WGN America

WGN America was an American subscription television network that operated from November 9, 1978 to February 28, 2021. The service was originally uplinked to satellite by United Video Inc. as a national feed of Chicago independent station WGN-TV, making the station's programming available to cable and satellite providers throughout the United States as the second nationally distributed "superstation" (after Atlanta station WTCG, now operating as the cable-originated TBS, which had become a national service almost two years earlier).

It maintained a nearly identical program schedule as the Chicago station, airing a variety of programming including films, syndicated series, programs intended for local broadcast in the Chicago market (including local newscasts, public affairs shows and children's programs), and sports (including Chicago Cubs and White Sox baseball, Chicago Bulls basketball, and regional collegiate events). By the 1990s, the WGN superstation feed began substituting some syndicated programs (and starting in 1996, selected sporting events) in accordance with syndication exclusivity rules implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in January 1990 to reduce programming duplication between local and out-of-market television stations carried by local cable systems, and served as the national carrier of The WB (part-owned by WGN-TV founding owner Tribune Broadcasting, which would acquire the national feed from United Video in 2001) during the latter half of the decade.

WGN America was converted into a conventional basic cable network in December 2014, adding scripted original programs and removing WGN-TV's local programs from its schedule as well as making the network available on cable and satellite providers within the Chicago market. Nexstar Media Group acquired WGN America as part of its 2019 purchase of most of Tribune's assets, becoming the company's only wholly owned, national cable-originated network. The channel in its final form under the WGN branding ran a mixture of entertainment programs (consisting of comedy and drama series, and theatrical feature films) for most of the broadcast day and, beginning in March 2020, a straight-news format—via a daily national prime time newscast, NewsNation—during the evening and early overnight hours. Nexstar relaunched the network as NewsNation on March 1, 2021, eventually converting its entire schedule to a general news and discussion format in July 2024, as contracts for syndicated entertainment programs held over from the predecessor WGN America service (and originally purchased for the network by Tribune) expired.

WGN America traces its origins to WGN-TV, a broadcast television station in Chicago, Illinois that began operating over VHF channel 9 on April 5, 1948 as the second commercial television station to sign on in both the Chicago market and the state of Illinois – after WBKB-TV (channel 4, now CBS owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV on channel 2), which began experimental operations as W9XBK in 1940 and converted into a commercially licensed independent station on September 6, 1946 – and the 19th commercial station to sign on in the United States. The station – which, until January 1948, had initially planned to use the call sign WGNA – was founded by WGN, Incorporated, the broadcasting subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune Company (owned by Robert R. McCormick, then the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune), which had also owned local radio stations WGN (720 AM) and WGNB (98.7 FM; frequency now occupied by WFMT). WGN America and its Chicago-based broadcast television and radio siblings borrow the three-letter "WGN" initialism from the "World's Greatest Newspaper" slogan used by the Tribune from August 29, 1911 until December 31, 1976. (The calls were initially obtained by the Tribune in 1924 for use on the former WDAP radio station, which it had then recently acquired from Zenith-Edgewater Beach Broadcasting, by permission of the owners of the then-under-construction SS Carl D. Bradley.)

Initial programming on WGN-TV consisted of local newscasts and various other local programs (including children's programs and music series), older feature films and sporting events from Chicago-area professional and collegiate teams (including Chicago Cubs baseball games, the only local sports franchise to have aired consistently on the station from launch until the station's broadcasting relationship with the Cubs concluded in September 2019). By the end of 1948, network programs from CBS (later shared with WBKB-TV, beginning in September 1949) and the DuMont Television Network joined the schedule; WGN served as a production hub for several DuMont programs during the late 1940s and the first half of the 1950s (including The Al Morgan Show, Chicagoland Mystery Players, The Music Show, They Stand Accused, Windy City Jamboree and Down You Go). CBS programming moved exclusively to the rechristened WBBM-TV in February 1953, upon completion of that station's sale to CBS by Balaban and Katz Broadcasting, then owned by United Paramount Theatres, which was in the process of merging with ABC and acquiring, by association, WENR-TV (channel 7, now WLS-TV). This left WGN-TV with the faltering DuMont until that network completed its operational wind-down in August 1956, at which time it became an independent station; at that time, off-network syndicated reruns (such as The Cisco Kid, Our Miss Brooks and My Little Margie) were added to the schedule.

Channel 9 originally maintained studio and transmitter facilities at the Chicago Daily News Building, on West Madison and North Canal Streets in downtown Chicago, before relocating to WGN Radio's main facility at the Centennial Building annex of the Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue in the city's Magnificent Mile district, which was refurbished to accommodate the television station, on January 25, 1950. The channel 9 transmitter was moved to the Prudential Building on East Randolph Street and North Michigan Avenue in January 1956. The station moved to a proprietary studio facility at the 95,000-square-foot (2.2-acre) WGN Mid-America Broadcast Center (later renamed the WGN Continental Broadcast Center and now simply referred to as WGN Studios) on West Bradley Place in Chicago's North Center community in June 1961. (It shared the Bradley Place studios with WGN Radio until the latter moved its operations to the Pioneer Court extension on North Michigan Avenue in 1986.) In May 1969, the main transmitter was moved to the west antenna tower of the John Hancock Center on North Michigan Avenue.

WGN-TV became most associated with its heavy schedule of sporting events, which, in addition to its signature Cubs telecasts, included Chicago White Sox baseball, Chicago Bulls basketball, Chicago Blackhawks hockey, and college football and basketball games from individual regional universities (including the University of Illinois, DePaul University and Notre Dame University) as well as Big Ten Conference schools, among other events in aired at various points over the years. The station was also known locally for its lineup of children's programs including Bozo's Circus (which became the most well-known iteration of the Bozo franchise through its local and, later, national popularity, featuring a mix of comedy sketches, circus acts, cartoon shorts and in-studio audience participation games), Ray Rayner and His Friends (a variety show which featured animated shorts, arts and crafts segments, animal and science segments and a viewer mail segment) and Garfield Goose and Friends (a series hosted by Frazier Thomas as the "prime minister" to the titular clacking goose who designated himself as "King of the United States," which is considered to be the longest running puppet show on local television) as well as a robust lineup of feature films (showing as many as four movies – one in the morning, and two to three films per night – each weekday, and between three and six movies per day on weekends).

Channel 9 was Chicago's leading independent station for much of the period between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, although it was briefly overtaken in this distinction from 1979 to 1981 by rival independent WFLD (channel 32, now a Fox owned-and-operated station), which forced WGN-TV parent subsidiary Tribune Broadcasting (previously known as the WGN Continental Broadcasting Company from 1956 until 1981) to initiate efforts to beef up the station's inventory of off-network syndicated programs and add product from the Tribune Company's upstart national syndication unit, Tribune Entertainment. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the WGN-TV signal began to be retransmitted via microwave relay to cable television systems in much of the central Midwestern United States, enabling the station to reach far beyond the Chicago television market and reach areas that lacked access to an entertainment-based independent station. By the fall of 1978, WGN-TV was being distributed to 574 cable systems – covering Western, Central and Southern Illinois and large swaths of Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri – reaching an estimated 8.6 million subscribers.