(Until the Fox Sports Chicago deal, the Cubs were the last Major League Baseball franchise that did not have local broadcast contracts with both cable and broadcast television outlets. [33][34][35] Because of reductions to the team's local over-the-air broadcast schedule (due to shares of its game telecasts being split with regional and national cable sports networks and Major League Baseball's broadcast network partners) predating the Sox's third run on Channel 9, since the White Sox returned to the station in 1990, the number of White Sox games shown on the station had decreased to anywhere between 30 and 40 per season. Along with Major League Baseball telecasts, WGN-TV's initial sports lineup included a Saturday night wrestling program produced by National Wrestling Alliance promoter Fred Kohler, Wrestling From Marigold, originating from the Marigold Gardens arena in downtown Chicago. (L-R) Violeta, Branko, Brenda and Vera Podrumedic in Little Bucharest Bistro (Courtesy: Violeta Podrumedic) John Williams With the conversion of WGN America into a traditional cable channel, WGN-TV chose to expand distribution of its Cubs, White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks telecasts through syndication agreements with television stations in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa primarily those affiliated with The CW and MyNetworkTV that are within each team's designated market area (including sister stations WHO-DT [channel 13] in Des Moines and WQAD-TV [channel 8] in Moline, Illinois respectively affiliated with NBC and ABC which carried WGN's baseball telecasts on their respective Antenna TV- and MyNetworkTV-affiliated digital subchannels). Graye, Tom - Formerly Program Director and morning personality at KQXT-FM in San Antonio, Texas. With NBC, he hosted the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1998 to 2017 and co-hosted the opening ceremonies of several Olympic Games. The ruling permitted the station to televise at least 30 games (eleven fewer than the 41 annual games that the Bulls and WGN requested) over the Chicago signal and superstation feed, while allowing the NBA to impose a reasonable rights fee (around $40,000, rather than the $100,000 licensing fee sought by the NBA) for broadcasts of each game, based on the consideration that the league received more than $2 million in annual copyright payments from WGN's Bulls broadcasts. Each of the city's major professional sports franchises, along with several area collegiate teams, have had their games regularly televised over channel 9. Allison Payne, a nine-time Emmy Award winner who was the face of WGN-TV for two decades and inspired a generation of Black women reporters, died Sept. 1 in her hometown of Detroit, the television station reported. He is the anchor of the 6 p.m. news. 9 reporter and former WTTW-Ch. 50 to station rotation", "CW, Tribune Stations Set Affiliation Deal as WGN-TV Chicago Goes Indie", "WGN-TV/Chicago To Become Independent Station Featuring Local News, Live Sports, High-Quality Syndicated Programming", "WGN to air more sports after dropping CW", "WGN-TV Takes NBA to Court Over Superstation Rule", "TV SPORTS; Bulls, Superstations And Power Moves", "The Economics of Sports Leagues - The Chicago Bulls Case", "Bulls Get OK for 30 WGN Games in '92-93", "Cable Rights Spur Renewal of NBA-WGN Battle", "Bulls, WGN Hit Court Again in TV Dispute with NBA", "PRO BASKETBALL; N.B.A. WGN-TV's respective relationships with Chicago's two Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises, the Chicago Cubs (of the National League) and the Chicago White Sox (of the American League), trace back to shortly before the station's inception in April 1948. The unrest at the channel's flagship newscast started in earnest last month, when an industry publication reported that. [73][82][83][84], On September 10, 1996, a three-judge Seventh Circuit panel overturned the 1992 decision and remanded the case to be re-heard by a federal judge. In 1989, he had the highest approval rating (75%) among local television and radio sports reporters in a Chicago Sun-Times readers poll. (The remaining ten televised Fire games will air on the MLS's national broadcast partners, ABC, ESPN, FS1, Univision and UniMs, the latter of which will air locally via O&Os WGBO-DT [channel 66] and WXFT-DT [channel 60], respectively; all WGN-televised Fire matches will also be streamed nationally via ESPN+.) The league's Board of Governors applied a set limit in June 1985, restricting the number of seasonal NBA telecasts that could be licensed to superstations to 25 games (which was applied to the Bulls' 1989 contract with Channel 9). The station's relationship with the Cubs was further cemented on June 16, 1981, when the Tribune Company (renamed Tribune Media in August 2014 following the spin-off of its publishing division) purchased an 81% share in the franchise from William Wrigley Jr. who sold the franchise to alleviate himself of the large estate taxes that were accrued upon inheriting the team following the death of his parents for $20.5 million. (The first WGN-leased game on CLTV, which provided supplementary local cable coverage to the team's existing agreement with SportsChannel Chicago, was an exhibition game against the Seattle Mariners on March 21, 1993. That was the case for Robin Baumgarten, a WGN Chicago morning news anchor, who expressed frustration with co-anchor Larry Potash after he allegedly failed to play a video clip during a newscast. Magiera came to WGN News from the NFL. Former ABC News correspondent Adrienne Bankert is joining NewsNation as a morning show anchor. The life and times of inspirational and pioneering Allison Payne, former WGN news anchor Allison Payne had not visited Chicago-area homes for more than a decade, but she was such a. . Kupcinet began writing sports columns for the The Chicago Daily Times (now known as the Sun-Times) in 1935. [41], On February 19, 2020, WGN-TV announced a multi-year agreement with Chicago Fire FC, awarding it the exclusive local broadcast rights to the franchise's Major League Soccer games as well as a monthly series featuring interviews and profiles of Fire players, coaches and fans; the initial 2020 season broadcast schedule will encompass 24 regular season matches, 18 of which will air in prime time. Anchor since: 1965 to 1968 (beginning at age 26), then "World News Tonight" in 1978 (became sole anchor in 1983). $299. He served as sports anchor for the station's 9 p.m. newscast on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and filed sports reports for the station's Sunday through Thursday evening newscasts. Over the years, many Bears play-by-play broadcasters have included Jack Brickhouse and Wayne Larrivee. [24] For the 1962 season, WGN-TV would occasionally cover the Cubs and White Sox games occurring simultaneously, using the respective announcing staffs for both teams, which used "bingo" as a signal to other announcers to switch to coverage of the other ongoing game. In the fall of 1984, the Bulls signed an agreement with WFLD to broadcast the team's games for four years, effective with the 198586 season. Hale, Bob - Retired from radio. [85] Although the Bulls initially maintained that WGN would still be able to nationally televise Bulls games, in October 1996, WGN-TV announced plans to restrict distribution of the 35 Bulls games it was scheduled to air during the 199697 season (a five-game increase over the 199596 season) exclusively to the Chicago area signal. Harry Caray leaves Sox to broadcast Cubs games", "Biggest What Ifs in White Sox History, Part 2", "WGN To Air Cubs Game In High Definition", "Tribune finalizes sale of Cubs to Ricketts family", "Cubs buy Tribune Media's remaining 5 percent ownership stake in the team", "How much are the Cubs worth? Concerts & Performances. )", "Cubs exercise option to end WGN-TV contract after next season", "Cubs reach deal with WGN-TV for remaining 45 broadcasts", "WGN-TV to Air White Sox Day, Night Games", "Chicago White Sox will move over to UHF in 1968", "White Sox History: The story of SportsVision", "Drysdale, Harrelson team up for White Sox", "White Sox, Bulls Leave Channel 32 for Channel 9", "Jerry Reinsdorf, who heads the new ownership group of", "Blackhawks to Televise All Games, Join 20th Century", "WGN, Comcast Deals Make History for Hawks", "Chicago Fire reach a multiyear deal with WGN to televise games", "Back to play-by-play, WGN to air Chicago Fire soccer broadcasts", "WGN to Simulcast Monday Night's Bears Game", "The 'Center Field Shot' began at a Chicago Little League game", "ChicagoLand TV Brings Cubs to Local Cable", "Cubs Will Make a Trade: CLTV Games to WGN", "The Times Are a Changin' . The initial deal would have resulted in Cablevision (which had provided cable television service to the Chicago suburbs of Homewood and Oak Park by that time) broadcasting most of the team's home games through a production agreement with its SportsChannel production unit. Several seasons of sub-par play by the Cubs after Tribune's sale of the team to Thomas S. Ricketts in late 2009 also played a factor, as the team's television package cost five times as much for rights fees alone as the revenue it brought in for the national broadcasts. Here's what that means for fans", "Cubs launching a network of their own, Marquee Sports Network", "Sports media: Will Chicago teams leave WGN-TV without any sports? (At the time, WGN was contracted to air a minimum of 86 Cubs games per season under an existing two-year contract.) )[88][89][90][91][92][93], On December 12, 1996, the Bulls and WGN reached a settlement to the six-year-long lawsuit, which allowed WGN to air an extended schedule of 41 games the maximum allowed under the NBA's local television policies during the 199697 season (35 that would air only on the Chicago signal and twelve that would be shown on both the local and superstation feeds). (This also was the case for WGN-produced games shown on WPWR-TV, as well as WLS-TV's Cubs broadcasts.) 4.98 (284) 24hr. However, criticism of the move from some subscribers led TCI to reverse course and retain the WGN superstation feed from affected systems in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan. She joined the WGN sports team in June of 2022 and now works as an evening sports anchor and co-host of GN Sports.. WGN Radio AM 720 United States employs 59 employees. "I think I'm real close to 100 percent," said Wilson, who . After syndication exclusivity rules were re-implemented on January 1, 1990, the major sports leagues began to impose some partial restrictions on the national carriage of WGN-televised sports broadcasts due to concerns over impacts to revenues from game attendance and national television rights. At various points between the station's founding in 1948 until 2019, WGN Sports produced telecasts from several of Chicago's major professional sports teams, most notably the Chicago Cubs (MLB), Chicago White Sox (MLB), Chicago Bulls (NBA) and Chicago Blackhawks (NHL). $34. The first Fire telecast to air on the station was an early-afternoon away game against the New England Revolution on March 7. He also won awards from the Illinois chapters of the Associated Press and United Press International for his sportscasts. Jack Brickhouse, Lorn Brown, Milo Hamilton and Bob Costas were among those assigned to work as Bulls play-by-play announcers for the WGN telecasts, with Johnny "Red" Kerr serving as an analyst. The Upside. . Allison Payne, a Detroit native and former longtime TV anchor in Chicago who crisscrossed the globe for various stories and won nine Emmys, died earlier this month after a series of health. Peter Liguori, then the president and chief executive officer of Tribune Media, cited the limited revenue and viewership accrued from the national simulcasts relative to their contractual expense revenue was reportedly only covering 20% of the rights fees behind the decision to drop the national telecasts. WGN Sports (originally known as WGN-TV Sports from 1948 to 1993) was the programming division of WGN-TV (channel 9), an independent television station located in Chicago, Illinois, United Stateswhich is owned by the Nexstar Media Groupthat was responsible for all sports broadcasts on the station, some of which were previously also broadcast on its former national superstation feed, WGN America (now news and entertainment channel NewsNation). [97][98][99], In April 1992, Vincent lobbied Congress to repeal the compulsory license that allowed cable systems to carry superstation signals. The sale was approved in a unanimous vote among the National League team owners on August 6 of that year. Janet Rausa Fuller. Mark Gaffney. Tyree Wilson of Texas Tech and Will McDonald IV of Iowa State appear to be the top defensive ends. 11 correspondent and program host Eddie Arruza was sent out with a news crew to look for city salt trucks on the North Side for a TV news story . [117][118][119] The deal left WGN-TV without sports programming for the first time in the station's 74-year history; however, WGN-TV plans to carry events from LIV Golf starting on February 25, 2023 as part of a time-brokerage deal with Nexstar; although the deal was signed with the CW, WCIU agreed to cede rights to the Chicago market due to cross-ownership. . WGN-TV has also held broadcast rights to the Illinois Derby, Hawthorne Gold Cup Handicap and Arlington Million (except in years NBC Sports carried coverage as part of the Road to the Breeders' Cup) horse races. The 21-year veteran of the station passed away September 1 at her home in Detroit, according to a WGN press release. On a stage he'd always dreamed about taking, the former Georgia defensive star stood before a group of reporters and gave an emotional memorial about his friend and former college teammate, Devin Willock, who was killed in a car crash Jan. 15. The ranks of Chicago's women sports anchors are noticeably smaller today. (Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer also owned television and radio stations in the Midwest during his ownership of the team from 1956 to 1983; however, none were based within the Detroit market. Former WGN Radio Traffic Reporter Violeta Podrumedic catches up with John about the closing of her father's restaurant, Little Bucharest Bistro, after 40 years of business. )[121] Even prior to the decision, WGN America had chosen not to air certain sports-related programming carried on the Chicago signal such as the Blackhawks' victory parade following its 2010 Stanley Cup championship win and a half-hour special paying tribute to the late Cubs player and broadcaster Ron Santo in 2011. Dan Roan. Robert Feder. [111][112] The station's final Bulls game aired on April 9, 2019, against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Dick Bremer. 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