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WISH-TV history
WISH-TV company history timeline
The station first signed on the air on July 1, 1954 at 6:00 pm.
Also in 1956, WISH became one of the first television stations in the United States to install a videotape machine.
In 1956, McConnell sold the station to the Indiana Broadcasting Company, the broadcasting subsidiary of J.H. Whitney & Company and owners of WANE-TV in Fort Wayne.
His long list of credits include working in management for 20 years at WISH and hosting a popular series, When Movies Were Movies, that aired for 10 years beginning in 1971.
Jane Pauley was hired in 1972 by Lee Giles, whose long, award-winning career as a news director at WISH was preceded by on-air posts in the news department, including anchor and Statehouse reporter.
You can listen to excerpts from "Survival tales from the Blizzard of January 1978," aired on the storm's 30th anniversary, Jan.
During the brutal Blizzard of 1978, he was a nearly round-the-clock presence on Channel 8 as he provided Central Indiana residents with constant updates about the historic winter storm.
Bonus! Listen to Hoosier History Live "Blizzard of 1978" radio show
He established the non-profit Indiana Military Museum in 1982 as a way to enhance education of United States military history and preserve significant artifacts.
Corinthian merged with Dun & Bradstreet in 1971. As a result, the company sold WISH-TV and WANE to LIN Broadcasting (the predecessor of LIN Media) the following month in March 1984.
LIN later acquired low-power independent station W11BV (channel 11, now WIIH-CD channel 17) in 1992.
In 1995, WISH-TV relocated its transmitter to a new tower built in the Augusta section of Indianapolis.
WISH-TV signed on its digital signal on VHF channel 9 on December 17, 1998; two days later on December 19, the station broadcast its first program in high definition when it broadcast an NFL game telecast in the format.
In 2002, WISH-TV began handling the master control operations of WANE-TV and fellow sister station WLFI-TV in Lafayette.
The hub expanded to include the Buffalo duopoly of WIVB-TV and WNLO in October, with other LIN-owned stations gradually being added to the WISH hub by the summer of 2003.
On February 10, 2005, the Paramount Stations Group subsidiary of Viacom sold UPN affiliate WNDY-TV (channel 23, now a MyNetworkTV affiliate) as well as its Columbus, Ohio sister station WWHO to LIN TV for $85 million, creating a duopoly with WISH-TV when the sale was finalized that spring.
His other books include Hoosiers in Hollywood (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006) and a biography of movie star Clifton Webb, an Indianapolis native.
On May 18, 2007, the LIN TV Corporation announced that it was exploring strategic alternatives that could have resulted in the sale of the company.
By the way, several well-known news anchors and personalities in the Indy TV market have been studio guests on Hoosier History Live! since our debut in January 2008.
On September 15, 2008, LIN and Time Warner Cable entered into an impasse during negotiations to renew retransmission consent deals for some of the group's television stations.
On August 7, 2009, WISH-TV began operating a Mobile DTV feed of subchannel 8.1, which originally was only accessible via an app for BlackBerry devices.
They include retired Channel 8 news anchor Mike Ahern (he was a guest on show in October 2009 about the legendary House of Blue Lights) and Barbara Boyd, who, at Channel 6, became the first African-American woman in Indiana to anchor a news broadcast.
2010 interview with Janie Hodge by Al Hunter for Eastside Voice.
His books include Indianapolis Television (Arcadia Publishing, 2012), which explores the evolution of TV in the Hoosier capital and highlights a parade of personalities whose careers were linked to various TV stations in Indy.
While in Decatur, you can visit Storybook Park, established in 2013 next to the Adams Public Library.
On March 21, 2014, Media General announced that it would buy LIN Media in a $1.6 billion deal, described as a "merger." The merger was completed on December 19.
© 2014 Hoosier History Live! All rights reserved.
As mentioned above, in late March 2015, a simulcast of WISH's main signal was added via WNDY-DT3.
After a failed bid for Media General to merge with Meredith Corporation, Nexstar Broadcasting acquired Media General in January 2017.
The WTTV/WXIN duopoly was longer-established and Nexstar opted to keep that duopoly over WISH/WNDY. The sale was completed on September 19, 2019.
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Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of WISH-TV, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about WISH-TV. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at WISH-TV. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by WISH-TV. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of WISH-TV and its employees or that of Zippia.
WISH-TV may also be known as or be related to WISH-TV and Wish-tv.