История телеканала WFRV в Грин-Бей, Висконсин.

CBS affiliate in Green Bay, Wisconsin

WFRV TV (channel 5) is a television station in Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with CBS. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains studios on East Mason Street in Green Bay, and its transmitter is located north of Morrison, Wisconsin. WFRV TV traces its history to WNAM TV, a station that broadcast beginning in January 1954 from studios in Neenah. Owned by the Neenah Menasha Broadcasting Company, it was the only ultra high frequency (UHF) outlet in northeastern Wisconsin at a time when UHF stations faced severe technical and economic handicaps against very high frequency (VHF) stations. At the end of 1954, WNAM TV suspended operations and merged with the Valley Telecasting Company, a consortium of area investors that had obtained the construction permit for channel 5 in Green Bay. The new station, WFRV TV, debuted on May 20, 1955, from the former WNAM TV studios in Neenah and was ultimately owned entirely by Neenah Menasha. In January 1957, the station opened its present studios in Green Bay. Originally an affiliate of the ABC network, the station switched to NBC in 1959. From 1960 to 1980, WFRV TV was owned by the Morton and Norton families of Louisville, Kentucky, under the aegis of what eventually became known as Orion Broadcasting. In 1969, the company opened WJMN TV (channel 3) in Escanaba, Michigan, which served as a semi satellite of WFRV for the central Upper Peninsula of Michigan. When Orion Broadcasting and Cosmos Broadcasting merged, WFRV and WJMN were divested to Midwest Radio and Television, which owned WCCO TV in Minneapolis. Midwest switched the station's affiliation back to ABC in 1983 and invested in the news department. Midwest was acquired by CBS in 1991. This resulted in another affiliation switch in Green Bay on March 15, 1992, with ABC moving to WBAY TV (channel 2). CBS continued to own WFRV TV until 2007, when it traded the Green Bay and Escanaba stations to Liberty Media in exchange for shares of its stock. Nexstar acquired WFRV and WJMN in 2011. WJMN was given more local news programming; that station lost its CBS affiliation in January 2022. WFRV TV's studios continue to house master control and some internal operations for WJMN TV, which maintains its own studios, sales offices and engineering operations in Marquette.

WNAM TV began telecasting from Neenah on ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 42 on January 26, 1954, after beginning test transmissions in December 1953. Owned by the Neenah Menasha Broadcasting Company alongside radio station WNAM (1280 AM), the station carried programming from ABC as well as occasional NBC and DuMont Television Network programs. By late 1954, northeastern Wisconsin had one UHF television station—WNAM TV—and two very high frequency (VHF) outlets, WBAY TV on channel 2 and new sign on WMBV TV on channel 11. The UHF station was struggling; WOSH TV of Oshkosh had closed down in March. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had awarded the third and final commercial channel for Green Bay, channel 5, to the Valley Telecasting Company, a consortium of 17 area leaders, in 1953. Sensing that the arrival of Valley Telecasting, which had selected the call letters WFRV TV for its station to represent the "Wonderful Fox River Valley", would economically harm its UHF station, Neenah Menasha reached a deal in November to merge with Valley and announced it would suspend operations of WNAM TV on the evening of January 2, 1955. The combined station would retain some operations at Neenah for program production in the Fox Cities, but it would use the tower and transmitter building of the former WJPG FM on Scray's Hill near De Pere. WFRV TV signed on channel 5 on May 20, 1955, after an appeal lodged by WMBV TV to block the merger of Valley Telecasting and Neenah Menasha was declined for the final time; the station aired film programming for its first ten days before beginning affiliations with ABC and the DuMont Television Network—then on its way out—on June 1. While the transmitter facility was new, WFRV TV used WNAM TV's Neenah studios. By 1956, Neenah Menasha owned all of WFRV TV; that same year, the company announced plans to build a studio base in Green Bay. Master control switched to Green Bay in December when a new tower and transmitter building were activated, and production from the station's present Mason Street studios began in mid January 1957. WFRV TV was the Green Bay station in the short lived Badger Television Network, which operated in 1958 and also included Milwaukee's WISN TV and Madison's WKOW TV. The next year, on February 1, the station changed affiliations from ABC to NBC. Later that year, the station broadcast what was claimed to be the first ever coverage of a live lunar eclipse: a studio camera was wheeled out into the station parking lot.

In December 1960, Valley Telecasting sold WFRV TV to Valley Broadcasting Company, a subsidiary of WAVE TV at Louisville, Kentucky, for $1.09 million. WFRV's first attempt at expanding to the Upper Peninsula, a construction permit to build channel 8 at Iron Mountain, Michigan, was scrapped at the company's request days after the sale, as was an application by the company to build a channel 9 station at Wausau. Channel 5 began to broadcast local programming in color in the fall of 1965, making it the second station (behind WBAY TV) with that capability in the market. Two years later, the station began its move to build a satellite in the Upper Peninsula when it filed for channel 3 at Escanaba, Michigan, on June 20, 1967. As a result of an attempt by Northern Michigan University to build an educational station on the wider coverage channel 3 instead of the allocated channel 13, it would be nearly two years before a construction permit was granted on April 23, 1969. From a transmitter site near Trenary, WJMN TV—so designated in honor of Jane Morton Norton, chairman of the board of the company—began broadcasting October 7, bringing a full NBC lineup and WFRV TV's signal to a further 50,000 households. That same year, WAVE, Inc. renamed itself Orion Broadcasting in reflection of its broadcasting holdings beyond Louisville.

Orion Broadcasting reached a deal to merge with Cosmos Broadcasting, a subsidiary of the Liberty Corporation, in 1980. The merger would put the combined company over the limit for the number of VHF television stations it could own, prompting it to immediately announce that it would divest WFRV/WJMN. In January 1981, Cosmos found a buyer: Midwest Radio Television, owners of WCCO radio and television in Minneapolis. The transaction closed in October. After taking over, Midwest made $1 million in major investments in new equipment, including a news helicopter. An even larger change was in the offing. On October 25, 1982, the station announced it would end its 23 year association with NBC and return to the then stronger ABC in 1983, after ABC began courting channel 5, which had been one of NBC's strongest affiliates. One potential complication emerged when it was discovered that WFRV's affiliation agreement had just been automatically renewed through February 1985. It was not until March 1983 that outgoing ABC outlet WLUK TV and NBC reached an affiliation deal, which allowed the switch to take place on April 18.

On July 23, 1991, CBS announced that it would purchase the entirety of Midwest Communications, Inc. The deal gave the company WCCO radio and television in Minneapolis, but it also gave CBS an ABC affiliate—WFRV/WJMN—in a market smaller than any in which the company was operating. In the immediate aftermath of the $200 million acquisition, the network sent out mixed messages: CBS executive Peter Lund said the company had decided to keep the Green Bay station, yet an affiliate relations official told longtime CBS affiliate WBAY TV that the network would be interested in remaining there if a buyer were to be found. The sale dislodged the existing CBS affiliates in the Green Bay and Marquette markets, WBAY TV and WLUC TV. The switch in Green Bay took place March 15, 1992—just over a month after CBS closed on the Midwest purchase—with WBAY becoming the ABC outlet. In Marquette, where CBS angered WLUC TV by notifying it on February 5 that it was terminating the affiliation agreement in July, that station switched to ABC on February 23, prompting WJMN to change to CBS three weeks early (and be fed CBS programs from the control room in Green Bay). WFRV would be unaffected by the 1995 switch that saw WLUK TV and WGBA TV swap affiliations. The station was the first in Green Bay to launch a digital television signal, in 2002.

In April 2007, Liberty Media (a media company unrelated to The Liberty Corporation and a spin off of former cable television company TCI) completed an exchange transaction with CBS Corporation pursuant to which Liberty Media exchanged 7.6 million shares of CBS Class B common stock valued at $239 million for a subsidiary of CBS that held WFRV and WJMN and approximately $170 million in cash As part of the transaction, Liberty Media acquired WFRV and WJMN, becoming the only over the air television properties to be owned by the company. WFRV TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 5, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre transition UHF channel 39, using virtual channel 5.

On April 7, 2011, Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced it would acquire WFRV and WJMN TV from Liberty Media. The $20 million deal was approved by the FCC on June 28, 2011, and closed three days later on July 1, when Nexstar tapped Joseph Denk to become vice president and general manager of both stations; Denk replaced Perry Kidder, a 37 year employee of the station, who announced his retirement shortly after the sale was announced. Nexstar also relaunched the station's website at a new domain, "wearegreenbay. com". Nexstar also moved to increase the local content of WJMN in the Upper Peninsula. A station that had long merely rebroadcast WFRV TV's newscasts or maintained a minimal reporting and weather presence in northern Michigan, WJMN launched separate local newscasts at 6 and 11 pm on March 13, 2014. At that time, it branded as "Local 3", matching WFRV, which had taken on the "Local 5" moniker in 2012. On January 27, 2016, Media General announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Nexstar. Because Media General owned WBAY, the new company was required to sell that station or WFRV to another owner. On June 3, Nexstar announced it had opted to keep WFRV and would sell WBAY along with another merger divestiture, KWQC TV in Davenport, Iowa, to Gray Television for $270 million. In 2022, WJMN lost its CBS affiliation in the Marquette market to WZMQ (channel 19) and replaced the lost CBS programs with programming from MyNetworkTV as well as Nexstar owned diginets Antenna TV and Rewind TV, to fill time where CBS programming formerly resided. The station also extended its existing 6 p. m. newscast to one hour and moved its 11 p. m. newscast to 10 p. m.

WFRV has typically been the second or third rated station for local news in the Green Bay market, led by WBAY TV. In the early 1980s, WFRV was the first local station to start a full news bureau in the Fox Cities area, which at the time accounted for a third of the newsroom budget. Where the original news bureau was in the reporter's apartment, by 1983 the station had dedicated facilities including a microwave link for sending stories back to Green Bay. In 2004, the station moved its Fox Valley facility to a site on Patriot Drive in Little Chute, equidistant from downtown Appleton and downtown Green Bay, and equipped it with the area's only Doppler weather radar. On June 23, 2011, after a six month upgrade process, WFRV became the first station in the Green Bay market to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; the changeover to HD included upgraded weather systems, including real time street level radar. Beginning in September 2012, WFRV would greatly expand its local news output, including the addition of an hour long afternoon newscast at 4 p. m. and the expansion of its 6 p. m. newscast from 30 minutes to one hour; the 6 p. m. newscast was reduced to 30 minutes during the NFL season on nights when WFRV aired Packers related programming. The station launched an hour long local mid morning program, Local 5 Live!, in 2013.

WFRV has historically been a major producer of programming around the Green Bay Packers. In 1988, the station hired former Packers center Larry McCarren to serve as a sportscaster. By 1990, McCarren was hosting a weekly program on the team, Packers Locker Room. McCarren was elevated to sports director when he signed a new long term contract with channel 5 in 1994; this came even as CBS lost NFL rights. In 2003, WFRV acquired the rights to preseason telecasts, which had belonged locally to WBAY TV for some 40 years; McCarren appeared on the telecasts. After the Packers left WFRV for a deal with WGBA TV (and a renewal with Milwaukee's WTMJ TV) in 2012, McCarren soon followed; he 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. McCarren left WGBA in 2015 and became a team employee.