WYOU
WYOU is a television station licensed to Scranton, Pennsylvania, United States, serving as the CBS affiliate for Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is owned by Mission Broadcasting, which maintains a shared services agreement with Nexstar Media Group, owner of Wilkes-Barre–licensed NBC affiliate WBRE-TV, for the provision of certain services. The two stations share studios on South Franklin Street in downtown Wilkes-Barre, with a news bureau and sales office in the Ritz Theater in downtown Scranton. WYOU's transmitter is located at the Penobscot Knob antenna farm near Mountain Top.
Channel 22 was the second television station built in Northeastern Pennsylvania and the first on air in Scranton, beginning broadcasting as WGBI-TV on June 7, 1953. A CBS affiliate from the start, the station was owned by the Megargee family alongside WGBI radio and shared its facilities on Wyoming Avenue. The station changed its call letters to WDAU-TV in 1957, after the Philadelphia Bulletin—owner of WCAU radio and television in Philadelphia—purchased a controlling stake which was later repurchased by the Megargees. In the 1970s, ratings began to slide for the station's newscasts as WNEP-TV catapulted into a dominant first-place position. The station's problems were compounded by a lack of investment during a three-year period in the early 1980s in which the station was forced to relocate to downtown Scranton.
Southeastern Capital Corporation acquired WDAU-TV in 1984 after another acquisition attempt failed. The new owners immediately set out to upgrade the station's outdated equipment and news department, as well as to establish a more regional image for the station. Two years later, Southeastern Capital sold channel 22 to Diversified Communications, which renamed the station WYOU in October 1986. Under Diversified, the news product improved and expanded with new equipment and a news helicopter, and at times the station eclipsed WBRE-TV for second place in local news ratings. In 1996, WYOU was the first station acquired by Nexstar Broadcasting Group, which cut costs by firing several on-air personnel. When WBRE-TV came up for sale shortly after, Nexstar acquired it and sold WYOU to Mission Broadcasting with a shared services agreement. Some of WYOU's operation, including news production, was integrated with WBRE over the course of 1998, while sales and programming remained separate. Over the 2000s, despite several attempts to change the format and an investment of nearly $1 million a year, WYOU's share of news viewership declined from 7% to 4%. In April 2009, WYOU discontinued its newscasts completely, and the combined operation laid off 14 employees; it aired no news programs for three years until the station began simulcasting newscasts from WBRE in 2012.
WGBI-TV and WDAU-TV: The Megargee years
Construction and early operation
When the Federal Communications Commission ended a multi-year freeze on television channel allocations in 1952, it assigned three channels in the ultra high frequency band for use in Scranton: 16, 22, and 73. Scranton Broadcasters, the parent of radio station WGBI, had already applied for channel 22 on September 7, 1951, and amended its proposal on June 27, 1952. With no opposition, the construction permit for WGBI-TV was one of the first two awarded for Scranton on August 14, 1952. WGBI announced that the TV station studios would be co-located with the radio station in the basement of what was then the Prudential Life Insurance Building on Wyoming Avenue, with a tower on Bald Mountain. Construction on the Bald Mountain tower began in early November, at which time the owning Megargee family announced the station would be the CBS television affiliate for the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre area.WGBI-TV began broadcasting on June 7, 1953. Network programs were received directly from WCBS-TV in New York City by means of a large rhombic antenna at the Bald Mountain transmitter, while the station boasted a large studio for most programs and a secondary news studio in its Wyoming Avenue facility. In addition to newscasts hosted by news director Tom Powell, a newscaster for WGBI radio and the first face seen on the new station, WGBI-TV produced a daily cartoon show and a western performer program in the early evening. It originally broadcast with an effective radiated power of 178,000 watts, which was approved to be increased in 1955. At the time, the Megargees planned to construct satellite stations in Williamsport and Sunbury. Eventually, the link to New York was changed to a private microwave system after reception of the over-the-air signal from WCBS-TV degraded; still later, the station began taking a proper feed from AT&T to broadcast network shows in color.
In July 1956, Scranton Broadcasters began entering into negotiations with WCAU radio and television—the broadcasting stations of the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper in that city—which sought to purchase the WGBI stations. This resulted in a $650,000 deal for a 50-percent interest and voting control in WGBI-TV, while the Megargees retained full ownership of the radio stations. The deal was approved that October, and channel 22 changed its call sign to WDAU-TV on April 1, 1957, coinciding with the activation of a higher-power, 892,300-watt transmitter facility expected to double the station's service area. The Bulletin ownership of channel 22 was short-lived. The next year, it sold the WCAU stations in Philadelphia to CBS, retaining its interests in WDAU-TV and a Muzak background music service. The Megargees bought back the newspaper's stake in 1959. Again, the family pursued the possibility of constructing satellite stations of channel 22; in 1960, it proposed to reactivate the silent WBPZ-TV in Lock Haven for the purpose of rebroadcasting channel 22 for the Williamsport area.
From dominance to third place
For more than two decades, WDAU-TV's news department, headed by Powell, led news ratings in the Scranton area, while WBRE was the most-watched station in and around Wilkes-Barre. Under Powell, the station provided extensive coverage of local politics and coverage of local and national events including 1957 U.S. Senate hearings into racketeering and the 1959 Knox Mine disaster. Most of the surviving aerial footage of the flooding brought by Hurricane Agnes was shot by channel 22; Powell arranged for the use of a helicopter owned by a coal businessman. WDAU-TV news commanded as much as 48 percent of news viewers in the market in the late 1960s and early 1970s.This changed when the third-rated station, WNEP-TV, began a top-to-bottom overhaul of its news department in the mid-1970s in the mold of the successful Eyewitness News format as used by WABC-TV in New York City. As a result, over a period of several years, channel 16 climbed to the top while channel 22 fell to the bottom in the Northeastern Pennsylvania market. Though only slightly behind WBRE-TV, both stations combined had fewer viewers than channel 16's early evening news, which by 1981 commanded nearly half the audience and in 1984 was the highest-rated early evening newscast in a three-station TV market in the country.
Compounding the station's fall was a protracted series of circumstances involving the Megargees' attempts to sell WDAU-TV between 1981 and 1984. That February, the Scranton Preparatory School—which had moved into the Wyoming Avenue building in 1963—gave WGBI and WDAU-TV a year to leave their basement studio so that it could alleviate overcrowding on its campus. Three months later, channel 22 officially went on the market. On September 17, Scranton Broadcasters agreed to sell the station for $12 million to a consortium of Robert Dudley, Charles Woods, and A. Richard Benedek. Under the deal, the new owners would construct a new studio facility for WDAU-TV so it could move out of the Scranton Prep building. The transaction bogged down over the course of 1982 as the Dudley–Woods–Benedek group struggled to raise the cash necessary to make the purchase, requiring extensions of time from the FCC. In the meantime, as a result of the delays, Scranton Broadcasters acquired a former S. S. Kresge department store in the 400 block of Lackawanna Avenue downtown and began refitting it to serve as channel 22's new home. The Dudley–Woods–Benedek transaction hit another snag in November, despite an amended payment plan and FCC approval, due to hesitancy from a bank to put up the money the buyers owed at closing. At the end of 1982, the buyers presented a last-ditch proposal to modify the deal accordingly, which was rejected; the Megargees sued for breach of contract. Litigation involving the buyers, the Bank of New York, and a law firm stretched into 1985, when a judge ruled in favor of the Megargee family.
Philip Lombardo came close to buying the station and engaged in talks throughout 1982 and 1983, but the Megargees instead agreed to sell WDAU-TV to an affiliate of the Atlanta-based Southeastern Capital Corporation, a diversified holding company. The $10.2 million deal, approved in 1984, included a 15-year lease of the studio facility from Scranton Broadcasters.
The lengthy sale process further deferred investment and attention in the station as its ratings continued to decline. Vacancies were left unfilled so that new managers could make hires; as a result, WDAU-TV had only three full-time reporters on its news staff by February 1984 compared to seven at WBRE-TV and nine at WNEP-TV, and its total news staff had shrunk by a third. The station's equipment was outdated, another matter expected to be handled by new owners. Alarmed by slumping ratings for the CBS Evening News and fearing that WDAU-TV's poor image weighed down its entire lineup of shows, CBS made two overtures to WNEP-TV within 18 months, in 1981 and again in 1983, in hopes of inducing an affiliation switch; channel 16 refused, remaining with ABC.