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Television · Channel 15 · CBS throughout
On the record
Founded: 26 September 1954, as WINT, strong. The History Center’s collection description and the station histories agree on the date, the original call letters and the shape of the start: the Fort Wayne area’s second television station, a CBS affiliate, licensed to and with studios in Waterloo, north of Fort Wayne, broadcasting from a transmitter near Auburn. Its Fort Wayne founding date is therefore two dates: first air 1954 (Waterloo) and Fort Wayne arrival 1956 — the Tokheim pattern, not a single Fort Wayne founding.
Founder: Tri-State Television (expressly not Tri-State Christian Television, the later owner of WINM). No individual founder is named in the sources in hand, and none is invented here. The original owner used FCC allocation rules to aim a Waterloo-licensed signal at Fort Wayne, identifying as “Waterloo/Fort Wayne.”
What it did: CBS network television for the Fort Wayne market (with a secondary ABC affiliation until WPTA, entry 42, took ABC in September 1957), on UHF channel 15.
Course: the early Fort Wayne years were precarious in the News-Sentinel’s 1950s history, from Reid Chapman, who began managing WANE in 1958: viewers would not turn their aerials from WKJG’s West State Street tower to WANE’s tower five miles south of Auburn; “for the first four or five years it was touch and go.” In 1956 the Indiana Broadcasting Company (owner of WISH-TV, Indianapolis, and WANE radio, 1450 AM) purchased the station, changed the call letters to WANE-TV (for the co-owned radio station; also read as Fort WAyNE), and moved all operations and the licence to Fort Wayne; the transmitter remained at Auburn until 1957. Indiana Broadcasting became the Corinthian Broadcasting Company in 1957. WANE answered its aerial problem by building its tower and station on West State Street in Fort Wayne (the 1974 International Television Almanac lists it at 2915 W. State Blvd., its address still), with community programmes including the long-running noon Ann Colone Show. Ownership thereafter: Corinthian was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet in 1970; Dun & Bradstreet sold to the Belo Corporation in 1983, which, over the FCC ownership limit, sold WANE and WISH to LIN Broadcasting (the Belo spin-off is also dated 1984 in Indiana RadioWatch’s history note — the 1983 sale / 1984 completion sequence is carried, not a single year). LIN’s successor LIN Media was acquired by Media General in a $1.6 billion merger completed 19 December 2014; Media General was in turn acquired by Nexstar, which announced on 13 June 2016 that it would keep WANE and sell Fort Wayne’s WFFT-TV instead (Nexstar’s asset list dates its WANE purchase to 2017, the merger’s completion).
Fate: still operating. WANE-TV, channel 15, CBS affiliate, owned by Nexstar Media Group, studios at 2915 W. State Blvd., Fort Wayne. It has been a CBS affiliate throughout (1954– ), the longest unbroken network affiliation among Fort Wayne’s first three stations.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: History Center, Collection 89.9.1, WANE-TV Videotapes description — https://fwhistorycenter.org/virtual-exhibits/vex16/00F48451-00D2-4FE6-ACBF-563911331074.htm ; WANE-TV station history — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANE-TV ; News-Sentinel, Doug LeDuc, “Everything was new on television” — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/2000/1950/atom8.php ; International Television Almanac 1974, Fort Wayne listings — https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/55882000/almanac/185 . Sources as cited in the profile.