WUSA (TV)
WUSA is a television station in Washington, D.C., affiliated with CBS. It is the flagship property of Tegna Inc., which is based in suburban McLean, Virginia. WUSA's studios and transmitter are at Broadcast House on Wisconsin Avenue in northwest Washington's Tenleytown neighborhood. Among CBS affiliates not owned and operated by the network, WUSA is the second-largest by market size.
The station's signal is relayed on a low-power digital translator station, W27EI-D, in Moorefield, West Virginia. It has a channel-sharing agreement with Silver Spring, Maryland–licensed WJAL.
History
Early years (1949–1978)
The station first went on the air on January 11, 1949, as WOIC. It began full-time operations on January 16. The fourth-oldest station in the nation's capital, channel 9 was originally owned by the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, a subsidiary of R. H. Macy and Company. Bamberger also owned WOR-AM-FM in New York City, and was working to put WOR-TV on the air at the same time. Nine days later, WOIC broadcast the first televised American presidential inaugural address, given by President Harry S. Truman. WOIC picked up the CBS affiliation upon signing on, replacing WMAL-TV as the network's Washington outlet. WOIC/WTOP/WUSA has been a CBS affiliate since its inception, and is currently the network's longest-tenured affiliate. However, WOR was a shareholder in the Mutual Radio Network, which had plans to enter television. Plans for the proposed Mutual-branded network advanced far enough that, at the annual meeting of Mutual stockholders in April 1950, network president Frank White made an official announcement of the planned creation of a limited five-station Mutual network. At that same time Mutual radio station KQV in Pittsburgh, which was engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get a television license, was reportedly hoping for their station to be a Mutual television affiliate. "Mutual Television Network" ended up being the decided-on branding for the Mutual-branded network. However, the 5-station Mutual network failed in short time. Also, at the start of 1950, Bamberger Broadcasting changed its name to General Teleradio.In June 1950, a joint venture of CBS and The Washington Post purchased WOIC from Bamberger/Macy's for $1.4 million. The new owners, WTOP Incorporated, changed the station's call sign to WTOP-TV, after its new sister station WTOP radio. In July 1950, WTOP-TV became the first television station in Washington authorized to broadcast color television in the 405-line field sequential color standard, which was incompatible with the black-and-white 525-line NTSC standard. Color broadcasts continued for nearly 30 months, when regulatory and commercial pressures forced the FCC to rescind its original color standard and begin the process of adopting the 525-line NTSC-3 standard, developed by RCA to be backwards compatible with the existing black-and-white televisions.
In 1954, the WTOP stations moved into a new facility, known as "Broadcast House", at 40th and Brandywine Streets NW in Washington. The building was the first in the country designed as a unified radio and television facility. Its name was in honor of Broadcasting House, home of the BBC in London. The building was well known to WTOP's president, since he had spent much of World War II assigned to the BBC. Previous to the move to Broadcast House, the radio stations operated out of the Earle Building, and WTOP-TV had operated out of the small WOIC studios at the same location. When Broadcast House was completed and the new television studios were inaugurated, the old studio became the garage for Broadcast House and the old master control room became both the master control and transmitter room for channel 9, since Broadcast House had been built around the station's original, four-sided tower. The building with the tower remains in the middle at the same location, although it is now an office building and retail store front.
The WTOP-TV tower was known in Washington for two things. First, at Christmas time, the tower was strung with Christmas lights and glowed brightly on top of Mount Reno, the tallest point in the District of Columbia. Second, the tower tended to sway much more than three-sided towers. In a strong wind, the tower could be seen swaying back-and-forth, and during the winter ice from the tower fell quite often on the streets below.
In October 1954, CBS sold its share of WTOP Inc. to the Washington Post to comply with the FCC's new seven-station-per-group ownership rule. CBS's partial ownership of WTOP radio, KQV radio in Pittsburgh and WCCO radio in Minneapolis exceeded the FCC's limit for AM radio stations. CBS opted to sell its share of WTOP, which it had purchased in whole in 1932 before selling controlling interest to the Post in 1949.
After the sale closed, the Post merged the WTOP stations with its other broadcast property, WMBR-AM-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, and changed the name of the licensee from "WTOP Inc." to "Post Stations, Inc." WMBR radio was sold off in 1958, and WMBR-TV became WJXT. The Post renamed its broadcasting group "Post-Newsweek Stations" in 1961 after the Post bought Newsweek magazine. Post-Newsweek acquired its third television station, WLBW-TV in Miami in 1970 and in 1974 added WTIC-TV in Hartford, Connecticut, to the group. In 1972, WTOP-TV joined with the Evening Star Broadcasting Company to build the Joint Tower, a, three-sided tower across the alley from Broadcast House at 4010 Chesapeake Street NW. Transmission lines were extended from Broadcast House's transmitter area to the new tower for both WTOP-TV and WHUR-FM. The old tower continued to serve as the backup antenna for channel 9 until the station sold Broadcast House in 1996.
In 1974, WTOP and the other Post-Newsweek stations adopted the slogan "The One and Only". The moniker was part of a trend toward group identification of stations, with each station being "The One and Only Channel ". Staff members from the "One and Only" period usually refer to themselves as "the one and onlies" as a source of pride. The slogan was dropped from active use in the late 1990s and has not been used as part of an image campaign since 1996. The slogan no longer appears on-air, but was revived in a sense when channel 9 adopted its slogan in the mid-2000s, ''First and Only with Local News in HDTV.''
Later years (1978–present)
On June 26, 1978, Post-Newsweek exchanged WTOP-TV with the Evening News Association's WWJ-TV in Detroit. Post-Newsweek parent the Washington Post Company, and the Evening News Association, which published the Detroit News, decided to swap their stations for fear that the FCC would force them to sell the stations at unfavorable terms or revoke their very valuable licenses because the FCC at the time was considering forbidding ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market. As Post-Newsweek retained WTOP radio and FCC rules in effect at the time disallowed two separately owned stations from sharing the same base call letters, the station changed to WDVM-TV, representing the initials of the areas which it serves: the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland.Image:Wusa9logo.png|140px|thumb|Logo used from 2000 to January 2013. An earlier variant, which replaced the 1980s-era "square 9", which dated to the days of WDVM, was colored yellow with a black numeral and was used from 1995 to 1998.
In 1985, the Gannett Company purchased the Evening News Association. The WUSA callsign had been in use by Gannett's station in Minneapolis for a year, and Gannett offered it to WDVM's management upon taking control of the station. Post television columnist John Carmody noted that the "rather clumsy" WDVM callsign was not often used in promotions. Both stations agreed to the swap; the Minneapolis station became KARE on June 11, 1986, while WDVM became WUSA on Independence Day. The WDVM-TV callsign is now in use on an unrelated station in Hagerstown, Maryland.
Carrying over a practice started by the Minneapolis station, the callsign was depicted in print and on logos as "W★USA" during this time. However, the asterisk or star between the "W" and "U" is not part of the call sign. The star was replaced on-air with the CBS Eye Device, which is also not part of the call sign, by 1998 as CBS began to considerably relax their formerly strict branding guidelines for their affiliates, which had not allowed blending the logo into call letters.
WUSA moved to a new Broadcast House at 4100 Wisconsin Avenue NW in January 1992. WTOP-FM had left the old Broadcast House in 1971, but kept its transmitter there. WTOP radio departed in 1978; the Post had sold it a year earlier to the Outlet Company. The move to the more modern building was tinged with sadness due to the death from a brain tumor of popular sportscaster Glenn Brenner just days beforehand. In 1998, WUSA launched its website, wusatv9.com, but later removed the "TV" reference in the domain name to become wusa9.com.
In 2001, WUSA made the decision to preempt CBS' national coverage of the September 11 attacks with its own local coverage. At 9:41 a.m., just four minutes after the impact, WUSA broke into the CBS national coverage anchored by Dan Rather and showed smoke billowing from the Pentagon. National coverage remained available on multiple Viacom-owned cable networks, including MTV and VH1. Their local coverage, like that of other Washington-area affiliates, included reporters on the phone and on camera, eyewitness accounts, and analysis. WUSA continuously stayed on the air, covering the exodus of the District, school closures, and traffic issues until 12:42 p.m. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, WUSA provided local news updates and press conferences, alternating between their local coverage and the national feed. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales took issue with this decision, writing that "the city was subjected to a CBS blackout by the local affiliate, Gannett-owned Channel 9. The station chose to view this, incredibly enough, as a local story and reported it initially as if it were a winter snow day and school closings were of the utmost importance."
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 digital media. WUSA was retained by the latter company, named Tegna.