WGN America
WGN America was an American subscription television network that operated from November 9, 1978 to February 28, 2021. The service was originally uplinked to satellite by United Video Inc. as a national feed of Chicago independent station WGN-TV, making the station's programming available to cable and satellite providers throughout the United States as the second nationally distributed "superstation".
It maintained a nearly identical program schedule as the Chicago station, airing a variety of programming including films, syndicated series, programs intended for local broadcast in the Chicago market, and sports. By the 1990s, the WGN superstation feed began substituting some syndicated programs in accordance with syndication exclusivity rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission in January 1990 to reduce programming duplication between local and out-of-market television stations carried by local cable systems, and served as the national carrier of The WB during the latter half of the decade.
WGN America was converted into a conventional basic cable network in December 2014, adding scripted original programs and removing WGN-TV's local programs from its schedule as well as making the network available on cable and satellite providers within the Chicago market. Nexstar Media Group acquired WGN America as part of its 2019 purchase of most of Tribune's assets, becoming the company's only wholly owned, national cable-originated network. The channel in its final form under the WGN branding ran a mixture of entertainment programs for most of the broadcast day and, beginning in March 2020, a straight-news format—via a daily national prime time newscast, NewsNation—during the evening and early overnight hours. Nexstar relaunched the network as NewsNation on March 1, 2021, eventually converting its entire schedule to a general news and discussion format in July 2024, as contracts for syndicated entertainment programs held over from the predecessor WGN America service expired.
History
Early years
WGN America traces its origins to WGN-TV, a broadcast television station in Chicago, Illinois that began operating over VHF channel 9 on April 5, 1948 as the second commercial television station to sign on in both the Chicago market and the state of Illinois – after WBKB-TV, which began experimental operations as W9XBK in 1940 and converted into a commercially licensed independent station on September 6, 1946 – and the 19th commercial station to sign on in the United States. The station – which, until January 1948, had initially planned to use the call sign WGNA – was founded by WGN, Incorporated, the broadcasting subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune Company, which had also owned local radio stations WGN and WGNB. WGN America and its Chicago-based broadcast television and radio siblings borrow the three-letter "WGN" initialism from the "World's Greatest Newspaper" slogan used by the Tribune from August 29, 1911 until December 31, 1976.Initial programming on WGN-TV consisted of local newscasts and various other local programs, older feature films and sporting events from Chicago-area professional and collegiate teams. By the end of 1948, network programs from CBS and the DuMont Television Network joined the schedule; WGN served as a production hub for several DuMont programs during the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s. CBS programming moved exclusively to the rechristened WBBM-TV in February 1953, upon completion of that station's sale to CBS by Balaban and Katz Broadcasting, then owned by United Paramount Theatres, which was in the process of merging with ABC and acquiring, by association, WENR-TV. This left WGN-TV with the faltering DuMont until that network completed its operational wind-down in August 1956, at which time it became an independent station; at that time, off-network syndicated reruns were added to the schedule.
Channel 9 originally maintained studio and transmitter facilities at the Chicago Daily News Building, on West Madison and North Canal Streets in downtown Chicago, before relocating to WGN Radio's main facility at the Centennial Building annex of the Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue in the city's Magnificent Mile district, which was refurbished to accommodate the television station, on January 25, 1950. The channel 9 transmitter was moved to the Prudential Building on East Randolph Street and North Michigan Avenue in January 1956. The station moved to a proprietary studio facility at the WGN Mid-America Broadcast Center on West Bradley Place in Chicago's North Center community in June 1961. In May 1969, the main transmitter was moved to the west antenna tower of the John Hancock Center on North Michigan Avenue.
WGN-TV became most associated with its heavy schedule of sporting events, which, in addition to its signature Cubs telecasts, included Chicago White Sox baseball, Chicago Bulls basketball, Chicago Blackhawks hockey, and college football and basketball games from individual regional universities as well as Big Ten Conference schools, among other events in aired at various points over the years. The station was also known locally for its lineup of children's programs including Bozo's Circus, Ray Rayner and His Friends and Garfield Goose and Friends as well as a robust lineup of feature films.
Channel 9 was Chicago's leading independent station for much of the period between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, although it was briefly overtaken in this distinction from 1979 to 1981 by rival independent WFLD, which forced WGN-TV parent subsidiary Tribune Broadcasting to initiate efforts to beef up the station's inventory of off-network syndicated programs and add product from the Tribune Company's upstart national syndication unit, Tribune Entertainment. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the WGN-TV signal began to be retransmitted via microwave relay to cable television systems in much of the central Midwestern United States, enabling the station to reach far beyond the Chicago television market and reach areas that lacked access to an entertainment-based independent station. By the fall of 1978, WGN-TV was being distributed to 574 cable systems – covering Western, Central and Southern Illinois and large swaths of Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri – reaching an estimated 8.6 million subscribers.
As a superstation
WGN-TV goes national
On October 26, 1978, one day after the agency implemented an "open entry" policy for transponder resale carriers to feed distant television station signals to cable television systems, the Federal Communications Commission granted authority to four common carrier satellite relay firms – Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Southern Satellite Systems and United Video Inc., Lansing, Michigan-based American Microwave & Communications and Milwaukee-based Midwestern Relay Company – to uplink the WGN-TV signal to satellite to cable television providers serving various locations throughout the 48 contiguous U.S. states. Southern Satellite Systems – founded in 1975 by Ted Turner and subsequently sold to former Western Union marketing executive Edward L. Taylor to comply with FCC rules prohibiting a common satellite carrier from having involvement in program origination – was the leading contender to uplink the WGN signal for availability to a nationwide audience, intending to make it the second independent station that the company distributed via satellite, after Turner's Atlanta, Georgia, independent station WTCG, which SSS began redistributing to American cable and satellite systems in December 1976. However, in a memo released to provider clients on October 30, 1978, Taylor announced that Transponder 13 of Satcom 1 had failed and that the communications satellite's operator, RCA American Communications, had refused a request to assign it a new transponder unless Satellite Communications Systems agreed to dismiss a lawsuit it filed against RCA on October 16 over retaining use of Satcom Transponder 18 after January 1, 1979.On November 9, 1978, United Video Inc. – which stepped in to oversee uplink responsibilities in lieu of Southern Satellite Systems – uplinked the WGN-TV signal from a satellite relay facility in Monee, Illinois to the Satcom-3 communications satellite for redistribution to cable systems and C-band satellite providers throughout the United States. This resulted in WGN-TV joining the ranks of WTBS to become America's second national superstation and becoming the first of three independent stations to be redistributed on a national basis before the end of 1979: KTVU in Oakland, California was uplinked by Satellite Communications Systems in December 1978 and WOR-TV in New York City was uplinked by Newhouse Newspapers subsidiary Eastern Microwave Inc. in April 1979. It was also the first Tribune-owned independent station to be distributed to a national pay television audience—United Video would later uplink WPIX in New York City in May 1984; Netlink began distributing KWGN-TV in Denver in October 1987; and Eastern Microwave began distributing KTLA in Los Angeles in February 1988—and the first superstation to be distributed by United Video—with WGN and WPIX being joined by Gaylord Broadcasting-owned KTVT in Dallas–Fort Worth in July 1984 and, after it assumed retransmission rights from Eastern Microwave, KTLA in April 1988.
By the end of its first week of national availability, the WGN-TV signal had become available to approximately 200 additional cable television systems nationwide, reaching approximately 800,000 subscribers. That cable reach would grow over the next several years: the first heaviest concentrations developed in the Central United States and gradually expanded to encompass most of the nation by the mid-1980s. United Video initially charged prospective cable systems 10¢ per subscriber to receive the WGN-TV signal, the same rate Southern Satellite Systems charged for 24-hour-a-day retransmission of WTBS. WGN Continental Broadcasting and station management originally treated WGN-TV as a "passive" superstation, asserting a neutral position over United Video's national retransmission of its signal and holding no oversight over national promotion of the WGN signal. This allowed WGN Continental/Tribune Broadcasting to continue paying for syndicated programming and advertising at local rates rather than those comparable to other national networks. Tribune was also not directly compensated by United Video for their retransmission or promotion of WGN's signal, though under compulsory license provisions applying to out-of-market stations through the Copyright Act of 1976, WGN-TV did receive royalty payments made by cable and satellite systems retransmitting the national WGN feed to the United States Copyright Office for retransmission of any copyrighted programming over which it held ownership.
Since United Video did not seek the Tribune Company's permission to relay the WGN-TV signal, for many years, WGN and United Video's relationship was described as being "not particularly friendly," going as far as Tribune even attempting legal challenges to stop retransmission of its signal, even though a Copyright Act exemption clause regarding "passive" carriers in the compulsory license statute of Section 111 effectively defined that satellite carriers were not required to seek direct the express permission of a television station or its licensee to redistribute out-of-market broadcast signals. Publicly, Daniel T. Pecaro, president of WGN-TV at the time, opined that the station was "very honored selected" by United Video and the three other carriers granted redistribution but noted that the station would "continue to serve our Chicagoland communities." For about eleven years afterward, the national WGN-TV signal carried the same programming schedule as that seen in the Chicago area, except in instances where Chicago Bulls basketball games were prohibited from airing on the national feed due to NBA restrictions on superstation broadcasts. The national feed also used the same on-air branding as the Chicago area signal until 1997, when it became known as simply "WGN" outside Chicago ; in print and off-air promotional advertisements, however, United Video marketed the service as "WGN, The Chicago SuperChannel" and later, on an alternative basis, "WGN/UV".
On February 10, 1981, WGN-TV began using the satellite feed's audio subcarrier signal to transmit programming schedules delivered to the Electronic Program Guide service in a 2400 bit/s data stream over the satellite feed's vertical blanking interval to local cable providers receiving the schedule information to the EPG's proprietary computer units. However, despite being notified that WGN would be conducting tests of the programming information teletext, United Video chose to substitute the material with teletext content from its Dow Jones business news service; its repurposing of the VBI became the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Tribune Broadcasting against United Video in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois that April, alleging that it retransmitted the station's prime time newscast, The Nine O'Clock News, as well as other WGN-TV programs in a "mutilated and altered" fashion to use profitable teletext content from the Dow Jones service in a manner which resulted in United Video exercising direct control over the content in violation of Section 111 of the 1976 Copyright Act and in interference with an agreement between WGN-TV and Albuquerque, New Mexico, cable provider Albuquerque Cable Television Inc. to supply the EPG teletext to subscribers. United Video contended that the Copyright Act's passive carrier rules applied to how it used the VBI, also maintaining that transmitting extraneous material to cable systems did not constitute a public performance and the teletext material was a separate transmission from the copyrighted program since it required a standalone decoder to view it over television receivers.
On October 8, 1981, District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner denied injunctive relief to WGN Continental Broadcasting and dismissed the case against United Video, citing that it was not required to carry the station's teletext transmission. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Northern District of Illinois reversed Getzendanner's decision on August 12, 1982, ordering in a narrowly defined ruling that United Video must retransmit WGN-TV's VBI Teletext where the transmission was directly related to and part of the 9:00 p.m. news simulcast. The court pointed out that "purely passive " carriers cannot make any changes or outright remove any part of the copyrighted transmission and that United Video had no grounds to claim exemption from copyright liability as the definition of what the Copyright Act constitutes as a public performance was broad enough to encompass indirect transmission through cable systems that received the WGN satellite feed.
In 1985, Tribune Broadcasting began providing a direct microwave relay link of the WGN-TV signal to United Video to serve as a contingency feed to allow United access to WGN programming in the event of any problems with the microwave link-up. Separate national advertising or per inquiry ads also began to be inserted over the satellite feed in place of local advertisements intended for broadcast in the Chicago market. This also allowed the station to increase the amount of advertising revenue it accrued by charging separate rates for the Chicago-area signal and a higher fee for advertisers purchasing airtime on the national signal, and offering advertisers exclusive commercial avails for either the Chicago-based audience or the national cable audience, or uniform avails for both the national and local audiences. Despite the feed restructuring, most of the shows viewable over WGN-TV in the Chicago area continued to air nationally over the satellite signal. In July 1987, United Video began transmitting the WGN superstation feed in stereo; all WGN-TV-produced programming was made available to participating systems in the format, while other programming was initially transmitted in synthesized stereo audio.
On May 18, 1988, the FCC reinstituted the Syndication Exclusivity Rights Rule, a rule – previously repealed by the agency in July 1980 – that allows television stations to claim local exclusivity over syndicated programs and requires cable systems to either black out or secure an agreement with the claimant station or a syndication distributor to continue carrying a claimed program through an out-of-market station. To indemnify cable systems from potential blackouts, Tribune and United Video began to secure national retransmission rights to certain programs featured on the WGN Chicago signal—particularly, local and some syndicated programs as well as sporting events not subjected to league restrictions pertaining to the number of games that could be shown on out-of-market stations annually—and substitute programs not subjected to exclusivity claims—mainly syndicated reruns of recent and older comedy and drama series, select first-run syndicated shows, and acquired theatrical feature and made-for-television films not shown on the Chicago feed—to ensure that the national feed would not face blackout issues. United Video also made contingency plans to put alternative programming on a second satellite to which it could switch to absolve any holes in the WGN-TV national feed's schedule by leasing part-time space for the affected time periods.
When the Syndex rules went into effect on January 1, 1990, United Video formally launched a separate national feed of WGN that featured the WGN-TV-transmitted and separately acquired programs cleared for "full-signal" carriage. However, it continued to run much of the same programs as the Chicago broadcast signal with limited programming differentiation from its parent station for most of the 1990s. Of the four United Video-distributed superstations, WGN was the only one to have its national coverage expand post-Syndex, adding 2.2 million households with cable or satellite service to its total reach by July 1990; some systems also began to swap out New York City-area rivals WPIX and WWOR in favor of offering the WGN superstation feed in the years immediately following that feed's launch as it offered fewer blackout-subjected programs than other affected superstations. The national feed's distribution gradually expanded further to direct broadcast satellite through agreements with DirecTV, Dish Network and Primestar throughout the 1990s. In January 1992, WGN-TV signed an agreement with A.C. Nielsen Co. to provide monthly measurements of the station's national audience through Nielsen's cable network measurement service.