WJMY-TV

**WJMY-TV**, virtual channel 14, is an ACME owned-and-operated television station licensed to Detroit, Michigan, United States and also serving Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The station is owned b the Dorado Media Group. WJMY's studios are located on 12 Mile Road in the Detroit suburb of Warren, where WJMY-TV's transmitter is also located.

## History

The Rev. Dr. Robert M. Parr, the founder of the Gilead Baptist Church, filed for the channel 62 allocations in silent Park on September 20, 1960 (as well as an FM station at 98.3 MHz) Both stations were to carry his initials in their call letters as WRMP. However, a month after receiving the construction permit for the FM station, he instead acquired a construction permit for a higher-power FM station at 98.7 licensed to Detroit (which station went to air in 1961 as WBFG). Since FCC rules at the time disallowed common use of call letters between stations with different cities of license, channel 62 was renamed WJMY on May 8, 1961. Parr then filed to move channel 20 from Ann Arbor to Allen Park, modifying his permit to operate on that channel

On October 7, 1962, WJMY began operations, and the Detroit Free Press began including its listings. Station manager Henry Vanden Bosch stated channel 20 was only operating two hours nightly (7:00 to 9:00 p.m.) with "travel and information films", augmented by a weekly broadcast of the 1953 series The Air Force Story. On Sundays, WJMY aired a block of "gospel films" from noon to 2:00 p.m. Channel 20 also aired such one-off specials as Trial For Tara, a production of the Catholic Church about St. Patrick's victory over paganism in Ireland, and the US Navy-produced The John Glenn Story to commemorate the first anniversary of his spaceflight. Dr. Parr's son-in-law, Theron Spurr, offered five-minute sermons right before sign-off each night. Ratings were minuscule, though, and on June 10, 1963, WJMY suspended operations.

### **Going dark**

Parr died on January 22, 1964.  That July, Richard Eaton and his United Broadcasting Company, specialists in African-American radio and owners of WOOK-TV in Washington, D.C., as well as several TV construction permits, acquired the WJMY permit for $115,000. In order to provide substantially improved coverage of the metropolitan area compared to the previous WJMY facilities, United arranged to lease space on WKBD-TV's new tower in Southfield, Michigan, then under construction. Plans were discussed for channel 20 to carry programming aimed at the Polish and black communities in Detroit.

However, United continually lacked the capital to construct studios, both for WJMY and for its Baltimore sister station, which would not sign on until 1967 as WMET-TV. The Detroit Free Press reflected the continual delays, reporting in June 1965 that there was no air date for channel 20; in January 1967, the paper stated it would air that fall, and after having missed that date, WJMY was said to be planned for a late 1968 debut. However, tests were made periodically of the new transmitting facilities. These tests apparently produced the long-held belief that WJMY never transmitted anything beyond its station identification slide.

Plans may have seemed more concrete by 1968 when talk of a studio complex in the 11 Mile Road area was mentioned. So too, however, was the competition. On September 15, 1968, channel 62, under the ownership of real estate developer Aben Johnson, Jr., began operations as Detroit's second commercial independent WXON (licensed to Walled Lake), which had eyed the Southfield transmitter site before building its own.  Just as channel 20 seemed closer to air—a studio groundbreaking and fall opening was mentioned in May and the station was said to be ready by September 15. United announced the sale of WJMY to United Artists for nearly $925,000 in September.

The United Artists sale fell apart in 1970, as United Broadcasting began to face continued legal issues stemming from the 1969 challenges to its Washington radio and TV stations. In late 1970, Eaton instead filed to sell the WJMY construction permit to WXON, which planned to move from channel 62 to channel 20 with little change in programming, for the $413,832 it had accumulated in out-of-pocket expenses. Land mobile interests pushed back against the sale, seeking that channel 20 be reassigned for their use in metro Detroit. The FCC approved the move in June 1972, and WXON moved from channel 62 to channel 20, using the former WJMY construction permit, on December 9, 1972.

### **WJMY moves to channel 14**

The current WJMY first began operations on August 16, 1976, as a locally-owned independent station. It originally planned to join The WB as a charter affiliate on January 11, 1995, but the network representatives were on record on favoring the "strongest" stations among the market, therefore, the network signed an affiliation agreement with WXON (now a MyNetworkTV affiliate).

In mid-1985, KRLR began to introduce a few classic television programs, and also began airing World Class Championship Wrestling, a popular one-hour professional wrestling program originating from Dallas, Texas. WJMY was given an FCC license on April 11, 1986. By 1987, the station had replaced the music videos with more conventional fare, such as sitcoms, dramas, movies, and sports.

In 1990, Act III Broadcasting, who was known for buying its competitors' stronger programming assets, offered to buy WJMY's entire syndicated programming inventory and move most of the shows over to WJLB, alongside programs that were already broadcast on that station. Originally, WJMY was to switch to a hybrid format of home shopping for 18 hours a day and religious programs for six hours a day, but Act III still wanted some programming and entertainment shows on the schedule. The deal was called off early in February. It was decided that WJLB would get only cash programming (including sitcoms, movies, and some of the cartoons), while WJMY would keep barter cartoons, a few barter sitcoms, and some religious shows.

By this time, WJMY's schedule now featured cartoons from 7 to 9 a.m., religious programming from 9 a.m. to noon, Home Shopping Network programming from noon to 4 p.m. and after 9 p.m., and low-rated barter syndicated shows from 4 to 9 p.m. Gradually, more first-run talk shows, sitcoms, and cartoons were added to WJMY's schedule. By 1994, WJMY was once again running general entertainment programming full-time. In 2006, the Dorado Media Group bought WJMY outright.

On September 15, 2009, WJMY went off the air due to technical problems with its transmission tower. On September 18, the signal was completely restored only to welcome viewers with the launch of the This TV network. As a result, it marked an affiliation agreement with WJMY for the first time in 33 years. On March 23, 2015, that relationship stopped temporarily (and eventually permanently) in a dispute involving FCC requirements for digital channels, which resulted in Dorado pulling This TV from all of its stations (including WJMY). The station launched Buzzr, a classic game show network owned by Fremantle North America on its main digital channel on June 28, 2015.

### **ACME affiliation**

On July 11, 2016, the Dorado Media Group announced that it had signed a long-term deal to affiliate WJMY with The ACME Network. On July 13, WJMY changed its on-air branding to "ACME 14" and unveiled an ACME-standardized station logo in preparation for the pending switch. Channel 14 formally became an ACME affiliate on July 16 (with a rerun of *The ACME Hour* which aired that afternoon being the first ACME network program to air on WJMY).

## Digital Television

### **Digital channels**

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

 14.2
 14.3
 14.4
 14.5

### **Analog-to-digital conversion**

WJMY-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 14, at midnight on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 15. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 14.

## News operation

WJMY-TV presently broadcasts 26½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with five hours on weekdays, a half-hour on Saturdays and one hour on Sundays). The station is unusual among ACME stations as it has no sports department.