Station History

WWNY TV began broadcasting at 8 pm, on the evening of October 22, 1954. The Johnson family - owners of the Watertown Daily Times - created WWNY. Back then it was called WCNY, the ‘C’ standing for Carthage, our primary community of license. The call letters were later changed to WWNY.

From the start, WWNY stressed its local identity. In his remarks opening the station, John Johnson Sr. said “We are locally owned, managed, engineered and announced,” conditions that are still largely true today. And from the start, the station was affiliated with CBS.

The Johnson’s decided to build new premises for the station in downtown Watertown, on Arcade Street, where the newspaper offices had been for a hundred years. Ground was broken on October 16, 1968, and the TV station was operating from Arcade Street in mid-February, 1970. By the time the station’s 20th anniversary rolled around in 1974, it was difficult to imagine things getting much better for WWNY. The Johnson’s threw a party in the station’s studio with 200 guests, including the president of CBS television in that era, Robert Wood. Yet the celebration was short-lived. In 1975, the Federal Communications Commission ordered the Johnson’s to sell WWNY within five years. The theory was - the owner of the only local newspaper shouldn’t own the only local commercial TV station. This was ironic since it was the federal government who originally encouraged the Johnson’s and other newspaper owners to go into the TV business because “these were the people who knew news and knew community service”.

The Johnson’s sold WWNY to United Communications Corp. of Kenosha, Wisconsin for $8.2 million. In doing so, the Johnson’s turned over the station to people whose values were very consistent with theirs - Howard Brown, the principal owner of UCC, believed (and believes) in small, locally run newspapers and TV stations of high quality.

What changed for WWNY after its sale to UCC was everything - and nothing. We remain the dominant presence in local television - our newscasts are regularly ranked among the top rated in the country, as is the station as a whole. We remain an oasis of family-owned and community-oriented broadcasting in an increasingly ‘corporatized’ world. People still come here to work, and stay for many years

The single most significant change within WWNY came in 2001, when United Communications Corp. entered into an agreement with Smith Broadcasting to operate a Fox network affiliate with low power transmitters in Watertown and Massena. With the Fox affiliation came a 10 pm newscast; it debuted on April 11, 2001, and was at first seen by only the handful of viewers that could receive the low power signal ‘off air.’ An agreement with Time-Warner Cable in the fall of 2001 placed the station (WNYF Fox 28) on cable channel 2. The 10 pm news debuted for most of the North Country on October 4, 2001. After a year of joint operation, UCC took complete ownership of WNYF.

WNYF Map

In 2003 WWNY started a new era of broadcasting with digital broadcasts on UHF frequency channel 35. WWNY-DT offers HD programming from CBS on its primary channel 7-1, and standard definition broadcasts of WNYF FOX-28 on a secondary (multicast) channel 7-2. WWNY/WNYF also provide HDTV programming to Time Warner cable subscribers on channel 875 (WWNY) and 878 (WNYF).

[Watertown is located in the northwest section of New York, near the juncture of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario. The area's natural beauty is a perfect backdrop for four seasons of recreation. From world class fishing and boating in the 1000 Island Seaway region, to camping or skiing in the near-by Adirondack mountains.]