WTSP


WTSP is a television station in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States, serving the Tampa Bay area as an affiliate of CBS. The station is owned by Tegna Inc. and maintains studios on Gandy Boulevard on St. Petersburg's northeast side, just off the Gandy Bridge; its transmitter is located in Riverview, Florida.
Channel 10 was a latter-day insertion into the Tampa Bay television market, and six groups competed for the channel between 1957 and 1964. Rahall Communications, owner of St. Petersburg radio station WLCY, was awarded the construction permit, and WLCY-TV began broadcasting on July 18, 1965, becoming Tampa Bay's ABC affiliate that September. For technical reasons, the channel 10 transmitter had to be further north than all other local stations, and the initial tower height was limited to. As a result, the station had a smaller coverage area and potential audience than its principal competitors, WFLA-TV and WTVT. This situation also led to the construction of WXLT in Sarasota in 1971, providing ABC service to the southern portion of the market but limiting WLCY-TV's reach. A taller tower was constructed in 1979, but the station was unable to move to Riverview until 2011.
In 1977, Gulf United Corporation acquired Rahall Communications and used it as the base of the Gulf Broadcast Group, with corporate headquarters in St. Petersburg. Channel 10 was separated from WLCY radio and changed call signs to WTSP. Under Gulf, a news department previously regarded as under-resourced and amateurish became professionalized and moved into second place in local ratings, at one point challenging WTVT for first place. After Gulf sold to Taft Broadcasting, which in turn was taken over and became Great American Broadcasting, momentum was lost in the mid-to-late 1980s, and the station slipped to third. In 1989, the news director and assistant news director were fired when it emerged they had accessed WTVT's computer systems and used them to make decisions about news coverage at WTSP. Despite various overhauls, the news department rarely moved above third place. On December 12, 1994, a three-station affiliation switch saw WTSP become a CBS affiliate. News ratings did not improve as WTSP's new CBS programming attracted older viewers.
Jacor acquired WTSP in 1996 and swapped it to Gannett months later in exchange for six radio stations. Under Gannett—whose broadcasting division became Tegna in 2015—WTSP has remained either in second or third place in local news ratings, having tried several strategies to change its approach and presentation over that time.

History

Construction and early years

When the Federal Communications Commission allocated television channels in 1952 after lifting a multi-year freeze on new stations, the Tampa Bay area had been allocated channels 3, 8, and 13 in the very high frequency band and 38 in the ultra high frequency band. The final plan assigned channel 38 instead of the previously contemplated channel 10. Channel 38 was occupied by WSUN-TV, owned by the city of St. Petersburg, beginning in 1953; the two commercial VHF channels opened in 1955 as WFLA-TV in February and WTVT in April.
In January 1955, three St. Petersburg men formed the Suncoast Cities Broadcasting Corporation and asked the FCC to allocate channel 10 to Pinellas County, in hopes of "prevent the major network television activity from being concentrated in Tampa". The channel had previously been requested by Jacksonville station WJHP-TV, which intended to locate it at Bunnell, Florida. When WJHP's owners, the Jacksonville Journal, acquired WESH in Daytona Beach, their application was disqualified. The commission allocated channel 10 to New Port Richey, sufficiently far enough from Miami where channel 10 could be allocated, on May 15, 1957. The announcement stirred interest from seven different applicants, some of whom had lost in their attempts to obtain channels 8 or 13: Orange Broadcasting Company, headed by a Tampa department store executive; Walter Tison, the former owner of Tampa's WTVT, and a consortium from Clearwater; Suncoast Cities Broadcasting Corporation; Robert A. James, a Tampa businessman associated with the failed bid of Tampa Bay Area Telecasting Corporation; Nelson Poynter, president of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper and former owner of St. Petersburg radio station WTSP ; the Rahall group, the current owners of WTSP; and the city of St. Petersburg, which had previously attempted to obtain channel 3 for its use to ensure the continued operation of WSUN-TV. Joining later in the proceeding was Tampa Broadcasters, Inc., owner of Tampa radio station WALT. St. Petersburg officials viewed obtaining channel 10 as necessary for WSUN-TV to continue. An attorney representing the stations called the proceeding a "life or death matter" for the station, which had thrived in the time between it went on the air and WFLA and WTVT began telecasting. National sponsors were shunning UHF stations like WSUN-TV in favor of VHF stations like WFLA and WTVT.
By the time the FCC set hearings on channel 10, there were six applicants in contention. All of them would be limited to towers of or less at New Port Richey due to aviation restrictions:
  • Florida Gulfcoast Broadcasters, the Nelson Poynter group;
  • the city of St. Petersburg;
  • Suncoast Cities Broadcasting Corporation;
  • the Rahall group, incorporated as WTSP-TV, Inc.;
  • Tampa Telecasters, Inc., led by Kenneth R. Giddens; and
  • Bay Area Telecasting Corporation, led by former CBS executive J. L. Van Volkenburg.
Though the applicant was still named WTSP-TV, Inc., co-owned WTSP radio changed its call sign to WLCY on July 14, 1959.
On February 1, 1961, FCC hearing examiner Millard French handed down an initial decision favoring WTSP-TV, Inc., the Rahall application, for the channel 10 grant. French favored WTSP-TV's proposed programming and program planning and found in favor of it on the factors of integration of ownership and management and the company's past broadcast record. He ruled out Gulfcoast on diversification of media ownership grounds, given Poynter's ownership of the St. Petersburg Times, and its proposal to locate studios only at Largo; found WSUN-TV's programming and broadcast experience poor, outweighing positives of the application; and gave few other preferences to the remaining applications. Multiple losing applicants contested French's initial decision. In September, the commission found in favor of the Rahall application on a 3–2 vote, with two of the FCC's seven commissioners not participating and two dissenters who would have awarded the channel to WSUN-TV. In addition to further challenges by the losing applicants, the FCC's Broadcast Bureau objected to the decision based on changes in the format of WLCY since the initial decision, writing, "WLCY is no longer a station with a record of considerable time devoted to live, religious, discussion and agricultural programming.... It has instead converted to a disc jockey and news format." As a result, the commission rescinded the grant and ordered more hearings. After the hearings, the Broadcast Bureau recommended WTSP-TV, Inc., be disqualified, claiming it lacked the character to be a broadcast licensee, but the examiner again found in its favor, leading to yet more appeals. In November 1964, the commission upheld the award to WTSP-TV, Inc.
As early as 1961, Rahall had a commitment for the new station to affiliate with ABC, whose programs had been seen on WSUN-TV. In 1962, Rahall signed an agreement with a general contractor to construct studios, which would be located with the existing WLCY radio studios at 11450 Gandy Boulevard. To get the station on the air faster, Rahall built temporary studios at 2429 Central Avenue.
WLCY-TV began broadcasting on July 18, 1965. It operated as an independent station until September 1, when WSUN-TV's ABC affiliation agreement expired; the first ABC program on channel 10 aired following a special dedication featuring Florida governor Haydon Burns. Work on the permanent studio facility on Gandy Boulevard began in 1967 and was completed the next year. In 1970, an FM radio station, WLCY-FM 94.9, was added to the operation.
In the Rahall era, WLCY-TV produced several local non-news programs, including a local version of the children's program Romper Room, the Russ Byrd Morning Program, and a local exercise show, The Fran Carlton Show.

Tower woes

Shortly after going on the air, Rahall petitioned the FCC to let WLCY-TV move its transmitter site to a proposed tower in Hillsborough County southeast of Riverview, an antenna farm where other stations were located. The application received two objections. One was from Miami's channel 10 station, concerned about interference from the more southerly site. The other was WSUN-TV, which claimed that any improvement of WLCY-TV's signal would cause it economic hardship. An FCC examiner and the commission's review board each denied the move, finding that WSUN-TV's "marginal coverage advantage... may spell the difference between survival and failure" for that station and that a move would thus harm the development of UHF television in Tampa Bay and fail to maintain minimum separation to the Miami station. This decision left WLCY-TV on the shorter tower, already in the opposite direction from the other stations for most viewers, and gave it a coverage area 65 percent the size of WFLA and WTVT. While WLCY-TV fared better in the core metropolitan area, this transmitter deficiency hurt its ratings. In May 1977, Arbitron reported that WLCY-TV had finished fourth in ratings behind St. Petersburg UHF station WTOG-TV in sign-on to sign-off ratings, an unusual occurrence of an independent station beating a network affiliate. WLCY-TV's underperformance came just as ABC experienced an increase in its national ratings.
Another effect of the tower disadvantage was to create a void in ABC reception to the south of Tampa Bay. Viewers in areas such as Sarasota, Bradenton, and Venice needed cable to watch ABC programs. This led to the construction of WXLT-TV in Sarasota as an ABC affiliate serving six southwestern Florida counties. That station began providing ABC and local programming to 140,000 homes, replacing WLCY-TV on cable systems in its area, when it debuted on October 23, 1971. WXLT, which became WWSB in 1986, served to leave WLCY-TV with virtually no ratings in Sarasota County by 1988.
In 1972, Rahall made a second attempt at improving its tower facility, this time by building a new, tower to increase its coverage area by 40 percent. WXLT and, for a time, WTOG-TV objected, with WXLT claiming it would lose viewers and advertisers were the new tower to be built. The commission and review board approved the tower. Having lost at the FCC, WXLT unsuccessfully attempted to have a local court halt construction of the tower. The $1.5 million tower and transmitter facility were activated in June 1979. In January 1981, the station was allowed to change its city of license from Largo to St. Petersburg.