WNEP-TV
WNEP-TV is a television station licensed to Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States, serving as the ABC affiliate for Northeastern Pennsylvania. Owned by Tegna Inc., the station maintains studios on Montage Mountain Road in Moosic. Through a channel sharing agreement with PBS member WVIA-TV, the two stations transmit using WNEP-TV's spectrum from an antenna at Penobscot Knob near Mountain Top.
WNEP-TV operates a digital replacement translator on UHF channel 22 that is licensed to Waymart with a transmitter in Forest City. It exists because wind turbines run by NextEra Energy Resources at the Waymart Wind Farm interfere with the transmission of full-power television signals.
History
WILK-TV and WARM-TV
There were originally two ABC network affiliates in northeastern Pennsylvania. WILK-TV, operating on channel 34 and owned by WILK radio took to the air from Wilkes-Barre on September 15, 1953. It was followed by Scranton-licensed WARM-TV, broadcasting on channel 16 and owned by future Governor William Scranton along with WARM radio, in February 9, 1954. During the late 1950s, WILK-TV was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.WILK wanted to get a head start on the other local stations when it signed on in 1953, going on the air at 2 p.m. rather than the 3 p.m. sign on that the other stations did. The engineers got the signal ready by noon and decided to take a break. However, at lunch, they turned on the station to inspect their handiwork, only to find the signal was dead. They rushed back and were able to establish the link by 1:50 p.m., 10 minutes before sign-on.
Getting a signal from ABC headquarters in New York City was a challenge in the early days with no access to satellites. As a result, WILK set up a microwave tower in Effort, about east of Wilkes-Barre. From there, the network signal was bounced to the Penobscot Knob transmitter site. Often, station engineers had to adjust the Effort transmitter to accept a signal from WFIL-TV in Philadelphia if they were unable to receive the New York feed.
WILK-TV and WARM-TV were both losing money, in large part because their network, ABC, was not on an equal footing with NBC and CBS. However, they stayed on the air because they were owned by well-respected local radio stations.
Merger and transition
By 1955, however, it was obvious that Scranton and Wilkes-Barre were going to be a single television market. On October 17, 1957, WILK-TV and WARM-TV agreed to merge into a single ABC station for Northeastern Pennsylvania. The merged station, then as now, operated under WILK-TV's license, but used WARM-TV's channel 16 in order to provide wider signal coverage at less cost—no small consideration given the station's vast and mostly mountainous coverage area. Transcontinent Television Corporation, a Buffalo, New York–based media firm, acquired a 60 percent interest in the merged station; the remaining shares were split between the WARM and WILK groups, with William Scranton as chairman. The merged station, WNEP-TV, was licensed to Scranton, and split operations between WILK-TV's former facility in Wilkes-Barre and a new studio in Scranton. In 1962, WNEP-TV consolidated its operations at a new studio near Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport in Avoca. WILK-TV's transmitter site at Penobscot Knob was retained by WNEP-TV, and the WARM-TV transmitter was donated a decade later to the area's PBS member station, WVIA-TV.Meanwhile, the WILK-TV facility was repurposed as a satellite repeater of WNEP-TV until late summer 1958. The channel 34 assignment was later reallocated to Binghamton, New York, to be occupied by ABC affiliate WBJA-TV beginning in 1962.
Despite a power boost to 1.5 million watts, and an increased coverage area—expanded to 15 counties in northeastern Pennsylvania—WNEP-TV bounced back and forth in the ratings for most of the next two decades. It was never able to achieve any consistency because of the bitter rivalry between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Viewers in Wilkes-Barre thought it was a Scranton station, while viewers in Scranton thought it was a Wilkes-Barre station. It was also hobbled by being an affiliate of the smallest and weakest network of the time. Indeed, WNEP's launch made Scranton–Wilkes-Barre the smallest market in Pennsylvania with full service from all three networks.
Transcontinent exited broadcasting in 1964 and sold several of its stations, including WNEP-TV, to Taft Broadcasting. When Taft purchased Philadelphia independent station WIBF-TV in 1969, it sought a waiver to keep both stations. Channel 16's Grade B signal reaches the Lehigh Valley, which is part of the Philadelphia market. WNEP-TV had also operated an outlying translator on channel 7 in Allentown for many years. The Federal Communications Commission normally did not allow one company to own two stations with overlapping coverage areas. While it initially granted the waiver, it reversed itself four years later and forced Taft to sell channel 16. A group of WNEP-TV station employees and executives formed NEP Communications, which bought the station from Taft in late 1973.
Soon after NEP took over the station, news director Elden Hale decided to take a regional approach. He billed the station as serving "Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania", and stepped up coverage of the remote portions of the market. These areas had largely been ignored by the other stations in town. He also added the area's first news helicopter. This approach quickly paid off. In November 1976, WNEP surged to first place for the first time in a decade. After briefly falling back to second it returned to number one in 1978, around the same time ABC became the nation's number one network. Apart from a brief period in the mid-1990s when WBRE-TV passed it, it has been number one ever since. NEP also established a remote production company, which operated as an adjunct to WNEP-TV.
The New York Times Company bought the station in 1985. WNEP moved to its current studios in Moosic in 1989; the facility is similar to the building the Times Company built for then-sister station WHNT-TV in Huntsville, Alabama, but on a larger scale. NEP Communications retained the production unit, which became NEP Broadcasting; the company provided remote broadcast facilities for the Olympics, FIFA World Cup and the Academy Awards, as well as a studio production facility in New York City.
On January 4, 2007, the station, along with the rest of the Times Company's television division, was sold to Oak Hill Capital Partners in a $575 million transaction. Oak Hill formed Local TV as a holding company for its stations.
On July 1, 2013, Local TV announced that its 19 stations would be acquired by the Tribune Company for $2.75 billion; Tribune owns The Morning Call in Allentown. Although Allentown is part of the Philadelphia television market, WNEP has long claimed the Lehigh Valley as part of its coverage area. The FCC ruled that Tribune could not keep WNEP due to its ban on newspaper-television cross-ownership within a single market, The Morning Call serving a city within WNEP's coverage area. Tribune spun off WNEP-TV to Dreamcatcher Broadcasting, an unrelated company owned by former Tribune Company executive Ed Wilson. However, Tribune will operate the station and provide other services under a shared services agreement, and will hold an option to buy back WNEP outright in the future. The sale was completed on December 27. Tribune later announced on July 10, 2013, that it would spin off its newspapers into a separate company, the Tribune Publishing Company, in 2014, pending shareholder and regulatory approval. The split was completed in August 2014, though as of yet Tribune has not announced plans to acquire Dreamcatcher outright.
Analog broadcast tower collapse
WNEP-TV's transmission tower broadcasting the analog signal on channel 16 collapsed on December 16, 2007, due to severe ice, winds, and snow at the transmitter location on Penobscot Knob. The tower collapse also destroyed the transmitter building. No one was injured during the incident. WCLH's FM antenna and transmitter, which was co-located on WNEP's analog TV tower, was also destroyed during the incident. Transmission of the digital signal on channel 49 was restored after a brief interruption of power to the tower supporting the digital transmitter and antenna. WNEP's signal on local cable systems and satellite was restored later that day. WNEP-TV partially restored its analog over the air TV signal by January 1, 2008 by broadcasting from the nearby American Tower on Penobscot Knob supporting the WNEP-DT antenna as well as WOLF-TV/DT's antenna.As the WNEP-TV analog broadcast tower collapsed on December 16, 2007, one of the falling guy wires supporting the WNEP-TV tower damaged the neighboring tower broadcasting WVIA-TV and WVIA-FM by shearing off the top section of the WVIA tower supporting the antenna for the analog and digital TV signals. The antenna for WVIA-FM remained intact, as it is located on the lower section of the shared WVIA-FM-TV tower. The WVIA-TV analog signal on channel 44 was temporarily put off the air until service was restored through a back-up tower on Penobscot Knob. The collapse of WNEP-TV's analog tower also severed power to the transmitters for CBS affiliate WYOU and NBC affiliate WBRE-TV, putting those stations off the air for a time.
On June 12, 2009, WNEP was to operate on a new tower which had been completed, though the antenna had not arrived in a timely fashion. Their goal was to have the new facility operating by August 2009, but it was delayed a few months. On December 5, 2009, WNEP turned off channel 49 and moved to channel 50. Moving to channel 50 was necessary so it could alleviate possible interference from Telemundo O&O WWSI in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which at the time broadcast on UHF channel 49.
On February 15, 2010, the channel 49 facility was put back into use by WNEP on a temporary basis with FCC approval to accommodate WVIA-TV, which had suffered a partial tower collapse and electrical fire which had destroyed WVIA's transmitter building and the equipment within.