The Fourth Station and the Public One — WFFT and WFWA

Fort Wayne's fourth commercial station arrived as an outsider and made a virtue of it. WFFT, channel 55, signed on December 21, 1977, as an independent — one of the smallest markets in America to sustain an independent station — running movies and reruns, staying on all night on weekends when the network stations signed off, and surviving the Great Blizzard of January 1978 a month after its birth. It was voted the number-one independent station in the United States at one point in those years, a trade distinction the station's histories record with pride. WFFT started a news department in 1980 with a half-hour prime-time program, The 10 O'Clock Report — the market's first 10 p.m. newscast, decades before the format became standard — joined the new Fox network as a charter affiliate on October 9, 1986, and filled its off hours from 1982 with CNN Headline News. The Fox affiliation was lost in a contract dispute on August 1, 2011, and won back — after an antitrust settlement with the rival that had taken it — on March 1, 2013. Its relaunched 2009 news operation, Fox 55 News First at 10, made WFFT the first station in the market to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition.

Public television came last and quietest. Channel 39 reached Fort Wayne first as a translator — W39AA, relaying Bowling Green's WBGU and later Indianapolis's WFYI; the station histories date the translator's establishment to February 2, 1975, though one account carries a 1964 sign-on for it, a conflict the note filed with this chapter records unresolved. A local group, Fort Wayne Public Television, won the full-power grant in 1985, and WFWA signed on December 5, 1986 — northeast Indiana's own PBS station for the first time — programming separately from WFYI from October 1, 1989. In 2003 WFWA became the first station in the Fort Wayne market to broadcast a digital signal. As PBS Fort Wayne, from its Teleplex on the Purdue Fort Wayne campus, it carries the local documentary and public-affairs work noted in the Current chapter. Between WFFT's insurgency and WFWA's patience, the market's shape was complete: three network newsrooms, a Fox independent-turned-affiliate, and a public station — the five-signal structure Fort Wayne still has.

Sources: WFFT-TV reference history (December 21, 1977 sign-on; the number-one independent distinction; CNN Headline News from 1982; Fox charter affiliation October 9, 1986; The 10 O'Clock Report, 1980; the 2011 loss and March 1, 2013 return of Fox; HD news first); TVNewsCheck (February 6, 2013) (the antitrust settlement); WFWA reference history (the W39AA translator era and its two datings; December 5, 1986 sign-on; October 1, 1989 separate programming; 2003 digital first).