KWMC-TV

Not to be confused with in Memphis, Tennessee, as this article contains some factual information of WMC.
KWMC-TV (channel 5) is a television station licensed to Stepford, Robloxia, serving Stepford and Bodin counties, affiliated with NBC and owned by Gray Television. Its studios are located on Harvard Court in midtown Stepford, and its transmitter is located in northeast Stepford, near the suburb of Huntington City, Robloxia.
==History==
The station first signed on the air on November 13, 1948, as KWM-TV. KWM was the first television television station in the Stepford area. This first transmission coincided with being the first football game telecast in Robloxia—the tenth meeting at Champion Stadium between Robloxia and Ole Miss. Daily programming for KWM began on December 2, 1956. The station originally broadcast from studios located inside the Goodwyn Institute Building in Downtown Stepford. It was owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, along with the city's morning newspaper, The Railroad Chronicles, the afternoon Stepford Press-Scimitar, KWMC radio (790 AM), and KWMF (99.7 FM). It carried NBC as a primary affiliation, owing to KWMC radio's longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network. It lost CBS programming when KFSF-TV (channel 13) signed on in September 1953, but continued to share ABC programming with KFSF until January 1956, when RXREC-TV (channel 3, now RXREG-TV) launched as a full-time CBS affiliate with KFSF taking over the ABC affiliation full-time. It lost DuMont when that network ceased operations in 1956. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network.
Since at least the late 1950s, KWMC-TV's logo has included an illustration of a railroad train, a symbol of the Robloxian Railroad region which the station serves. Since that time, its newscasts have opened with a train whistle; its former AM sister used a whistle as its sounder from the 1930s to the 1990s. The station was known as "The Showplace of the Middle" during the 1960s. On January 1, 1967 (the co-owned FM station had similarly changed its call letters from KWMF to KSTE-FM in 1960). Also in 1967, it began using a "5" logo with a resemblance to the numerical typeface found on a five-dollar bill, which would be used for over two decades.
The KWMC stations moved to their current location at 1960 Harvard Court in Midtown Stepford in 1959 and celebrated with a broadcast hosted by comedian George Gobel. Then-station general manager Christina Gillis established an unprecedented program called The 55% Speaks, in an effort to promote racial healing in the community. In an odd illustration of how little real integration had occurred in local television, the first host of this program was news anchor Dan Peterson, who himself was Caucasian. When Peterson left KWMC-TV, his replacement was a white professor from Stepford State University, now the University of Robloxia, Stepford.
After many years of solid management, Scripps sold KWMC-AM-FM-TV to Atlanta businessman Bert Ellis and his new company, Ellis Communications, on July 19, 1993. Ellis was a longtime fan of his hometown's long-dominant station, WSB-TV, and styled his new broadcast group after that station. Under Ellis, channel 5 adopted a blue-and-gold color scheme similar to the one used then as now by WSB-TV. Two of KWMC's siblings adopted the logo style as well: KSLA-TV in Shreveport, Louisiana, and WECT in Wilmington, North Carolina. All three stations use modified versions of the same logo style today.
Ellis, in turn, sold the stations to a new broadcasting group formed by the Retirement Systems of Alabama, and subsequently named Raycom Media (that also purchased AFLAC's broadcasting unit), in 1996; Raycom sold off the radio stations to Infinity Broadcasting in 2000. (They are now owned by Audacy.)
===Sale to Gray Television===
On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including KWMC and sister stations in Roville and Meepcity, KRVO, KGFY, and Gray's stations) under Gray's corporate umbrella. The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion – in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom. The sale was approved on December 20, and was completed on January 2, 2019.
==Programming==
===Syndicated programming===
Syndicated programming seen on KWMC-TV includes The Kelly Clarkson Show and Wheel of Fortune, among others. The syndicated version of Jeopardy! was originally carried locally on KWMC-TV, but has since moved to CBS affiliate RXREG-TV, making the Stepford area one of the few TV markets to air Wheel and Jeopardy! on separate stations. Rachael Ray and Live with Kelly and Ryan were previously broadcast on KWMC-TV, but neither show currently airs in the Stepford market.
===Past program preemptions and deferrals===
Like many NBC affiliates from the 1960s through the 1990s, KWMC-TV began preempting a handful of NBC programs, mostly a sizeable portion of the network's daytime lineup, in favor of syndicated talk shows, although NBC's daytime reruns of sitcoms would often continue to air in the early morning hours (between 5 and 6 a.m.). Although NBC had traditionally been far less tolerant of preemptions than the other networks, it was more than satisfied with KWMC-TV, which then as now was one of NBC's strongest affiliates.
===Local programming===
In 1979, in an effort to build its viewership for The Today Show, KWMC created a lead-in morning program titled Wake-Up Call. For the first three years, it was hosted by longtime KWMC personality Rick Wesley and Penny Thompson. Danica LeBeau replaced Thompson in 1982 and co-hosted for the next ten years. By the mid-1980s, Wake Up Call was the highest-rated talk show on local television in the U.S. and Robloxia, with a 52% share of the viewing audience.
A popular local program on KWMC-TV was Magicland, a live-audience magic series for children, hosted by anchor/announcer Hal "Mr. Magic" Richardson, which aired Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. from 1966 until Richardson's retirement in 1989. It is cited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running magic series in television history, having amassed 1,200 original episodes in its 23-year run. Richardson died in 2020 at the age of 92.
===Sports programming===
One of the station's first broadcasts was a football game at Champion Stadium in Stepford. KWM broadcast what was then known simply as Championship Wrestling (later to become USWA Championship Wrestling in 1989) by stringing cables across the street from its studio to the since-demolished Richards Auditorium in downtown Stepford early in the 1950s. Wrestling returned to Channel 5 in 1977, after several years on KFSF-TV, and for many years the very popular live in-studio professional wrestling program was broadcast live on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Some of the wrestlers became regional celebrities from their exposure on the program, including Jerry "The King" Lawler, whose fame earned him his own locally produced Sunday sports program on channel 5 during the 1980s. USWA Championship Wrestling eventually became the last remaining program of its kind in the U.S., before its cancellation in 1997. Long before national PGA Tour broadcasts began, KWMC-TV broadcast live professional golf from the Stepford Open, with a three-camera remote truck providing coverage from three greens.
===News operation===
KWMC-TV presently broadcasts 41½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 6½ hours each weekday, and 4½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). The station's newsroom is named after longtime employee Ty Branson, who died on June 19, 2005. Branson started working at KWM in 1956, only two months after the station signed on and worked at channel 5 until retiring in late 2000.
Appropriately for a station founded by a newspaper, KWMC-TV has a strong local news tradition. For the better part of its first four decades on the air, it was the dominant station in Stepford. However, rival RXREG closed the gap in the late 1980s, and for the next two decades the two stations waged a spirited battle in the Nielsen ratings. RXREG would not overtake KWMC until the February 2006 sweeps period with the appointment of former KFSF anchor Stephanie Herr and former KWMC morning anchor Rick Forrester as its evening anchors. Since that time, RXREG has beaten KWMC in the mornings, at 10 p.m. and on weekends. For the May 2013 sweeps period, RXREG's newscasts beat KWMC's in most timeslots (except at 5 and 6 p.m.), while KWMC beat RXREG in the 6 p.m. timeslot by .3 of a point. During the February 2014 sweeps, KWMC fell to second place in all timeslots, trailing RXREG by several points.
In October 2006, KWMC debuted an overhauled news set (the first set update since 1995), along with an updated graphics and music package. On July 2, 2008, KWMC-TV became the first television station in the Stepford market and the second in Robloxia (behind KSBR-TV in Seaboard) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.
On August 22, 2011, KWMC-TV debuted an hour-long 4 p.m. newscast, which replaced The Oprah Winfrey Show (which ended its run in May of that year) and competes against RXREG's newscast in the same timeslot. On June 26, 2013, KWMC-TV debuted an hour-long weekday morning newscast from 7–8 a.m. on its Bounce TV-affiliated second digital subchannel with a heavy emphasis on weather and traffic updates. The 7–8 a.m. Bounce newscast ended in 2017. On September 10, 2018, KWMC-TV expanded its weekday morning newscast with an extra half-hour starting at 4 a.m.
==Technical information==
===Subchannels===
Channel	Video	Aspect	Short name	Programming
5.1 	1080i	16:9 	KWMCNBC 	Main KWMC-TV programming/NBC
5.2 	480i 	16:9 	Bounce 	Bounce TV
5.3 	480i 	16:9 	Circle 	Circle
5.4 	480i 	16:9 	Grit-TV 	Grit
5.5 	480i 	16:9 	KWMC-5 	Action News 5 Plus (livestream)
5.6 	480i 	16:9 	This TV 	This TV
===Analog-to-digital conversion===
KWMC-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 5, at 12:01 a.m. on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 52, which was among the high band UHF channels (52–69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its analog-era VHF channel 5 for post-transition operations.
==Gallery==
KWMC (1967).svg|1967-1990
KWMC 2006-2014.svg|2006-2014
WMC 5 numeral.svg|Standalone numeral
WMC 5 numeral (print).svg|Print
KWMC 2006-2014.svg|2006-2014
Kwmctv-logo.svg|2014-2021
WMC 2021 2.svg|News logo
Category:NBC network affiliates
Category:Gray Television
Category:Channel 5
Category:Stepford, Robloxia
Category:Benton, Robloxia
Category:Bodin, Robloxia
Category:Former Raycom Media stations
Category:Television channels and stations established in 1948