WPVI-TV
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| WPVI-TV | |
|---|---|
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| Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | |
| Branding | 6 ABC (general) Channel 6 Action News (newscast) |
| Slogan | The Delaware Valley's leading news program |
| Channels | Analog: 6 (VHF) |
| Subchannels | (see article) |
| Affiliations | ABC |
| Owner | Disney/ABC (ABC, Inc.) |
| Founded | September 13, 1947 |
| Call letters’ meaning | Philadelphia VI (six in Roman numerals) |
| Former callsigns | WFIL-TV (1947-1971) |
| Former affiliations | DuMont (secondary, 1947-1956) |
| Transmitter Power | 74.1 kW (analog) 500 kW (digital) |
| Height | 332 m (analog) 390 m (digital) |
| Facility ID | 8616 |
| Transmitter Coordinates | (analog) (digital) |
| Website | www.6abc.com |
WPVI-TV, channel 6, is an owned-and-operated station of the Walt Disney Company-owned American Broadcasting Company, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. WPVI has its studios located on the border between Philadelphia and Bala Cynwyd, and its transmitter is located in the Roxborough neighborhood. WPVI's signal covers the Delaware Valley area, comprised of large portions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
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[edit] History
[edit] As WFIL-TV
Philadelphia's second-oldest television station signed on the air on September 13, 1947 as WFIL-TV. It was owned originally by Triangle Publications, publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer and operators of WFIL radio (560 kHz.) and WFIL-FM (102.1 MHz, now WIOQ).
WFIL radio had been an ABC radio affiliate dating back to ABC's days as the Blue Network. However, WFIL-TV started out as a DuMont affiliate, as ABC hadn't gotten into television yet. ABC had launched its television network only a few months before and WFIL-TV became the fledgling network's first affiliate. It retained a secondary DuMont affiliation until that network's demise in 1956.
The WFIL stations were the flagship of the growing communications empire of Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications, which owned both Philadelphia newspapers (the morning Inquirer and, later, the evening Philadelphia Daily News), periodicals including TV Guide, Seventeen, and the Daily Racing Form, and a broadcasting group that would grow to ten radio and six television stations.
The WFIL radio stations originally broadcast from the Widener Building in downtown Philadelphia. With the anticipated arrival of WFIL-TV, Triangle secured a new facility for WFIL, located at Market and 46th streets. In 1964 Triangle built one of the most advanced broadcast centers in the nation on City (or City Line) Avenue in the Main Line, in a circular building across from rival WCAU-TV. The station still broadcasts from there today, while the original studio was turned over to public broadcaster WHYY-FM and Television.
Channel 6 has a long history of producing local shows. Perhaps its most notable local production was American Bandstand, which began in 1952 from WFIL-TV's original 46th and Market studio before the ABC network picked it up five years later. Other well-known locally-produced shows included Captain Noah and His Magical Ark, Chief Halftown, hosted by the full-blooded Seneca Indian Traynor Ora Halftown and the Larry Ferrari Show, which featured Ferrari playing organ music.
Channel 6 was the first station to sign on from the Roxborough neighborhood. It originally used a 600-foot (180 m) tower, but in 1957 it moved to a new 1,100-foot (340 m) tower which it co-owned with NBC-owned WRCV-TV (channel 3, now KYW-TV). The new tower added much of Delaware and the Lehigh Valley to the station's city-grade coverage.
[edit] As WPVI-TV
Because of its ownership of newspapers and broadcast licenses based in the same area, Triangle began to feel pressure from the Federal Communications Commission to divest some of its properties in order to comply with its newly-enacted "one-to-a-market" rule. In 1969, one year after the law was made official, Triangle sold the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News to Knight (later Knight-Ridder) Newspapers.
In 1971, Triangle began to break up its broadcasting group. The WFIL stations, along with outlets in New Haven, Connecticut and Fresno, California, were sold to Capital Cities Communications. As a condition of the sale, Capital Cities had to spin-off the radio stations to other entities (i.e., WFIL-AM to LIN Broadcasting and WFIL-FM to Richer Communications, which changed the call letters), and channel 6 changed its call letters to the current WPVI-TV on April 27, 1971.
Despite the ownership change, channel 6 continued preempting ABC programming in favour of locally-produced and syndicated shows. In 1975, when ABC entered the morning news field with AM America, WPVI did not carry it. Nor would channel 6 pick up AM America's successor, Good Morning America, in its entirety for nearly three years, choosing instead to carry its local children's program Captain Noah and His Magical Ark in place of the second hour of GMA. WPVI-TV also did not run other ABC daytime programming, notably The Edge of Night and numerous sitcom reruns. ABC was able to get most of its daytime schedule on the air in Philadelphia anyway, through contracts with independent stations WKBS-TV (channel 48) and WTAF-TV (channel 29).
In March 1985, Capital Cities announced it was purchasing the American Broadcasting Company, a move that stunned the broadcast industry since ABC was some four times larger than CapCities at the time. Some have said that CapCities was only able to pull off the deal because WPVI-TV, the company's flagship property, had become very profitable in its own right. However, the merged company almost had to sell off channel 6 due to a significant signal overlap with ABC's New York City flagship station, WABC-TV. In the FCC's view, the merger gave the new company a duopoly prohibited by the regulations of the time -- the same "one-to-a-market" rule that forced Triangle to split its newspaper/broadcast combination in Philadelphia many years earlier. Capital Cities sought a waiver of the rules to keep WPVI, citing CBS' then-ownership of WCBS-TV in New York and WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. The FCC granted the waiver, and when the transaction became final in early 1986, WPVI-TV became an ABC owned-and-operated station. A decade later, the Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC.
Even in the years after WPVI became an ABC-owned station, they continued to pre-empt an hour of ABC daytime programs in favour of other programs. Wildwood, New Jersey-based NBC affiliate WMGM-TV picked up the pre-empted ABC shows until 1987, when they moved back to channel 29, which was now WTXF-TV. The pre-empted programs were usually magazine shows, game shows or reruns of ABC primetime sitcoms. Some leeway was made in the early 1990s, when WPVI was down to pre-empting only the first half-hour the Home Show.
It was also after the CapCities-ABC merger that WPVI encountered infamy: On January 22, 1987, the station partially re-broadcasted the suicide of Pennsylvania treasurer Budd Dwyer on its noon newscast. Dwyer's suicide occurred at a press conference earlier that morning.
In 1997, in a directive from the new Disney ownership, WPVI-TV began carrying the entire ABC network schedule for the first time ever. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of its highly-rated local show, AM/Live (formerly AM Philadelphia), which was shifted to overnights to make room for ABC's then-new talk show The View. AM/Live was moved to 12:35 a.m. following Politically Incorrect and was renamed Philly After Midnight, where it lasted until 2001. Also in 1997, WPVI adopted the "network-plus-channel number" branding format and was now known on-air as 6 ABC.
Today, WPVI carries the entire ABC line-up as well as syndicated programming such as Live with Regis and Kelly and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, both of which are provided by corporate cousin Disney-ABC Domestic Television. In fact, its entire weekday line-up, including syndicated shows, is identical to that of WABC-TV.
A groundbreaking ceremony for a new WPVI studio/headquarters building, directly behind the current studio on ground bought from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, was held on June 12, 2007, with completion of the new studios due for spring of 2009. ([1])
[edit] Digital television
The station's digital signall is multiplexed:
Digital channels
| Subchannel | Programming |
|---|---|
| 6.1 / 64.1 | main WPVI-TV/ABC programming |
| 6.2 / 64.2 | WPVI Plus |
| 6.3 / 64.3 | Action News Now |
[edit] Analog-to-digital conversion
After the analog television shutdown and digital conversion, which is tentatively scheduled to take place on February 17, 2009 [1], WPVI-TV will move its digital broadcasts back to its present analog channel number, 6. [2]
[edit] News operation
The station is famous for pioneering the Action News format, which was used by many stations throughout the United States. When WFIL-TV premiered it on April 6, 1970 the format allowed the news program to have more stories than KYW-TV's Eyewitness News due to strict time limits on story packages. Within a few months, the station surged to first place for the first time in its history. It had previously been an also-ran behind KYW-TV and WCAU-TV, which was surprising given its newspaper roots.
Channel 6 went back and forth with KYW-TV for first place for most of the 1970s. In 1977, WPVI lured several personalities from its highly successful sister station WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York. It was enough to carry WPVI to a large lead over KYW-TV in the ratings books later that year. Channel 6 has dominated the ratings for most of the time ever since, winning virtually every time slot. Its dominance has only been seriously challenged twice -- in the 1980s, when WCAU-TV briefly took the lead at 5 p.m.; and in 2001, when WCAU took first place at 11 p.m. for the first time in decades.
The station has used the same theme since 1972, "Move Closer to Your World" by Al Ham. The composition has become as much a part of the Philadelphia consciousness as the Rocky theme and has helped WPVI stay number one in the Delaware Valley for 30 years. The station tried to switch to a fuller, thunderous and authoritative version of the song by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997, but switched back to the old version after five days of viewer complaints.
Years of being in the lead have led WPVI to maintain an "if it isn’t broken, don't fix it" mentality. For instance, it has had the same "6" logo since the 1970s; the only significant change coming in 1997 when it began calling itself "6 ABC" and began placing the ABC "dot" logo inside the "6." It has frequently remastered "Move Closer to Your World" to make it sound less dated.
In recent years, attempts have been made to modernize the newscasts. The magnet board used for weather forecasts gave way to a video screen in 2000 and a chromakey wall in 2005. On February 13, 2006, Action News debuted a revamped and fully modernized set which includes a glass etching background of several historical landmarks in Philadelphia positioned behind the anchor desk, shiftable lighting effects and a computerized Accu-Weather center[2]. WPVI introduced a new HD-capable helicopter in February 2006. Live shots from the helicopter, officially named Chopper6 HD, were shown in high definition. Furthermore, on July 23, 2006, starting with the 6:00 p.m. broadcast, Action News began broadcasting from their studio in full 720p HDTV. The official announcement was made on July 24. All news cameras on Action News are HD. Most of WPVI's personalities have been at the station for 10 years; several for 20 years or more. Jim Gardner has been with the station since 1976 and has been main anchor since May, 1977, the longest tenure as a main anchor in Philadelphia history. Dave Roberts (joined in 1978) has been the main weatherman since September 1983, following the death of popular weatherman Jim O'Brien in a skydiving accident near Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. Both Gardner and Roberts came directly from WKBW. Rob Jennings has been weekend anchor since 1981.
As there is no ABC affiliate or local station based in New Jersey, WPVI cooperates with WABC-TV in the production and broadcast of state-wide New Jersey political debates. When the two stations broadcast a state-wide office debate, such as Governor or U. S. Senate, they will pool resources and have anchors or reporters from both stations participate in the debate. Additionally, the two stations cooperate in the gathering of news in New Jersey where their markets overlap; sharing reporters, live trucks and helicopters.
WPVI offers live streaming video on its website of "Action News Now", which offers live local and national weather as part of The AccuWeather Channel. Local news headlines and updates are also provided. The format of "Action News Now" is much like NBC Weather Plus.
[edit] Current personalities
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This article or section contains a current television or radio schedule. Please convert this schedule to prose. Schedules which have been copied and pasted from an external source may possibly be in violation of copyright. Please remove this template after editing. |
- Anchors
- Sarah Bloomquist - weekdays Noon
- Jessica Borg - weekend mornings
- Tamala Edwards - weekday mornings
- Jim Gardner - weeknights 6:00 and 11:00 p.m.
- Rob Jennings - weekend evenings
- Monica Malpass - weeknights 5:00 p.m.
- Matt O'Donnell - weekday mornings
- Walter Perez - weekend mornings
- Rick Williams - weekdays Noon and 5:00 p.m.
- Sports
- Gary Papa - sports director/weeknights
- Keith Russell - weekends
- Weather
- Erica Grow - weekend mornings
- Adam Joseph - weekend evenings
- David Murphy - weekdays mornings and Noon
- Dave Roberts - weeknights 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.
- Karen Rogers - weekday mornings (also traffic reporter)
- Cecily Tynan - weeknights 5:30 and 11:00 p.m.
- Reporters
- Jamie Apody (sports)
- Amy Buckman
- Dann Cuellar
- Cathy Gandolfo (New Jersey bureau)
- Ali Gorman (Health Check)
- Nydia Han (consumer affairs)
- David Henry
- Denise James
- Adam Joseph
- Nora Muchanic (New Jersey bureau)
- Vernon Odom (also host of Visions)
- Erin O'Hearn
- Don Polec (features)
- Chad Pradelli
- John Rawlins
- Lisa Thomas-Laury
- Lauren Wilson
[edit] Notable alumni
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[edit] Radio
WPVI can be heard at 87.7 FM, though at a slightly lower volume than other FM stations. This is due to the fact that the 87.75 MHz frequency is the audio frequency used for channel 6 in System M. This will not work after the DTV transition in 2009.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- WPVI-TV website
- WPVI Wireless
- Modern Television - R. Budd Dwyer.
- Audio of Action News closing theme song "Move Closer to Your World" ([6]), ([7])
- Query the FCC's TV station database for WPVI-TV
- BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on WPVI-TV
- Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia
- Interactive Tour of New Action News set
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