WVIZ
WVIZ is a PBS member television station in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It is owned by Ideastream Public Media alongside classical music station WCLV and co-managed with Kent State University–owned WKSU, the NPR member for Cleveland and Akron, and Cleveland State University–owned WCSB. The four stations share studio facilities at the Idea Center on Playhouse Square in Downtown Cleveland; WVIZ's transmitter is located in suburban Parma, Ohio.
WVIZ began broadcasting on February 7, 1965, as Cleveland's first educational television station and the 100th such station in the United States. Its activation culminated years of work by business, philanthropic, and educational leaders to bring non-commercial television to Cleveland. For most of its first three decades of service, under general manager Betty Cope, the station intensively focused on producing and broadcasting educational television programming for schools. WVIZ's commitment to instructional fare sometimes came to the exclusion of the types of national and public affairs series other public television stations in major markets began producing as the medium evolved. This began to change after Cope's 1993 retirement, with the introduction of a daytime schedule of children's programs as well as a weekly arts magazine and documentaries focused on area history.
In 2000, WVIZ merged with WCPN, then Cleveland's NPR news, talk and jazz station; the combined venture, known as Ideastream, then moved to new studios in Playhouse Square in 2006. The station produces local news and arts programming to complement programs from PBS and other national public television distributors; Ideastream also manages The Ohio Channel, a statewide service.
History
From educational radio to educational television
Cleveland had been regarded as a forerunner in educational broadcasting well before WVIZ's sign-on. The Cleveland Board of Education built and signed on WBOE, an AM "Apex" station, on November 21, 1938, as the first radio station fully licensed by the Federal Communications Commission for non-commercial educational use. Converted to the FM band in 1941, WBOE operated strictly as an in-school educational tool for the next three decades. The New Republic described WBOE in 1949 as "a model for the country" and "the most exciting broadcasting job being done". Variety suggested in 1944 that WBOE could be a forerunner to educational television and was already "a close facsimile to actual television". Because of the FM band's obscurity, WBOE was almost entirely invisible outside of the classroom: radio supervisor William B. Levenson expressed hope of "a steady, if not rapid growth" in FM educational stations in 1941, but by 1958, WBOE was the only full-market FM signal receivable in neighboring Akron.In 1952, when the FCC reallocated television channels after lifting its years-long freeze on new TV station grants, channel 25 in the new ultra high frequency was assigned to Cleveland as its reserved channel for educational broadcasting. Some interest existed at that time in allocating the channel, but no such station immediately materialized. By 1960, when leaders of various local school systems met to discuss the establishment of an educational station, Cleveland was among the nation's largest cities without one. Some steps were made in 1961 toward getting an educational station on the air, notably when the Cleveland Board of Education voted to refer a property tax to voters. At that time, members of the Cleveland Board of Education disparaged plans by a community association—the Greater Cleveland Television Education Association, formed in 1958—as not knowledgeable of the needs of the school system.
By June 1962, several interested groups had merged into the Educational Television Association of Metropolitan Cleveland, which absorbed the former association and also featured Levenson, now the superintendent of Cleveland schools, as a key member. The Cleveland Foundation provided a $250,000 grant to the association in November 1963, which significantly accelerated the process and made it possible for the new station to qualify for matching grants and apply for a construction permit from the FCC. Cleveland Broadcasting, owners of local radio station WERE, offered ETAMC usage of their tower site in North Royalton through a lease of $1 a month.
ETAMC formally filed for channel 25 on March 31, 1964, after receiving another $150,000 in gifts from two philanthropic organizations. While the application was before the FCC, the association received more gifts, including a $20,000 grant from Storer Broadcasting, owner of WJW radio and television. WJW-TV, along with KYW-TV and WEWS-TV, had previously allocated daily 15-minute blocks to air educational programming produced by WBOE staff, with $30,000 worth of television sets furnished to the classrooms. The federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare granted ETAMC $250,000 in September 1964, and the FCC granted the construction permit on October 9. Another major contribution of $100,000 was made later in 1965 by NBC chairman Robert Sarnoff following NBC's repurchase of the former KYW stations.
Taking to the air
WVIZ-TV began broadcasting on February 7, 1965; it had intended to start on February 1 but had been delayed. It was the 100th public television station to sign on in the United States. The first image broadcast on the station was their test pattern slide, with a silhouetted figure holding up a card reading "THINK" at the center. Initially, channel 25 primarily broadcast taped shows produced by other educational stations.One of the main organizers of the station was Betty Cope, a former producer for WEWS-TV who served as the first director of local programming and production at channel 25. Cope was named general manager eight months after the station began, becoming the first woman to hold that position anywhere in the United States. Cope and others at WVIZ had to contend with being Cleveland's first station on the UHF band. All-channel sets had only recently been mandated by law, and few people were buying new sets or UHF converters to view channel 25 at the outset. Cope recalled that when the station began broadcasting, the strongest response came from viewers in Akron and Youngstown, which both had commercial UHF television stations. As late as 1979, Cope told Raymond P. Hart of The Plain Dealer that she wished WVIZ broadcast on VHF, not UHF.
For two years, WVIZ operated from studios in Cleveland's Max Hayes Trade School, where programs had to be recorded in between school bells and production personnel joined students in weekly fire drills. The station began broadcasting color programming in 1967; that year, it left the trade school for larger quarters in the former Marks Tractor building on Brookpark Road, and it built a new, taller tower at North Royalton to improve its coverage area. In 1968, WVIZ was the first public television station to stage an on-air fundraising auction, generating $52,000 over three days. The auctions quickly became a successful source for operating funds; WVIZ raised $139,000 during the 1971 auction, and raised $447,759 by 1978, a significant portion of the station's $2.5 million budget. The station would host annual in-studio auctions for the next 50 years. Cope's continued presence headlining pledge drives led the Akron Beacon Journal to describe her as "usually asking immodestly for money" and the Lorain Journal to call her "the broadcast industry's answer to the ragged street-corner peddler". Cope was part of an early 1970s effort to keep the Corporation for Public Broadcasting free from increased government control, serving on a board of station managers that negotiated directly with the CPB while also advocating for more local control.
WVIZ's emergence also coincided with the decline and failure of WBOE. With educational radio being rendered obsolete, WBOE struggled to incorporate National Public Radio programming into a lineup that still featured instructional fare. Cleveland Public Radio was set up as an outside organization aiming to bring a full-time NPR station to the city and made several rejected offers to buy WBOE. The Cleveland school system found itself in financial turmoil following years of litigation over segregation practices, a failed tax levy and fears of white flight. By April 1978, the district was in debt of $30 million and threatened with outright closure. WVIZ was approached as a possible interim operator for WBOE before the school district shut the station down in October 1978. An attempt to sell WBOE's assets to the Cleveland Public Library sparked a three-year legal battle with CPR before a compromise between both parties allowed CPR to sign on WCPN on September 8, 1984.
Committed to the schools
As an educational station, it was primarily designed to serve metropolitan Cleveland; at the outset, it provided programming to 255,000 school students in 21 Cleveland-area school systems, and schools supplied $250,000 of the station's original $360,000 budget. The fees were assessed on a per-pupil basis, with the Medina City School District paying WVIZ a total of $3,920 for the 1969–1970 school year. While WVIZ was a member station of National Educational Television, which was replaced by PBS in 1970, its local program production nearly exclusively focused on instructional shows for schools. For several years in the 1970s, WVIZ was the nation's leading producer of schools programs; between 1965 and 1987, it produced 2,000 programs, including 60 series. NewsDepth debuted in 1969 as a weekly news magazine tying currents events to secondary school curriculum. For a period in the 1990s, WEWS assisted in NewsDepths production.Other early local programs included high school sports coverage; a decade of coverage of Cleveland City Council meetings, which aired from 1967 to 1977; and the 1979 "carnival kickback" trial of George L. Forbes, which marked the first Ohio court case covered by television cameras. A February 25, 1972, Glass Harp rock concert from the WVIZ studios was simulcast in stereo over WMMS; the broadcast was conceived by WMMS program director Billy Bass, an early proponent of music television. Broadcast journalist Hugh Danaceau hosted a series of weekly public affairs shows over WVIZ in addition to anchoring the city council telecasts and local election coverage. Cope's preference towards local productions was modeled around the You Are There technique under the belief certain subject matter was best handled by someone who was well-versed in it and in that respective demographic. Staff from WVIZ's nascent years, including future WEWS Morning Exchange host Fred Griffith, aspired to have the station be a program supplier to PBS, but a lack of people, money and cohesive vision scuttled those efforts.
Some business leaders disagreed with the approach taken in constructing the channel 25 facility, believing that a site to the southeast near Streetsboro would provide better regional coverage and serve more people in cities such as Canton and Youngstown. This left an area that would ultimately receive primary public TV service from WNEO and WEAO, which began broadcasting from Alliance in 1973 and Akron in 1975, respectively, as a service of a consortium of the University of Akron, Kent State University, and Youngstown State University. Though WNEO–WEAO was the secondary PBS station for Cleveland, two-thirds of its households did not receive WVIZ. In 1987, WNEO and WEAO sued WVIZ over its ability to withhold PBS programs from the Akron–Alliance station. The following year, the Akron Public Schools signed a one-year deal with WVIZ for instructional TV rights bypassing WNEO–WEAO, with the district crediting WVIZ's larger array of resources as a factor for the switch.
The Ohio Department of Education assumed the role of paying in-pupil fees to the station from the school districts in 1979. Even with the station's various fundraising efforts, in 1977, WVIZ's predominant revenue source continued to come from these fees and districts without a contract were unable to access programs listings furnished by the station. By the early 1980s, WVIZ's instructional programming lineup was networked by the Ohio Educational Broadcasting Network Commission in Columbus to other public television stations in the state. A lineup of internal fixed service channels were set up to relay additional in-school programming, along with an adult learner channel and a program block of college credit telecourses airing over WVIZ in the morning hours.
Starting in 1984, the station launched VIZ-TEC, a long-range project to develop interactive video in the classroom accessible from computers, an early form of video on demand. Director Thomas A. Valenti believed such technology could be viable in five years and dominate instructional television in ten years but still believed in WVIZ's primary mission of "one-way educational TV" during the daytime. In 1987, WVIZ created EDISON, a database of subjects for its 2,400 educational programs; the format was adopted by other broadcasters, including Kentucky Educational Television, Wisconsin Public Television, and KCTS-TV. By 1995, the service had evolved into "Learning Link", an online database offering lesson plans and educational resources to over 4,000 area teachers.