WISN-TV


WISN-TV, virtual channel 12, is an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. Owned by the Hearst Television subsidiary of Hearst Communications, it is the second-oldest television station to remain with the company in all of its various iterations behind WBAL-TV in Baltimore. WISN's studios are located on North 19th Street on the west end of the Marquette University campus, and its transmitter is located at Lincoln Park in the northeastern part of Milwaukee.

History

First tenure with ABC

The station first signed on the air on October 27, 1954, as WTVW. WTVW's transmitter building was built under a tent, as rain had threatened to delay construction. After the building was finished, a second tent was erected, and used for live automobile commercials, until it collapsed one day in early 1955. In early 1955, the station was purchased by the Hearst Corporation, publishers of The Milwaukee Sentinel and owners of WISN radio ; the new owners changed channel 12's call letters to WISN-TV, after its radio sister. The station originally operated as a primary ABC affiliate with a secondary DuMont affiliation. WISN-TV lost the DuMont affiliation when that network ceased operations in 1956, leaving it exclusively with ABC.
In January 1958, WISN-TV became the flagship station of the Badger Television Network, a three-station network serving Wisconsin that also included WFRV-TV in Green Bay and WKOW-TV in Madison. Programs broadcast by the network included Homemaker's Holiday, a quiz show hosted by Charlie Hanson; Good Housekeeping, hosted by Trudy Beilfuss titled after the Hearst magazine of the same name; and Pretzel Party, a variety program originally hosted by Larry Clark. All three programs originated from WISN-TV's studios. During March 1958, the network also aired Senate Investigation Committee hearings during late-night hours. The network ceased operations on August 8, 1958. WISN-TV and WISN radio would gain an FM radio sister when Hearst signed on WISN-FM in 1961.

Switch to CBS

In 1961, CBS decided to affiliate with WISN-TV, as its sister radio station had been a longtime affiliate of the CBS Radio Network. As a result, Storer Broadcasting-owned WITI-TV and WISN swapped networks: channel 12 switched its affiliation to CBS and channel 6 became an ABC affiliate on April 2, 1961. The final ABC network program to air on WISN before it joined CBS was an edition of the Fight of the Week with boxers Benny Paret and Emile Griffith; it ran the evening before the switch at 9:00 p.m. Central Time.
During channel 12's time with CBS, it served as the default home station for the NFL's Green Bay Packers for the Milwaukee market, and airing the team's first two Super Bowl appearances ; it was succeeded and preceded in this stead by WITI.
Hearst sold the Milwaukee Sentinel to Journal Publishing in 1962, retaining WISN-TV and WISN radio. The Journal also competed with the Sentinel in broadcasting as owners of WTMJ radio and WTMJ-TV, which Journal operated until April 1, 2015, when Journal and E. W. Scripps Company merged and split their assets into the broadcast-specific Scripps company, and publishing operations into the short-lived Journal Media Group, which merged only a year later into Gannett.

Second tenure with ABC

On September 26, 1976, CBS announced it was moving its Milwaukee affiliation back to WITI-TV. Storer Broadcasting had much better relations with CBS than it reportedly had with ABC; weeks earlier, ABC opted to drop Storer's San Diego station KCST-TV from the network after a four-year dispute stemming from KCST's successful battle to strip that market's ABC affiliation from XETV-TV in nearby Tijuana, Mexico. Meanwhile, ABC had become the top-rated television network in the United States, thanks in large part to two Milwaukee-set sitcoms: Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley. WISN-TV and ABC agreed to a new affiliation contract about a month later; the two stations swapped networks once again on March 27, 1977; the final CBS program to air on channel 12 was an episode of The Carol Burnett Show with guest Ken Berry, which aired at 9:00 p.m. Central Time on the night before the station rejoined ABC. WISN even used Happy Days star Henry Winkler to herald its return to ABC with the slogan "Happy Days are Here Again" in on-air and print campaigns leading up to the switch. To this day, WISN-TV has been one of ABC's most successful affiliates, and bills itself as such in its own promotions.
Around the same time, the station was the first which utilized newscast composer Frank Gari's "Hello News" package, which included an imaging song individualized to each market's city; in this case "Hello Milwaukee", which remains well-remembered and remains used in various ways by WISN-TV to the present day, and was cited as one of the factors in driving viewers to the station in the late 1970s and allowing it to be competitive.
For most of its years with ABC, the station did not include the network's logo next to theirs, branding solely with the channel number and/or call letters vocally and visually until 2012, when the network began to contractually require the ABC logo be included with any affiliate's logo redesign. In November 2014, the station unveiled their current logo with the call letters beneath the long-used "12" logo form and the ABC logo on the right side of the "12" number mark, the first with the ABC logo blended in for all uses, including for news and entertainment programming, and ending a long run where the station's call letters were rendered in Bank Gothic font. Vocally, the station remains "WISN 12". The station is among the few in the nation which has their logo in a transparent bug at all times, including ABC network and news programming, though not during commercial breaks or paid programming.
Channel 12 was the first commercial station in the market to produce a high-definition broadcast, airing the Summerfest "Big Bang" fireworks show in HD on June 29, 2006. Milwaukee Public Television assisted WISN-TV in the production of the broadcast, and have continued to do so each year since, with additional help from sister stations in Sacramento and Boston in later years.
Hearst sold WISN radio and what by then became WLTQ to Clear Channel Communications in 1997, and the third floor WLTQ/WISN radio studios were vacated in 2000 after their move to the expanded WOKY facility in Greenfield. All ties between WISN-TV and its former sister radio stations were severed when a longtime agreement with channel 12 to provide forecasts for WISN and the then-WQBW and four others within Clear Channel's Milwaukee radio cluster ended on July 27, 2009, as WITI began its own weather/news content agreement with the stations. WISN-TV then began a news content agreement with Saga Communications for its five area radio stations. Due to the now separate ownership of the two stations, WISN-TV's news staff disclaim both on-air and through their social networking channels that the station has no connections with WISN radio's conservative talk format other than sharing the same call letters, a point of contention and confusion during events such as live shots at the Wisconsin State Capitol for the 2011 state budget debate.
In February 2014, the station added an SAP audio channel, allowing the station to carry ABC programming featuring audio description or a Spanish-language dub, and complying with the FCC's requirements to offer audio description.

Summer 2012 Time Warner Cable carriage dispute

As Hearst and Time Warner Cable entered into a retransmission consent dispute that resulted in Hearst's stations being removed from TWC's systems in certain markets on July 10, 2012, WISN was not immediately removed from its Milwaukee area systems in an eleventh hour announcement, as the direct fiber connection between WISN and TWC is also provided by the cable provider to Charter Communications under a side agreement between the providers which TWC and Hearst were contractually obligated to honor. It was the only Hearst station to remain on TWC during the dispute, but with both Start Over video on demand and the ability to record station programming to TWC DVRs completely removed. Charter then tried to pursue a different method of transmitting WISN's signal to remove itself as an intermediary from the dispute, and was able to make the arrangements by July 12, allowing WISN's removal from Time Warner Cable one day later, with WISN's SD and HD channel slots replaced with Hallmark Movie Channel. The dispute was resolved on July 19, returning the station to TWC's systems that evening.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
12.11080iWISN-TVMain WISN-TV programming / ABC
12.2480iTCNTrue Crime Network

Analog-to-digital conversion

WISN-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 12, at 8:30 a.m. on June 12, 2009. The station's digital signal continued to broadcast on its pre-transition UHF channel 34. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 12. The channel 12 frequency was subsequently used as the post-transition digital signal of WBBM-TV in Chicago.
On May 17, 2010, WISN-TV filed an application to upgrade its digital transmitter's power to 1 megawatt, mainly to place the station's digital antenna at the taller height of the dormant analog antenna, which would be replaced by a new digital unit. The analog antenna was removed in September 2010, and the digital antenna was activated from the new placement in early October 2010.

News operation

WISN-TV presently broadcasts 34 hours of locally produced newscasts each week ; WISN is one of the few Hearst-owned stations that carries an hour-long midday newscast. The station utilizes two weather radars as part of its "Doppler 12 Radar Network", using radar sites based at the National Weather Service forecast office in Sullivan, and atop Froedtert's Community Memorial Hospital in Menomonee Falls, which is operated by the station.
Longtime anchor Jerry Taff retired in May 2005, as WISN's newscasts began to climb in the ratings. Its success stems from hiring popular local anchors and reporters released from other stations, a stronger ABC schedule, and a period of change at rival WTMJ-TV due to NBC's weaker ratings and changes in its newsroom staff. The station's biggest hire came when longtime WTMJ anchor Mike Gousha joined channel 12 in 2007, a year after he retired as WTMJ's evening news anchor in order to focus on his new position as a distinguished fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University. Gousha served as a political analyst for WISN, and hosted the Sunday morning program UpFront with Mike Gousha, which is a mix of the interview segments familiar to viewers of his former WTMJ program Sunday Night, and local political analysis. Hearst syndicated the show to other stations statewide, and in August 2010 all of the stations involved broadcast a Gousha-moderated forum for the Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidates called the UpFront Town Hall Challenge from Marquette's new law building, which was purposefully structured to avoid classification as a traditional debate where either candidate could use the format to "sell" themselves. The format was repeated in October 2010 between the Democratic and Republican nominees for governor and U.S. Senate.
WISN has gradually expanded its newscast schedule since 2007, and is unusual in programming hour-long newscasts, starting that year with a Sunday at 10 p.m. broadcast and for a time, an hour-long Saturday 6 p.m. newscast. On July 30, 2010, WISN, like most of its ABC-affiliated sister stations under Hearst did on that date, added a one-hour extension of its weekend morning newscast from 8 to 9 a.m. On September 6, 2010, WISN expanded its weekday morning newscast a half-hour early to 4:30 a.m., extending the program to hours.
On April 21, 2009, the station began using full-time pillarboxing with the station logo and callsign on the respective sides of the screen for newscasts and other standard-definition programming. Afterwards, the station began to slowly implement graphical elements; in March 2010, WISN-TV unveiled 16:9-optimized weather alert graphics to allow programs to continue to be shown in HD rather than force a downscale to a modified mode in which the program was displayed in 3:3, with the weather warnings taking up the remainder of the screen. News tickers and logo bugs were also later upgraded; the only HD news segments until late June 2011 aired on its newscasts the day of the Summerfest "Big Bang" fireworks show, usually scenic and human interest pieces, along with Milwaukee Public Television co-productions. On October 10, 2010, the station began broadcasting its newscasts in 16:9 widescreen standard definition, with the pillarboxes being removed. Then on June 28, 2011, WISN-TV became the third station in Milwaukee to begin broadcasting its newscasts in high definition. Footage shot in-studio is broadcast in HD, while all news video from on-remote locations was initially upconverted to widescreen standard definition for broadcast. Since 2012, the station has upgraded its mobile units and field cameras to HD as equipment has needed replacement. In May 2013, the station unveiled its first HD skycam, overlooking the downtown Cathedral Square Park.
On January 24, 2011, WISN-TV expanded its 10 p.m. newscast to one hour. This bumped Access Hollywood from its longtime 10:30 p.m. slot to 12:30 a.m., resulting in NBCUniversal Television Distribution asking for an opt-out from the program's syndication contract with WISN to move Access, ending up on WTMJ at 6:30 p.m. on April 11, 2011.
On September 10, 2018, the station added an hour-long 11 a.m. local newscast leading into GMA Day, which coincided with the station introducing a next-generation news set, replacing one utilized since October 2001 with multiple re-facings and equipment replacements in the interim. On January 14, 2019, the station reduced its 10 p.m. newscast to the standard 35 minutes, allowing WISN-TV to carry the ABC late night lineup "live" and in pattern for the first time in the station's history. The station began to air a nightly half-hour 9 p.m. newscast on WISN-DT2 on April 1, 2019 entitled WISN 12 News at 9 on True Crime, joining WITI and WMLW-TV in carrying news at that time. It joined with many of its fellow Hearst stations in programming a prime time newscast on their.2 subchannels, which are usually associated with MeTV. On days where TCN has an hour-long program in the news timeslots, alternate programming like Upfront and Matter of Fact is re-aired in the latter half to fill the entire hour.

Notable former on-air staff