Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was WGBA-TV station created?
In early 1983, coinciding with the purchase of a licensing deal of approximately 1,000 movies and other syndicated programs,[2] WRLE took on the tagline "The Great Entertainer",[3] using station imaging shared with (at least) WPHL.[4] In late 1984, the station's partnership was dissolved in a bankruptcy court in which investors lost money. In 1985, it was bought by Family Group Broadcasting Incorporated for only pennies on the dollar. On October 3 of that year, the station's call letters were changed to WGBA-TV.[5] The station, then known on-air as "TV 26", was well known in its early years for children's program host "Cuddles the Clown", who stayed with the station until it switched to NBC, and moved to sister station WACY before retiring. The station's imaging was also shared with sister station WQRF-TV in Rockford, Illinois, WVFT-TV in Roanoke, Virginia, WPGX-TV in Panama City, Florida, WFGX-TV in Fort Walton Beach, Florida and WLAX-TV in La Crosse, Wisconsin, including its early 'diamond' logo.
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
As far back as the latter years of WACY's UPN affiliation, the station aired a weekly high school football game featuring local schools on Friday nights in the fall (billed as "Friday Night Thunder"), with select University of Wisconsin–Green Bay men's and women's basketball games added in 2007. All sports broadcasts on WACY featured WGBA's sports anchors, while visual presentation depended on the in-house camera system from the arena where the game was played instead of station-owned cameras. The broadcasts of high school games were discontinued in 2008, in part due to the addition of "SmackDown" to MyNetworkTV's Friday night lineup and also due to a lean financial period for the stations during the Great Recession, at a time when WGBA's news and sports staff were cut back due to budget concerns, WTMJ began to take control of several of WGBA's newscasts, and infomercials occupied portions of WACY's programming schedule. Sports broadcasts would return to WACY in August 2011 under the "N.E.W. Sports Showdown" banner, featuring both high school sports as well as St. Norbert College athletics (added in 2011) and Wisconsin Timber Rattlers baseball (added in the spring of 2013).
Larry McCarren, who had been the sports director at WFRV until the Packers contract ended in March 2012, along with budget cuts at that station, went over to Journal in July 2012; however he was only able to do short Packer analysis segments through the 2012 season on-air for WTMJ and WGBA, along with blogging on WTMJ's site, due to a one-year non-compete clause (which included these segments by contractual force originating outside the Green Bay market in Milwaukee), but continued his duties as color commentator over Journal's Packers Radio Network. With the expiration of the clause, McCarren assumed sports director duties for WGBA on April 1, 2013.[36][37] Packers Live, a program that resembles his former Locker Room program, with Packer player guests and "chalk talk" play analysis in front of a live audience, also began airing on the station beginning with the 2013 NFL season. He retired as WGBA sports director in April 2015 to fully focus on his television and radio network duties for the Packers and Scripps.
In 1994, WLUK-TV (channel 11) and three other stations owned by Burnham Broadcasting were sold to SF Broadcasting (owned as a partnership between Savoy Communications and Fox). As part of the purchase and through Fox's ownership of the group, SF signed a group affiliation deal to switch its stations to Fox; this enabled WLUK to become the Packers' unofficial "home" station as Fox had acquired the television contract to the NFL's National Football Conference. On August 28, 1995, WGBA-TV switched its affiliation to NBC (and changed its on-air branding to "NBC 26"); the Fox affiliation moved to former NBC affiliate WLUK. As an NBC affiliate, it struggled to find a constant identity. Green Bay's other three stations have been on-the-air since the 1950s and had loyal audiences. Relief did not come until October 2004, when the Journal Broadcast Group bought it for $43.2 million after Aries Telecommunications sold the station. Journal had long wanted a station in Northeastern Wisconsin alongside its flagship station, WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, that market's NBC affiliate and long-dominant news station.
WXGZ's license to operate was put back into use in June 1994. License holder Ace TV, Inc. put WXGZ back on the air with the help of WGBA and its then-owner Aries Telecommunications, who arranged to put WACY on solid financial footing through the entrance of a local marketing agreement with Ace TV, allowing WGBA to operate and program WXGZ through its studios and sell advertising time for the station.
WGBA-TV, virtual channel 26 (UHF digital channel 14), is an NBC-affiliated television station licensed to Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States. The station is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, as part of a duopoly with Appleton-licensed MyNetworkTV affiliate WACY-TV (channel 32). The two stations share studios on North Road alongside the WIS 172 freeway in Ashwaubenon (with a Green Bay postal address); WGBA's transmitter is located in the unincorporated community of Shirley, east of De Pere.
On April 7, 2009, WTMJ became the first station in Milwaukee to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. However, until April 2012, the pre-taped nightly sports and weekend weather segments originating from WTMJ were broadcast in 4:3 standard definition.[42] On July 24, it was announced that WGBA would eliminate some of its reporting and photojournalist positions, with the remaining staff being retrained to act as "one-man band" videojournalists handling reporting, camera work, and editing stories themselves. In September 2009, reporter Bonnie Kirschman, the final employee to remain with WGBA's news operation since its 1996 launch, left the station.
WTMJ-TV has served as Milwaukee's "official station" of the Green Bay Packers since the mid-1990s, giving it rights to air the team's non-nationally televised preseason games; in addition to the team's existing television broadcasters elsewhere in Wisconsin, the game telecasts are shared with sister stations WGBA in Green Bay and KMTV-TV in Omaha through a March 2012 broadcasting agreement between the Packers and former station parent Journal Broadcast Group. WTMJ holds the broadcast rights to the weekly coaches show (which airs Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m. during the NFL season) and other shows involving the team (such as the team's Sunday morning pre-game analysis program "Packers Today"). As part of the deal, Packers Radio Network color commentator Larry McCarren (who resigned as sports director at Green Bay CBS affiliate WFRV-TV in March 2012) now also serves as a Packers analyst for WTMJ and WGBA; until McCarren became WGBA's sports director upon the end of his non-compete clause with WFRV in April 2013, his segments appeared during the "Packers Extra" sports segment from the WTMJ set. McCarren resigned his sports director duties at WGBA at the end of March 2015 to solely focus on his Packers duties. In 2017, Scripps also began to air the "Family Night" scrimmage before the pre-season, which had previously been produced as a joint effort between the state's Fox affiliates under a separate contract.
On April 7, 2012, WGBA upgraded its local newscasts to 16:9 widescreen standard definition. It became the last station in the market to convert to full high-definition operations on January 23, 2016, with the unveiling of a new chyron-heavy "virtual" set, the first major change to the station's newsroom and set since the station began carrying newscasts in 1996 and the newsroom and anchor sets were split off in the early 2000s via an opaque partition. The station began to use the default Scripps graphics package/news music package in October 2016.
WGBA broadcasts the entire NBC schedule, with the exception of program preemptions for breaking news or severe weather coverage; however it currently airs Days of Our Lives at 12:00p.m. (one of a handful of NBC affiliates which carry the program in that slot, which is one hour earlier than recommended by the network, airing it "live" via the network's East Coast feed). Syndicated programs broadcast on WGBA include Page Six TV, TMZ Live, the true crime-focused Dateline syndicated package, and Right This Minute among others. The station picked up Scripps' national program The List during the 2016 Summer Olympics.
After "Today" expanded to four hours in September 2007, WTMJ began shifting its programming focus very heavily towards local news, as replacement syndicated programming for "Martha", "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy!" after all three programs moved to other area stations, and "Montel"s August 2008 departure from syndication failed to spark viewer interest outside of local/network hours. On August 25, 2008, after "Extra" moved to WITI, the station expanded its 6:00 p.m. newscast to one hour (although it reverted to a half-hour on Tuesday nights during the NFL season due to Mike McCarthy's coaches show in the past); this was followed on September 8 by the debut of an hour-long newscast at 3:00 p.m., which featured segments including "Ask the Experts", an interactive "sound off" segment incorporating viewer calls and social media contributions, and a "hot topics" section which features WTMJ radio afternoon host Jeff Wagner among the regular panelists. Green Bay sister station WGBA-TV added simulcasts of WTMJ's morning and noon newscasts on July 14, 2008, with WGBA producing local weather inserts using its own meteorologists in place of the WTMJ-produced weather segments. The simulcast ended in early 2009, due to viewer disinterest in Milwaukee-focused news (WGBA relaunched a local morning newscast in January 2011). WTMJ also began to produce forecasts for WGBA to air during its weekend newscasts. Until April 2013, when Larry McCarren became WGBA's sports director, all sports segments on WGBA were produced by WTMJ.
The purchase also included the LMA with WACY. Although Journal wanted to buy WACY outright, this had been unlikely since Green Bay has only seven full-power stations (not enough to legally permit a duopoly). However, in September 2010, WLUK owner LIN TV Corporation exercised an option to purchase CW affiliate WCWF (channel 14) from ACME Communications, and filed for a "failing station waiver" – which permits duopoly in such situations if the petitioner can prove the station is in an economically non-viable position – to allow LIN to own WLUK and WCWF. Because WCWF was hampered for years by several factors, including insufficient cable carriage and an analog signal originating more towards its city of license, Suring, than Green Bay, the waiver was granted in February 2011.[6][7] Journal eventually pleaded for the failing station waiver for WACY at the beginning of 2012, citing that station's dark period between 1992 and 1994 (when the Ace TV LMA began) and that the station was unable to survive on its own without the production and control assistance of WGBA. Because of this, the FCC allowed the full sale of WACY to Journal at the beginning of September 2012.[8][9][10]
The TV rights for pre-season games, not nationally broadcast are held by Scripps television stations WGBA-TV (Channel 26) in Green Bay and WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) in Milwaukee, along with Quincy Media's six ABC stations in the central, northern and western parts of the state, KQDS-TV (Channel 21) in Duluth-Superior, and in Escanaba/Marquette, Michigan, WLUC-TV (Channel 6), along with their Fox subchannel. As such, these stations are authorized to use the tagline "Your official Packers station" in their market area by the team, and also carry two weeknight programs; "Packers Live" on Tuesday evening, and the weekly coach's show, "The Mike McCarthy Show" on Wednesday evenings at 6:30 pm throughout the football season. Until the end of the 2011 season, the team's partner in Green Bay was WFRV-TV (Channel 5), and sister satellite WJMN-TV in Escanaba. As part of the 2012 deal, McCarren resigned his duties as sports director of WFRV to move to WTMJ/WGBA as a Packers analyst, becoming WGBA's official sports director on April 1, 2013, as his non-compete clause to appear as a sports anchor in Green Bay expired, though he retired as sports director in March 2015 to focus full-time on his duties for the Packer radio and television networks. WFRV/WJMN still airs any Packers regular season home games against an AFC team.
Since being acquired by Journal, WGBA and WTMJ have become close sister stations, eventually synchronizing their news imaging and sharing news and sports resources (WTMJ had previously paired with WFRV-TV, an NBC affiliate until the early 1980s, to provide Green Bay coverage and video). This became more evident in 2008, when WGBA outsourced sports and weekend weather reports to WTMJ, and had simulcast that station's morning and noon newscasts for a short time.
The FCC would approve Journal's request of WACY's license transfer on September 4, 2012, specifically citing two points Journal had included in its request: The financial and operational status of WACY before the grandfathered LMA commenced in 1994 (and which Journal inherited when it bought WGBA in 2004), and WGBA's ability to "produce and broadcast [on WACY] programming that furthers the public interest," programming that WACY would otherwise not have been able to produce. Also cited was channel 32's bankruptcy as WXGZ. On October 23, the deal was consummated. It was the third station that Journal acquired through a failed station waiver, after KNIN-TV in Boise and KWBA in Tucson.
The TV rights for pre-season Green Bay Packers games not nationally broadcast are held by Scripps stations WGBA-TV (Channel 26) in Green Bay and WTMJ (Channel 4) in Milwaukee, along with Quincy Newspapers' six ABC stations in the central, northern and western parts of the state, KQDS-TV (Channel 21) in Duluth–Superior, and in Escanaba/Marquette, Michigan, WLUC-TV (Channel 6), along with their Fox subchannel. As such, these stations are all allowed to use the tagline "Your official Packers station" in their market area by the team, and also carry the weekly coach's show hosted by WTMJ-TV's Jessie Garcia, "The Mike McCarthy Show" on Tuesday evenings at 6:30 pm throughout the football season. Until the end of the 2011 season, the team's partner in Green Bay was WFRV-TV (Channel 5), and sister satellite WJMN-TV in Escanaba. As part of the 2012 deal, McCarren resigned his duties as sports director of WFRV to move to WTMJ/WGBA as a Packers analyst, becoming WGBA's official sports director on April 1, 2013 as his non-compete clause to appear as a sports anchor in Green Bay expired.
WGBA launched a new second digital subchannel in November 2010 carrying TheCoolTV (an automated music video network) which had aired on the WTMJ's second subchannel since the summer of 2009. The establishment of WGBA-DT2 made it the second commercial station in the market to launch a subchannel service after WBAY-TV. On September 7, 2011, Journal and Weigel Broadcasting announced that WGBA would carry the classic television network MeTV beginning on October 1, 2011.[25][26] MeTV replaced TheCoolTV on 26.2 on that date, as Journal brought a lawsuit against TheCoolTV's parent company Cool Music Network, LLC for non-payment of services; WTMJ-TV, along with Journal's other stations dropped the network on October 1, 2011 to carry Live Well Network or MeTV, depending on the market.[27][28][29] Sometime in the summer of 2016, 26.2 was converted to a widescreen presentation in line with Weigel converting their networks to that format.
In early 1996, shortly after WGBA picked up the NBC affiliation, then-owner Aries Telecommunications announced plans to start a full-fledged news department for the station. On July 19, 1996, during the start of NBC's coverage of the 1996 Summer Olympics, WGBA debuted its local newscasts, with a half-hour early-evening newscast at 6:00p.m. on Mondays through Saturdays (the initial broadcast of that program on July 19 ran a special one-hour broadcast, leading into NBC's coverage of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies in Atlanta) and a late evening newscast at 10:00p.m. seven nights a week. Ted O'Connell[38] was WGBA's first news director; he was succeeded by Ashley Webster (now a journalist with Fox Business Network), who also served as weeknight co-anchor alongside Heather Hays (presently a main anchor at Fox owned-and-operated station KDFW in Dallas-Fort Worth). Eventually as the operation grew, the station added newscasts on weekday mornings, weekdays at noon and at 5:00p.m.
On July 29, 1994, Burnham Broadcasting sold WLUK-TV to SF Broadcasting – a joint venture of Savoy Communications and the Fox Broadcasting Company, then a division of News Corporation – for $38 million; the company later sold three of its other four stations (KHON-TV in Honolulu, WVUE in New Orleans and WALA-TV in Mobile) for $229 million on August 25 (a fifth Burnham station, KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, was excluded from the deal and was instead spun off to Westwind Communications, a new company that was formed by several former Burnham executives). As a result of the deal, SF Broadcasting announced that the four stations would become Fox affiliates; both Savoy and Fox shared ownership with Fox originally choosing to hold voting stock, ultimately opting not to retain it prior to the closure of the sale of the stations. The purchase was challenged by NBC, which filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on September 23, 1994, alleging that News Corporation had improperly set up a shell corporation to circumvent FCC limits on the amount of monetary capital that a foreign company is allowed to invest in an American television station in order to gain control of WLUK. NBC later withdrew its petition against the acquisition on February 17, 1995. The FCC approved the WLUK purchase on April 27, 1995.
WLUK became a Fox affiliate on August 28, 1995, swapping affiliations with WGBA-TV (channel 26), which had acquired the Fox affiliation three years earlier after WXGZ-TV (channel 32, now WACY-TV) shut down due to financial issues. Like most former "Big Three" network affiliates that switched to Fox during that time, WLUK picked up almost no syndicated programming from WGBA, though it was unnecessary because of WGBA's local marketing agreement with WACY-TV (channel 32); WGBA's programming largely moved to that station instead.
On March 2, 2012, the Green Bay Packers and Journal announced that WTMJ would be retained as the Official Packers Station in the Milwaukee market after the expiration of the previous agreement, and that WGBA would become the official station for the team in the Green Bay market beginning in August 2012, replacing former partner WFRV-TV.[35] As a result, WGBA carries the majority of the team's preseason schedule (the game broadcasts use CBS Sports announcers, with the NBC Sunday Night Football graphics package) along with Packers Live Tuesday nights and The Matt LaFleur Show on Wednesday evenings before primetime, and the Inside Lambeau program on Sunday nights, along with other official team programming; the station also provides gametime and 'ride home' forecasts for the "TundraVision" scoreboard displays at Lambeau Field during Packers home games. The first preseason game of 2012 was a national ESPN game against the San Diego Chargers on August 9 and aired on WBAY-TV, precluding a situation where NBC's non-preemptable coverage of the Summer Olympics would have forced WGBA to move that game to WACY instead (that situation also occurred in August 2016 due to the 2016 Summer Olympics for two games). In addition, the station also held the rights to the September 13 Thursday Night Football game of the Packers–Bears rivalry broadcast on cable/satellite on NFL Network, a network unavailable to much of the Green Bay market at the time due to conflicts with Time Warner Cable (three weeks later Time Warner added the network to its systems); this unusually forced the season seven finale of America's Got Talent to air the same night over WACY (the station's first move of NBC programming to that station in a pre-emption situation), and re-air after Saturday Night Live on September 15 on WGBA due to the pre-emption. As an NBC affiliate, WGBA broadcasts Packers games that are played on Sunday Night Football. For the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the station also aired Packers appearances on NBC's portion of the Thursday Night Football contract.
WGBA-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 26, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 41.[32][33] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 26.
On May 18, 2015, Scripps and Katz Broadcasting announced an affiliation agreement allowing Scripps' Green Bay duopoly to carry all three of Katz's digital broadcast networks in the near future, with WGBA carrying Laff and WACY carrying Escape and Grit (Laff launched one month earlier in markets with Scripps-owned stations not affected by its merger with the Journal Broadcasting Group, while the two others will also begin to be carried by select sister stations of WGBA through the deal).[30] Laff debuted as a digital subchannel on August 12, 2015.[31]
In July 2012, McCarren began to provide game and team analysis via the eastern Wisconsin stations of Journal Broadcast Group, including WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee and WGBA-TV in Green Bay, which currently are the official production and station/pre-season partners of the team; McCarren was already employed by Journal through the Packer Radio Network, which has its flagship at Milwaukee's WTMJ (AM). A "Locker Room"-type program returned for the 2013 NFL season on stations throughout the Packers state network, under the new title "Packers Live" and now being recorded in the Lambeau Field atrium rather than "Locker Room" filming from various local conference and banquet facilities through the year. On April 1, 2013, McCarren assumed sports director duties for WGBA as his WFRV non-compete clause expired.
In the wake of a bankruptcy, Green Bay's original Fox affiliate WXGZ (channel 32) went dark on February 14, 1992. WGBA became the new affiliate the following day, changing its branding to "Fox 26". After Ace TV acquired the WXGZ license, WGBA helped to relaunch the station through a local marketing agreement in June 1994. That station became a charter affiliate of UPN and changed its call letters to WACY-TV in 1995. In 1994 during the first year of Fox's contract to broadcast NFL games, the station entered into a contract with ABC affiliate WBAY-TV (channel 2) to produce a pregame show to air before Green Bay Packers games since it lacked a local sports department.