page_title: WLWC
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: WLWC / History
caption_attribution_description: English: This is a former logo of WLWC-TV, used from May 5th, 2017 until October 2nd, 2017. As of October 2017, The CW Providence has been moved to WNAC-DT2 from its former WLWC-TV channel location.
context_page_description: WLWC, virtual channel 28, is an Ion Plus owned-and-operated television station serving Providence, Rhode Island, United States that is licensed to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The station is owned by West Palm Beach, Florida-based Ion Media Networks, as part of a duopoly with Newport, Rhode Island-licensed Ion Television owned-and-operated station WPXQ-TV. The two stations share transmitter facilities on Champlin Hill in Hopkinton, Rhode Island. Their main studio facilities for the purposes of Federal Communications Commission regulations are located in New London, Connecticut with the Hartford–New Haven market's Ion station, WHPX-TV.
  WLWC is one of two major stations that serve Providence despite being licensed to the Massachusetts side of the market.
context_section_description: WLWC began broadcasting April 14, 1997 as an affiliate of The WB. It was owned by Fant Broadcasting and operated by NBC-owned WJAR (channel 10) under a local marketing agreement (LMA). For the first 27 months of The WB's existence, Boston's WLVI-TV, which had been carried on cable in Rhode Island for decades, served as the default WB affiliate for the Providence–New Bedford market. The station launched with various syndicated shows as well as a WJAR-produced 10 p.m. newscast, known as TV 28 News at 10, which began airing a few months after the WPRI-TV (channel 12)-produced effort on Fox affiliate WNAC-TV (channel 64).
  Fant had signed an LMA with WJAR's previous owner, Outlet Communications, on December 14, 1994, prior to Outlet's 1996 merger with NBC. Earlier in 1994, on March 18, Fant's station in Columbus, Ohio, WWHO, became the junior partner in an LMA with Outlet-owned NBC affiliate WCMH-TV. The LMA arrangement allowed channel 28 to come to the air; the station's original construction permit was granted to Metrovision Inc., a company controlled by Franklin D. Graham, on November 8, 1982, but financial problems and difficulties in securing a transmitter location prevented channel 28 (which was assigned the call letters WFDG, referring to Graham, on December 22, 1982; it became WLWC on August 1, 1995) from signing on. After several ownership changes, Fant purchased the permit on January 3, 1995.
  Although both of Fant's LMAs with Outlet were intended to expire after ten years, by the time channel 28 signed on, NBC had let it be known that it did not want to run stations outside its core owned-and-operated (O&O) outlets, and pushed Fant to sell WLWC and WWHO. On July 31, 1997, NBC announced a three-way swap in which Fant exchanged WLWC and WWHO to Viacom's Paramount Stations Group subsidiary, while Paramount/Viacom-owned NBC affiliate WVIT in Hartford, Connecticut became an NBC O&O.
  With the ownership change, WLWC added a secondary affiliation with UPN, and became a sister station to Boston's UPN affiliate, WSBK-TV, which until then had doubled as the UPN affiliate for Providence–New Bedford and (as with WLVI) had long been carried on Rhode Island cable systems. WLWC's master control and some internal operations were thus relocated from WJAR's studios in Cranston to WSBK's studios in Boston, with sales and public affairs offices remaining in Providence. In addition, TV 28 News at 10 was canceled by September 1997. Channel 28 became more or less a UPN O&O in May 2000, as UPN became its primary affiliation; in addition, the station signed a deal with The WB to retain its programming on a secondary basis through what a Paramount Stations Group executive described as a "program license agreement."
  For most of the television era, the FCC had not allowed common ownership of stations with overlapping city-grade signals. Just months earlier, WNAC-TV had to be sold because its previous owner, Argyle Television, had merged with Hearst Broadcasting, owner of Boston's WCVB-TV—the second time in three years that a Rhode Island station had to be sold after its owner merged with the owner of a Boston station. Due to these rules, WLWC's license was thus acquired by Straightline Communications, with WSBK operating the station through an LMA (earlier in 1997, Straightline acquired WTVX in West Palm Beach, Florida on behalf of Paramount/Viacom's Miami–Fort Lauderdale station WBFS-TV; the company later purchased and operated WVNY in Burlington, Vermont separately from Viacom); in 2001, Viacom bought WLWC outright.
  After Viacom and CBS merged in 2000, the operations of WLWC and WSBK were integrated with those of WBZ-TV at WBZ's facility on Soldiers Field Road in the Brighton section of Boston. When Viacom split into two companies in 2005, WLWC, along with the rest of Viacom's television stations, became part of CBS Corporation. On January 24, 2006, Time Warner announced that the company would merge The WB with CBS Corporation's UPN (which CBS took ownership of after the Viacom split in December 2005) to form The CW Television Network. At the
caption: Logo used from May 5, 2017 until October 2, 2017, under the operation of OTA Broadcasting and the affiliation of The CW.
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