WLRN TV: История и развитие телеканала Майами-Дейд округа

WLRN TV (channel 17) is a secondary PBS member television station in Miami, Florida, United States. It is owned by the Miami Dade County Public Schools district alongside NPR member WLRN FM (91.3); the two outlets are operated under a management agreement by Friends of WLRN, the stations' fundraising arm. Both stations share studios on Northeast 15th Street and Northeast 1st Avenue in Miami, while WLRN TV's transmitter is located at McTyre Park in Miami Gardens. WLRN TV is one of two PBS member stations serving the Miami–Fort Lauderdale market, the other being WPBT (channel 2), owned by South Florida PBS. Originally a secondary station to channel 2 when it was WTHS TV, the effective split of community and public licensee in the late 1970s made channel 17 the only TV station operated by the school system. WLRN TV's local productions include documentaries and special interest programs on South Florida, and it also airs independently produced Spanish language programs on Sundays.

While channel 17 kept broadcasting to an audience that almost exclusively consisted of students, channel 2 had emerged as the primary public broadcasting outlet in South Florida. Long a joint effort between the school board and the private Community Television Foundation of South Florida (CTF), this arrangement was consecrated as two separate FCC licenses sharing the channel in 1970. WTHS TV continued to broadcast during weekday daytime hours to provide in school programs, while non school fare was provided by the foundation under the new call sign of WPBT. The stated intention was to sunset WTHS TV after five years and transition its broadcasts to a closed circuit system connecting the schools, ceding channel 2 to WPBT full time. The arrangement went sour in 1975, when CTF sought to take full control. However, the school board refused, stating that WLRN TV and other services were not yet available to a majority of students. The inadequate WLRN TV facilities were cited by one school board member as a poor compensation for giving up half of channel 2; by 1978, the station was operating at an effective radiated power of 38,000 watts, using a transmitter it had acquired used from WHRO TV in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961. However, relief was on the way in the form of a major signal upgrade to WLRN TV. In August 1978, a rebuilt facility was activated and effective radiated power increased to 2.83 million watts, extending the station's city grade coverage to take in Cutler Ridge to the south and Boca Raton to the north. In addition to Something on Seventeen and educational courses for schools and the general public, the station also aired local government meetings. In 1983, WLRN radio and television moved from the decaying Lindsey Hopkins High School building, where radio had been since 1948 and where television operations of the district began in 1955, to a new facility on the same site. By 1985, the station was producing a panoply of local shows to supplement PBS productions, ranging from panel discussions on public issues to sewing advice and how tos on acting, as well as high school sports telecasts. When an appeals court ruling that year struck down FCC regulations requiring must carry carriage of all TV stations in a local area, two Miami cable systems with 70,000 subscribers pulled WLRN. The station boasted, in response to it being dropped by a system in Fort Lauderdale, that its local programming output was only surpassed by WGBH TV in Boston. The high school sports broadcasts were dropped in 1993, while school board meeting coverage on television was also curtailed to end at 6 p. m. even if the meeting was still in progress.

In 2017, a proposal to shift some news staffers from being employed by an independent nonprofit to directly by the school district led to controversy. A task force convened by the school board to determine the WLRN stations' future suggested four options, including restructuring the advisory board, spinning off WLRN radio and television, or selling them to another entity. The district opted to take proposals to outsource management while continuing to own the stations, receiving two bids. One came from Friends of WLRN, which had been established to provide fundraising support to the stations in 1974. The other came from South Florida PBS, the umbrella organization owning WPBT. The school district recommended the South Florida PBS bid, but after Friends of WLRN challenged the decision in court, a vote on the topic was postponed. After the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, South Florida PBS withdrew its bid in April 2020. A final agreement for Friends of WLRN to run the stations was reached in February 2022. The deal was also reached in the context of superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho leaving Miami to run the Los Angeles Unified School District.

In addition to airing PBS programs and daily children's programming, WLRN TV specializes in the production of local interest programs as well as documentaries which are syndicated for national distribution, making available 30 such shows to PBS stations since 2005. For four hours on Sunday afternoons, WLRN presents Spanish language programming from independent producers.

WLRN broadcasts one channel of programming. + Subchannel of WLRN TV Channel Res. Aspect Short name Programming 17.1 1080i 16:9 WLRN HD Main WLRN TV programming / PBS

WLRN TV terminated its analog signal, on UHF channel 17, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre transition UHF channel 20; it was then repacked to channel 26 a decade later.