Eyewitness News format originated on KYW-TV during its tenure in Cleveland.However, the ink had barely dried on FCC approval of the trade when the United States Department of Justice opened an investigation into the deal, on claims that NBC had employed extortion and coercion. The Justice Department believed that NBC abused its power as a broadcast network by threatening to withhold or cancel affiliations with Westinghouse-owned stations unless the latter company agreed to the network's terms and participate in the trade. Specifically, it was determined that NBC threatened to drop its programming from both WPTZ and Boston's WBZ-TV; to withhold a primary affiliation from newly acquired KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh ; and to withhold or pull an NBC affiliation from any other major-market station Westinghouse would purchase in the future. Based on these findings, a civil antitrust suit was filed against NBC and its parent company RCA, on behalf of Westinghouse in December 1956. During this ordeal NBC attempted to circumvent the investigation by trading the Philadelphia stations in return for RKO General's radio and television properties in Boston, which would have resulted in WBZ-TV losing its NBC affiliation to rival station WNAC-TV; the proposed NBC-RKO station swap never materialized.
In August 1964, after a nearly eight-year-long investigation, the FCC ordered a reversal of the swap. NBC appealed the ruling, extending the ordeal by another year, but the ruling was upheld on appeal. Westinghouse was also allowed to keep the cash compensation from the original deal. When Westinghouse regained control of the Philadelphia stations on June 19, 1965, it restored the KYW calls to the radio station and renamed the television station KYW-TV. And in a reversal of nine years prior, both NBC and Westinghouse relocated various personnel between both cities.