| WWJ-TV | |
|---|---|
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Location |
Detroit, Michigan |
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Branding |
WWJ News Detroit |
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Slogan |
This is WWJ News Detroit |
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Channel(s) |
Digital: 21 (UHF) |
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Subchannel(s) |
62.1 WWJ |
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Affiliation |
Independent (1975–1994, 2019-present) |
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First air date |
September 29, 1975 |
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Former call letters |
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Former channel number |
Analog: 62 (UHF, 1975-2009) |
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Former affiliation(s) |
CBS (1994-2019) |
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Licensing authority |
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WWJ-TV, virtual channel 62 (UHF digital channel 44), is an independent television station licensed to Detroit, Michigan, United States. The station is owned by the CBS Television Stations subsidiary of CBS Corporation, as part of a duopoly with independent station WKBD-TV (channel 50). The two stations share studios on 11 Mile Road in the Detroit suburb of Southfield; WWJ-TV's transmitter is located in Oak Park, Michigan.
The station is carried on several Canadian cable providers, predominantly in Southwestern Ontario, and is one of five local Detroit television stations seen in Canada on satellite provider Shaw Direct.
On cable, the station is available in standard definition on channel 15 on Comcast Xfinity's Detroit city and Wayne County systems and Cogeco's Windsor system, channel 9 on Xfinity's South Oakland County system, channel 14 on most cable systems in outlying areas (except for WOW!, where it is carried on channel 6), channel 62 on AT&T U-verse, and in high definition on Xfinity channel 233, Cogeco channel 713, and U-verse channel 1062.
Amyre Makupson's situation was not unique, as the station's early months were very rough. Technical failures were common; broadcast hours were cut back; and programming plans were curtailed after just one month when Banks felt the station was losing too much money. Hopes of WGPR-TV making an immediate ratings impact by luring existing Black viewers from the other channels in the market—five licensed to Detroit proper and two in Windsor, Ontario—failed to materialize. Commercials, particularly from the national clients that had made pledges to WGPR-TV, either failed to play correctly or would not play at all due to poor equipment; General Motors in particular withdrew their advertising but allowed the station to keep the money. Banks's daughter, station vice president Tenicia Gregory, left a job as a college instructor to help run the station and never left, despite the early struggles. Gregory later said, "television turned out to be more than any of us thought... at the end of (1975), it was obvious that I couldn't walk away from it. It was impossible."
On May 23, 1994, New World Communications, owner of Detroit's CBS affiliate, WJBK-TV, announced that it had reached a deal to convert 12 stations from CBS to Fox affiliation. The deal came on the heels of CBS losing the rights to National Football Conference football games to Fox; New World owned a string of mostly CBS affiliates in markets that were home to NFC football teams, including Detroit. As a result, CBS needed to find multiple new affiliates in each of the affected markets, but that would turn out to be far easier said than done in Detroit. Over a three-month period, CBS explored and exhausted almost every available option to find a new affiliate partner or to identify a station to acquire. First, the network attempted to woo the NBC and ABC affiliates, WDIV-TV and WXYZ-TV, away from their existing alliances. It failed to do so; both NBC and ABC negotiated renewals with their stations that increased network compensation payments as much as four- to fivefold. In the case of ABC's renewal with WXYZ-TV, additional contracts were secured with stations owned by WXYZ's parent company Scripps-Howard in several other cities.
Unable to lure a VHF station, CBS's next target was WKBD-TV. On paper, channel 50 was a good fit for CBS, not least because it was the outgoing Fox affiliate and already produced local news. However, WKBD had been purchased the year before by Paramount Communications, which was already preparing to launch UPN in January 1995 with WKBD as a charter affiliate. Paramount reportedly turned down an offer of between $120 and $130 million. CBS then approached WXON-TV; the network seemed more interested in an acquisition than a purchase, according to WXON's station manager, and offered half of what channel 20's owners thought the station was worth (reported to be as high as $200 million). CBS also contacted WADL (channel 38), an independent station owned by Frank Adell. Adell was interested in CBS, but CBS offered him a poor deal: he sought five years and compensation, in line with other deals the network was making with new affiliates, while the network merely offered Adell one year without any compensation payments. CBS's concern over Detroit was so great that the network also executed contingency plans. In June 1994, the network reached a deal to switch from UHF station WEYI-TV to VHF station WNEM-TV in the Saginaw–Flint area.
It's difficult to part with anything you love. But we don't have the financial capabilities to do what we'd like to here. And we take pride in the fact that we're now making it possible to bring some new jobs to the City of Detroit.
In WGPR-TV, which had already been carrying CBS This Morning, CBS finally found itself a home in Detroit, but one that Mike Duffy of the Detroit Free Press branded a "last resort" for the network. On September 23, 1994, CBS announced it would purchase WGPR-TV for $24 million (equivalent to $43.9 million in 2021), operating channel 62 under a local marketing agreement until the sale was approved. The purchase brought with it the promise of 140 new jobs and an immediate push to upgrade the station's signal to achieve parity with the other network affiliates. It also spared the station from imminent removal from cable systems in Windsor, Ontario, that had planned to drop channel 62 to make way for new Canadian cable channels to be launched in early 1995. CBS's purchase made national headlines due to the network's duress, along with the station's high channel number and relative obscurity outside of the inner city: one unnamed network executive, unaware of WGPR-TV's history, told The New York Times reporter Bill Carter: "this station has no news and no history in the market".
On December 11, 1994, WGPR-TV became the new CBS affiliate in Detroit, backed by a major promotional blitz amounting to $1 million in ad spending over the first 10 weeks. The first week was marred by issues that prevented some cable subscribers from seeing the station clearly; while ratings for channel 62 rose 11,000 percent over the station's former programming on the first Sunday night, ratings for CBS dipped by 25 percent. CBS's desperate purchase of channel 62, however, would come at the cost of WGPR-TV's existing programming inventory, which was fully displaced by new syndicated and network programs. Such shows as The New Dance Show, which had replaced The Scene as channel 62's music program after it ended in 1987, and Arab Voice of Detroit, a long-running Saturday block aimed at southeast Michigan's large Middle Eastern community, disappeared from the Detroit airwaves, as did the religious programs that had once kept it afloat. Arab Voice host Faisal Arabo was offered a 30-minute slot on Saturday mornings by the incoming CBS management free of charge, but Arabo would not have been able to sell advertising to make a profit, causing him to decline the offer. In the case of The New Dance Show and other programs produced by R.J. Watkins's Key/Wat Productions, many moved to a new low-power station on channel 68 that started the next year which Watkins operated alongside his newly-acquired WHPR-FM (88.1).
CBS's sale application, however, met with some opposition and attempts to keep the station Black-owned. Joel Ferguson, who had been rebuffed in 1986, joined forces with Bing and Roy Roberts, an executive at General Motors, to propose operation as a Black-owned CBS affiliate; Ferguson claimed he had offered $31 million for channel 62 weeks before the Masons took the $24 million CBS bid but Mathews claimed no such offer was ever made, saying, "There was no one else in line when CBS came to us". Ferguson's group, known as Spectrum Detroit, later expanded to include other business and religious leaders in the Black community with one pastor calling the station "sacred property". In December, the Spectrum Detroit group converted its proposal to an objection to the sale of WGPR-TV to CBS. Representative John Conyers promised to pressure the FCC to reject the sale, believing that channel 62 could retain existing Black-focused programming if it remained Black-owned. A Ukrainian-American man from Troy, Michigan, filed an objection claiming that a report on 60 Minutes was distorted and inaccurate, even though 60 Minutes was produced by CBS News and not WGPR-TV. In a satirical mocking of CBS's obvious desperation, Detroit News columnist Jon Pepper jokingly predicted Joel Ferguson's group still had a chance to purchase the station, in turn forcing CBS to buy a ham radio unit located in a Plymouth, Michigan, basement for $40 million.
WWJ was notable for its brief weather forecast at 11 p.m. tying in a pun referencing its succeeding show, which began with the meteorologist saying "Two and a Half Men starts in two and a half minutes." This timeslot was filled by The Big Bang Theory reruns until September 2017, when Two and a Half Men was brought back to the station's late night lineup (the fall of 2018 saw the CBS-distributed Entertainment Tonight replace it). Though the forecast segment remains at 2½ minutes, at one point, viewers were invited to submit videos of themselves saying the mentioned phrase, which were then played in a montage before each forecast.
Until 2019, WWJ formerly served as the CBS affiliate for the Detroit television market. However, on August 3, 2019, when former Fox O&O WJBK restored its CBS affiliation, with Fox programming moving to a newly-established low-power station, WDFH-LP, WWJ became a news-intensive independent station.
Programming[]
Due to its news-intensive schedule, WWJ, despite returning to its status as an independent after ending 25 years of network affiliation, airs only a few syndicated programs within its weekday daytime schedule.