WKYC
WKYC is a television station in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Tegna Inc. The station's studios are located on Tom Beres Way, and its transmitter is located in suburban Parma, Ohio.
History
Early years
The station first signed on the air on October 31, 1948, as WNBK, broadcasting on VHF channel 4. It was the second television station in Cleveland to debut, ten months after WEWS-TV, and was the fourth of NBC's five original owned-and-operated stations to sign on, three weeks after WNBQ in Chicago. WNBK was a sister station to WTAM radio, which had been owned by NBC since 1930. Although there was then no coaxial cable connection to New York City, AT&T had just installed a cable connection between WNBK, WNBQ, WSPD-TV in Toledo, KSTP-TV in St. Paul, Minnesota, and KSD-TV in St. Louis, creating NBC's Midwest Network. WNBK became one of the originators of programming for the regional network, along with WNBQ. Two days after signing on, on November 2, WNBK transmitted its coverage of the Truman/Dewey election results to the NBC Midwest Network. On January 11, 1949, WNBK began carrying NBC's New York-originated programming live via a cable connection to Philadelphia.As a result of frequency reallocations resulting from the Federal Communications Commission's 1952 Sixth Report and Order, WNBK was moved to channel 3, swapping frequencies with fellow NBC affiliate WLWC in Columbus to alleviate same-channel interference with another NBC station, WWJ-TV across Lake Erie in Detroit. After construction was completed on the station's new transmitter in Parma, the channel switch took place on April 25, 1954.
Westinghouse moves in
In May 1955, NBC agreed to trade WNBK and WTAM-AM-FM to Westinghouse Electric Corporation in return for KYW radio and WPTZ television in Philadelphia. Although Cleveland was a top-10 television and radio market at the time, NBC had long wanted to "trade up" its holdings to a larger market. Also, Philadelphia was the largest market in which it did not own a station. The swap became official on January 22, 1956, as NBC moved its operations to Philadelphia, with WPTZ becoming WRCV-TV. Westinghouse took over the WNBK/WTAM operation and changed its call letters to KYW-AM-FM-TV on February 13, 1956. Westinghouse received a cross-station waiver from the FCC to own channel 3 since it has overlapping signals with Group W flagship KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh.file:KYW 3 Cleveland.jpg|right|thumb|200px|1960s logo as KYW
Despite its success in Cleveland, Westinghouse was not happy with how the 1956 trade with NBC played out. Almost as soon as the ink dried on the trade, the FCC and the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation, claiming NBC extorted and coerced them into agreeing to the deal. The investigators discovered that Group W had only agreed to the deal after NBC threatened to remove its affiliation from WPTZ and Westinghouse's other NBC affiliate, WBZ-TV in Boston, and to withhold a primary affiliation with newly purchased KDKA-TV, which ultimately affiliated with CBS despite its strong radio ties to NBC. In 1964, after an investigation that lasted eight years, the FCC ordered the swap to be reversed. NBC tried to appeal the decision, delaying the swap for one more year, but ultimately to no avail. Ironically, during the ordeal NBC was actually trying to sell its Philadelphia cluster it acquired from Westinghouse to RKO General in exchange for Boston cluster WNAC-AM-TV; NBC wouldn't own a station in Boston until purchasing WBTS-LD in 2016.
NBC returns
NBC re-assumed control of the Cleveland stations on June 19, 1965. Instead of restoring the previous WNBK and WTAM identities, the stations' new call letters became WKYC-AM-FM-TV, mostly as a nod to Westinghouse's stewardship of the stations. The AM station, for instance, had become a top 40 powerhouse under the moniker "KY11." WKYC-TV was separated from its sister stations in 1972, when NBC sold the WKYC radio stations to Ohio Communications. The AM station changed its calls to WWWE before restoring its historic WTAM calls in 1996, while the FM station became WWWM and then, in 1982, WMJI.In a reverse of what took place in 1956, some radio and television staffers who worked for Westinghouse in Cleveland moved to Philadelphia along with the KYW call letters. This included news reporter Tom Snyder, news director Al Primo, and daytime talk show host Mike Douglas. Other Westinghouse employees—such as Linn Sheldon, Clay Conroy, and staff announcer Jay Miltner —remained in Cleveland. NBC also relocated many of their top Philadelphia radio and television executives and some on-air personalities to Cleveland, such as meteorologist Wally Kinnan. Kinnan's arrival displaced Dick Goddard, who had been with channel 3 since 1961. Goddard moved to Philadelphia with Westinghouse but returned to Cleveland in early 1966 and joined WJW-TV. Evening sports anchor Jim Graner, who had joined the station in 1957 while also serving as the color commentator for the Cleveland Browns radio network, remained through the transition; he stayed on until his death in 1976. To this day, the Philadelphia stations insist they "moved" to Cleveland in 1956 and "returned" to Philadelphia in 1965 after the trade was voided.
At the same time, channel 3 enjoyed several technical advances with NBC's parent company, RCA. It was Cleveland's first television station to broadcast full-time in color on September 13, 1965, the first to broadcast in stereo in 1985, and the first VHF station to closed caption its local newscasts for the hearing-impaired in 1990.
NBC cedes control to Multimedia, and then Gannett
After years of sagging ratings and continuing to be the lowest-rated of the network's owned and operated stations, NBC sold majority control of WKYC to Multimedia, Inc. in 1990. Due to its long ownership by NBC, to this day channel 3 is the only major station in Cleveland to have never changed its primary affiliation. At that time, Multimedia's entertainment division produced a number of syndicated daytime talk shows, and as a result Multimedia productions such as Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael and Donahue ended up on WKYC's daily schedule. In 1993, the NBC peacock was dropped from the primary station logo, which italicized the numeral 3, was put in a square, and took a red-white-blue color scheme, though WKYC was still identified as "Channel 3".The Gannett Company purchased Multimedia on December 4, 1995. Under a December 1998 put-call agreement with NBC, Gannett increased its stake in WKYC-TV to 58% in April 1999 and to 64% in December 2000; it acquired the remaining 36% of the station from NBC in 2001. WKYC accomplished another first in Cleveland television history by becoming the first station in Northeast Ohio to broadcast in high-definition in 1999. Soon after Gannett bought full control of the station, it moved from its longtime studios in the former East Ohio Gas building on East Sixth Street in downtown Cleveland to its state-of-the-art Lakeside Avenue studio on the shores of Lake Erie, which Channel 3 refers to as its "digital broadcast center".
Tegna era
On June 29, 2015, the Gannett Company split in two, with one side specializing in print media and the other side specializing in broadcast and home video media. WKYC was retained by the latter company, named Tegna.On September 23, 2019, WKYC debuted a new logo, began referring to their production operations as "WKYC Studios"—an umbrella brand encompassing their on-air and digital platforms, and began incorporating more lifestyle and human interest reports in their newscasts ; the station also now uses the "3" brand for general entertainment programming.
In January 2020, WKYC began a 5 p.m. newscast, bringing in former ESPN personality and Sandusky, Ohio native Jay Crawford as a co-anchor. In September 2022, channel 3 moved Crawford to its newly established 4 p.m. newscast, and signed former CNN anchor and Bellevue, Ohio, native Christi Paul as a co-anchor at 5 p.m.
On August 19, 2025, Nexstar Media Group announced their purchase of Tegna Inc. for $6.2 billion. In Cleveland, Nexstar owns WJW and WBNX-TV.
Programming
Local programming
Under Westinghouse's ownership, KYW-TV launched Barnaby, a children's program which starred Linn Sheldon as the title character. The show premiered in 1956 and was an immediate hit, running on weekday afternoons for ten years. In 1961, channel 3 originated a local 90-minute weekday daytime variety talk show with former band singer Mike Douglas, which went up against WEWS' One O'Clock Club. Quickly eclipsing the competition, The Mike Douglas Show became so popular that Westinghouse decided to carry the program on its other stations in 1963, and eventually to syndicate the program nationwide. WKYC-TV continued to air The Mike Douglas Show for many years after both the host and the program moved to Philadelphia, where it remained until 1978. Westinghouse also took the Eyewitness News name and format with it from Cleveland to Philadelphia; it would later return to Cleveland, being used on WEWS from 1972 to 1990.One show that made the jump from Philadelphia to Cleveland was the award-winning documentary series Montage, produced and directed by Dennis Goulden. This nationally acclaimed series of over 250 episodes investigated the issues and lifestyles of the Cleveland community during the 1960s and 1970s.
On July 1, 2011, WKYC became Cleveland's television outlet for the Ohio Lottery's daily drawings, as well as its Saturday night game show Cash Explosion; the rights returned to the lottery's former longtime broadcaster WEWS-TV on July 1, 2013.
Past programming preemptions and deferrals
Two NBC programs were notably excluded from the schedule of channel 3 under Westinghouse ownership: The Tonight Show, which was reformatted after original host Steve Allen's departure as the short-lived Tonight! America After Dark, was dropped by channel 3 in June 1957 and replaced with a late-night movie following the 11 p.m. newscast. NBC revived Tonight with Jack Paar as host in July of that year, but KYW-TV continued with its own programming, which also included the Westinghouse-produced-and-syndicated Steve Allen, Regis Philbin, and Merv Griffin programs. The Paar-hosted Tonight Show would not be seen in Cleveland until October 1957, when NBC agreed to terms with WEWS to carry the program. KYW-TV also did not carry NBC's early-evening newscast, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, for exactly one year comprising the 1959-1960 television season. As with The Tonight Show, WEWS also ran this program. Also during this period, WFMJ-TV out of Youngstown was the nearest full-time NBC station to Cleveland. Many were able to receive WFMJ with a good antenna and UHF converter at that time. The Tonight Show returned to WKYC-TV's schedule in February 1966, after airing on WEWS during channel 3's Westinghouse years.In March 2013, the station made national headlines when it preempted NBC's Thursday night sitcom lineup for two weeks with Matlock telefilms. Coming so shortly after it was announced about NBC's then sagging ratings, the decision was perceived to be a result of the lineup's poor performance, though WKYC's manager reminded many who had not noticed that the station has typically preempted the lineup for Matlock telefilms quite often for the past ten years, and the move had nothing to do with ratings, and that NBC had begun to push new programming on those March evenings without much advance notice; WKYC had originally scheduled the films when it was expected the night would carry mainly encore programming.
Currently, the station's only preemptions outside of breaking news and weather situations are mainly for local sports, including a package of Cleveland Guardians games and over-the-air simulcasts of Cleveland Browns games from ESPN's Monday Night Football.