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WOWT
WOWT (channel 6) is a television station in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Gray Media. The station's studios are located at the Kiewit Plaza on Farnam Street near downtown Omaha, and its transmitter is located on a "tower farm" near North 72nd Street and Crown Point Avenue in north-central Omaha.
WOWT is Gray's only Nebraska station that is not part of its Nebraska News & Weather Network which includes sister stations KOLN/KGIN, KSNB-TV, and KNOP-TV.
The station signed on the air on August 29, 1949, at noon as WOW-TV; it was the first television station in Nebraska and is one of the oldest in the Upper Midwest. It also claims to have gone on the air earlier than any station in four other Midwestern states—Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota. The station was owned by Radio Station WOW, Inc., alongside WOW radio (590 AM, now KXSP, and 92.3 FM, now KEZO). The owners operated under a United States Supreme Court ruling which had forced the Woodmen of the World, who had founded WOW in 1923, to divest itself of the radio stations because they threatened the Woodmen's tax-exempt status.
The station was originally a primary NBC affiliate and secondary ABC affiliate; it lost ABC programming in 1953, when KFOR-TV signed on from Lincoln as an ABC affiliate. However, in 1954, Lincoln was separated from the Omaha market, and WOW-TV resumed sharing ABC programming with KMTV (channel 3) until 1957, when KETV signed on as an ABC affiliate. Meredith Corporation bought WOW-AM-FM-TV in 1951. The station claims it was bought by former Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews in 1954, but this is false as Matthews had died two years earlier. On January 24, 1955, after the radio stations dropped their longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network in favor of the CBS Radio Network, WOW-TV became a secondary CBS television affiliate. This was part of CBS' multi-year, five-station affiliation deal with Meredith Corporation, as a compensation for Phoenix sister station KPHO's initial loss of the CBS affiliation to KOOL-TV before it reclaimed that affiliation in 1994 (KCMO-AM-FM-TV also switched to the network several months earlier). On January 1, 1956, WOW-TV officially became Omaha's CBS outlet, trading affiliations with KMTV.
WOWT's most famous former employee is former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who worked at WOW-TV in the early 1950s in his first television job as the host of a program called The Squirrel's Nest, where he told jokes. Another prominent former employee is former ABC Good Morning America reporter Steve Bell, who worked for Channel 6 during the early and mid-1960s. He was the only local reporter to go to Dallas in November 1963 to cover the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Bell left channel 6 in 1967 to join ABC News, where he remained until 1986.
In 1974, Meredith tried to sell WOW-TV to Pulitzer Publishing Company for $8 million, but the deal collapsed and Pulitzer ended up buying KETV instead.
When Meredith sold channel 6 to the San Francisco-based Chronicle Publishing Company in 1975, it changed its call letters to WOWT on July 9, due to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrictions regarding the usage of the same call letters by different owners at the time. Normally, channel 6 would have had to adopt a callsign starting with "K" when it changed its call letters, since the WOW call letters had been assigned before the current K/W dividing line was moved to the Mississippi River. However, Chronicle wanted to continue trading on the WOW calls, and got a waiver from the FCC to retain a "W" in its calls. To this day, WOWT is one of the westernmost stations with a callsign starting with "W". After negotiations with the network, Channel 6 reversed the 1956 swap and rejoined NBC on June 29, 1986.
Not surprisingly, channel 6 owns a lot of firsts in the market. It was the first Omaha station to broadcast local programming in color, starting in the mid-1950s; it was the first station to provide live reports during its daily newscasts; it was the first of the three local stations to broadcasts three live daily newscasts, at 5, 6, and 10 p.m.; and in 1993, WOWT was the first local television station to offer a website. During the analog era, WOWT-TV was relayed in Clarinda, Iowa, on a UHF repeater, K58AE, which has since been shut down and deleted from the FCC database.
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WOWT
WOWT (channel 6) is a television station in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Gray Media. The station's studios are located at the Kiewit Plaza on Farnam Street near downtown Omaha, and its transmitter is located on a "tower farm" near North 72nd Street and Crown Point Avenue in north-central Omaha.
WOWT is Gray's only Nebraska station that is not part of its Nebraska News & Weather Network which includes sister stations KOLN/KGIN, KSNB-TV, and KNOP-TV.
The station signed on the air on August 29, 1949, at noon as WOW-TV; it was the first television station in Nebraska and is one of the oldest in the Upper Midwest. It also claims to have gone on the air earlier than any station in four other Midwestern states—Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota and South Dakota. The station was owned by Radio Station WOW, Inc., alongside WOW radio (590 AM, now KXSP, and 92.3 FM, now KEZO). The owners operated under a United States Supreme Court ruling which had forced the Woodmen of the World, who had founded WOW in 1923, to divest itself of the radio stations because they threatened the Woodmen's tax-exempt status.
The station was originally a primary NBC affiliate and secondary ABC affiliate; it lost ABC programming in 1953, when KFOR-TV signed on from Lincoln as an ABC affiliate. However, in 1954, Lincoln was separated from the Omaha market, and WOW-TV resumed sharing ABC programming with KMTV (channel 3) until 1957, when KETV signed on as an ABC affiliate. Meredith Corporation bought WOW-AM-FM-TV in 1951. The station claims it was bought by former Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews in 1954, but this is false as Matthews had died two years earlier. On January 24, 1955, after the radio stations dropped their longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network in favor of the CBS Radio Network, WOW-TV became a secondary CBS television affiliate. This was part of CBS' multi-year, five-station affiliation deal with Meredith Corporation, as a compensation for Phoenix sister station KPHO's initial loss of the CBS affiliation to KOOL-TV before it reclaimed that affiliation in 1994 (KCMO-AM-FM-TV also switched to the network several months earlier). On January 1, 1956, WOW-TV officially became Omaha's CBS outlet, trading affiliations with KMTV.
WOWT's most famous former employee is former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who worked at WOW-TV in the early 1950s in his first television job as the host of a program called The Squirrel's Nest, where he told jokes. Another prominent former employee is former ABC Good Morning America reporter Steve Bell, who worked for Channel 6 during the early and mid-1960s. He was the only local reporter to go to Dallas in November 1963 to cover the aftermath of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Bell left channel 6 in 1967 to join ABC News, where he remained until 1986.
In 1974, Meredith tried to sell WOW-TV to Pulitzer Publishing Company for $8 million, but the deal collapsed and Pulitzer ended up buying KETV instead.
When Meredith sold channel 6 to the San Francisco-based Chronicle Publishing Company in 1975, it changed its call letters to WOWT on July 9, due to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrictions regarding the usage of the same call letters by different owners at the time. Normally, channel 6 would have had to adopt a callsign starting with "K" when it changed its call letters, since the WOW call letters had been assigned before the current K/W dividing line was moved to the Mississippi River. However, Chronicle wanted to continue trading on the WOW calls, and got a waiver from the FCC to retain a "W" in its calls. To this day, WOWT is one of the westernmost stations with a callsign starting with "W". After negotiations with the network, Channel 6 reversed the 1956 swap and rejoined NBC on June 29, 1986.
Not surprisingly, channel 6 owns a lot of firsts in the market. It was the first Omaha station to broadcast local programming in color, starting in the mid-1950s; it was the first station to provide live reports during its daily newscasts; it was the first of the three local stations to broadcasts three live daily newscasts, at 5, 6, and 10 p.m.; and in 1993, WOWT was the first local television station to offer a website. During the analog era, WOWT-TV was relayed in Clarinda, Iowa, on a UHF repeater, K58AE, which has since been shut down and deleted from the FCC database.