WGRZ-TV

Encyclopedia : W : WG : WGR : WGRZ-TV

---

WGRZ-TV is the NBC affiliate in Buffalo, New York. Its studio is located at 259 Delaware Avenue in downtown Buffalo, while its transmitter is located at 11526 Warner Hill Road in South Wales, New York. The station is currently owned by Gannett Company, Inc., publisher of the national newspaper USA Today and owner of numerous television stations and newspapers in the U.S.

The station's newscasts are called Channel 2 News; prior to 1998, it was 2 News and previously NewsCenter 2. Until July 2005, its partner station for the area was WPXJ-TV (Pax 51).

It is one of four local Buffalo TV stations seen in Canada on the StarChoice satellite service. It is also seen throughout Toronto and Central Ontario on most Rogers and Cogeco cable systems.

Rich Kellman (news anchor) and Ed Kilgore (sports) have been staples of "Newscenter 2" since the 1970s. Barry Lillis, the station's weatherman for almost twenty years, left WGRZ in the mid-1990s and is now a priest with the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America.

History

The station premiered in 1954 as WGR-TV, owned by the WGR Corporation along with WGR-AM 550. It was an NBC affiliate sharing the Barton Street studios of UHF outlet WBUF/Channel 17. In 1955, WBUF was sold to NBC. WGR affiliated with ABC and then switched back to NBC in 1958 after NBC shut down the money-bleeding WBUF.

Over the years, WGR Corporation bought several other radio and television stations across the country, including WNEP-TV in Scranton/Wilkes-Barre and WDAF-AM/FM/TV in Kansas City, and eventually became known as Transcontinent Broadcasting. Transcontinent merged with Taft Broadcasting in 1964.

In 1983, WGR's callsign changed to WGRZ after it was sold by Taft Broadcasting to General Cinema Corporation, which operated the Coral Television division. Taft gave Coral WGRZ, while in exchange, Taft got Miami's WCIX. (Taft held on to WGR radio until 1987, when it was sold to Rich Communications. Today, it is owned by Entercom Communications.)

In the years following the 1983 exchange deal, WGRZ changed hands several times. General Cinema exited the broadcasting business by selling Coral Television to WGRZ Acquisition Corp. (later SJL Broadcast Management, the predecessor to today's Montecito Broadcast Group) for $56 million in 1986. Two years later, Tak Communications purchased WGRZ from SJL for $100 million in 1988. Less than four years later, Tak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1992, and a group of creditors seized the company's assets in 1994. Argyle Television (now part of Hearst-Argyle) purchased the station (and then-sister KITV in Honolulu, Hawaii) from Tak's creditors for $91 million (on WGRZ's end) in December 1995.

Gannett became the station's owner in 1997. Argyle (which merged with Hearst's broadcasting unit shortly after the trade was finalized) traded WGRZ and Western Michigan's ABC affiliate WZZM-TV to Gannett for Oklahoma City's ABC affiliate KOCO-TV and Cincinnati's NBC affiliate WLWT in a four-station deal between the two companies.

Logo

In the 1980s, the "futuristic" logo consisted of two lines, making an outline of the number two. In 1988, the station's logo consisted of simply a large numuber "2" in a common Avant Garde font, with a yellow triangle over blue added in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the logo changed to a blue-on-red box with the bottom reading WGRZ-TV Buffalo. The NBC logo is placed to the left of the numeral "2"; however, "NBC" is not mentioned orally in the station's on-air brand (which is simply "Channel 2"). Since 2000, lottery drawings have been presented on Channel 2.

Infamous moment

According to the Baseball Hall of Shame book series by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo, WGR-TV did not complete the telecast of the game between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers on September 26, 1981. The station went to an Army training film as scheduled at 5 p.m. that afternoon. As a result, local baseball fans missed Astros pitcher Nolan Ryan's record fifth no-hitter.

Historic slogans

• It Takes 2 (1995 - 1999)
• 2 on Your Side

Local programming

Newscasts

• Daybreak - 5:30 to 7:00 a.m. ET
• Channel 2 News at Noon - 12:00 p.m. ET - 5 minute update
• Channel 2 News First at Five - 1 hour, prior to 2002, 30 minutes - 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. ET
• *2 On Your Side
• *Channel 2 Weather
• **Doppler 2000
• *Channel 2 Sports
• Channel 2 News at Six - 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. ET
• Channel 2 News at Eleven - 11:00 to 11:35 p.m. ET
• 2 On NYO 10 at 10 - On April 13, 2006, Sinclair announced that WGRZ will produce a new 10 p.m. newscast for Sinclair-owned WB affiliate WNYO-TV, to be called 2 On NYO 10 at 10, using WGRZ's current news staff. That newscast is slated to begin Thursday, April 20. This is WGRZ's first 10 p.m. newscast since the cancellation of Channel 2 News First at Ten on WPXJ-TV, which aired in the early 2000s. [link]

Other local shows

• 2 Your Home - housing show about renovation of homes throughout Western New York
• WNY Metro - real estate channel throughout Western New York
• WGRZ also airs all Buffalo Bills football games that air on ESPN. This includes Saturday Football and Sunday Night Football. Next year, when NBC airs Sunday Night Football, WGRZ will air Monday Night Football games that show the Bills, in addition to all other NBC games.

News reporters and journalists

(as of 2006)

• Adam Benigni
• Stu Boyer, sports
• Erika Brason, Weekend Daybreak ancor
• Pat Breen
• Scott Brown
• MaryAlice Demler, co-anchor of the 5:30, 6 and 11 p.m. news
• Lynne Dixon
• Claudine Ewing, reporter
• Mary Friona
• Pete Gallivan, coanchor of Daybreak
• Mike Igoe, 2 On Your Side
• Jodi Johnston, coanchor of Daybreak
• Rich Kellman, Senior Correspondent
• Ed Kilgore, sports director
• Scott Levin, co-anchor of the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts
• Chesley McNeil, meteorlogist
• Stefan Mychajliw
• Kevin O'Connell, chief meteorologist
• Andy Parker, meteorologist
• Ron Plants
• Aaron Saykin
• Julie Wolfe
• Robyn Young

External links

• [Official website]
• [Query the FCC's TV station database for WGRZ-TV]

 

---

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

?