WPXJ-TV (channel 51) is atelevision station licensed toBatavia, New York, United States, serving theBuffalo area as an affiliate ofIon Television. Owned by Inyo Broadcast Holdings, the station maintains offices on Exchange Street in Buffalo, and its transmitter is located inCowlesville, New York.^[2]

Until August 2019, WPXJ-TV's transmitter was based atPavilion, approximately halfway betweenWestern New York's two largest cities, Buffalo andRochester; it was the only station to serve bothmarkets with the same signal (WNYB still serves both markets, but relies ontranslators andcable carriage to do so), although what little local programming the station has carried has traditionally favored Buffalo, and Ion now maintains a separate Rochester affiliation on the fourth digital subchannel ofWHEC-TV.

The station signed on the air on June 17, 1999, as anowned-and-operated station of Ion predecessor Pax TV, and was founded byPaxson Communications. WPXJ-TV was Paxson's second effort at launching a television station in Western New York; the first wasJamestown-basedWNYP-TV (channel 26), anaffiliate of Canadian television networkCTV, which Pax founderLowell W. "Bud" Paxson majority owned from 1966 to 1969. In February 2006, WPXJ-TV was added toDish Network's Buffalo channel lineup on channel 51.

On September 24, 2020, theCincinnati-basedE. W. Scripps Company announced that it would purchase Ion Media for $2.65 billion, with financing fromBerkshire Hathaway. With this purchase, Scripps will divest 23 Ion-owned stations, but no announcement was made as to which stations that Scripps would divest as part of the move. However, on October 16, 2020, it was announced that WPXJ-TV would be one of the stations that Scripps would spin off as part of the merger. The buyer, revealed in an October 2020 FCC filing to be Inyo Broadcast Holdings, has promised to maintain the stations' Ion Television affiliations after the purchase. The proposed divestitures will allow the merged company to fully comply with the FCC local and national ownership regulations. This would have made it asister station toABC affiliateWKBW-TV (channel 7) if Scripps had decided to keep WPXJ-TV, but Buffalo has fewer than eight independently owned and operating full-power television stations, not enough to permit a duopoly in any case (even as bothNexstar Media Group andSinclair Broadcast Group both hold longstanding duopolies in the same market).^[3][4][5] The transaction was finalized and closed on January 7, 2021.^{[6][3][4][5][7][8][9][10]}

For a time, WPXJ-TV carried a rebroadcast of newscasts fromNBC affiliateWGRZ (channel 2), as well as a live 10 p.m. newscast produced by that station (this was part of a nationwide initiative for Pax affiliates to carry news and local content from NBC stations).Channel 2 News First at Ten was the first prime time newscast in the Buffalo market (as previously noted, virtually none of the newscast's content was geared toward Rochester, despite WGRZ havinga large sister news bureau in that city). It was never a ratings contender and consistently lost the ratings battle withWNLO (channel 23)'s newscast in the same time slot, which had debuted a few weeks later but had been planned for months.

After Pax ended its local news partnerships with NBC in 2005, WGRZ later established a news share agreement withWNYO-TV (channel 49) to produce a half-hour 10 p.m. newscast for that station in April 2006, which effectively replaced WNYO-TV's in-house newscast that was canceled the month before in relation to the shutdown of ownerSinclair Broadcast Group'sNews Central division; that newscast was moved toFox affiliateWUTV (channel 29) on April 8, 2013.^[11]

The station's signal ismultiplexed:

WPXJ-TV ended regular programming on its analog signal, overUHF channel 51, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United Statestransitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal moved from its pre-transition UHF channel 53^[13] to UHF channel 23, usingvirtual channel 51.

• Ion Television website

• 1999 establishments in New York (state)
• Court TV affiliates
• Defy (TV network) affiliates
• Genesee County, New York
• Ion Plus affiliates
• Ion Television affiliates
• Laff (TV network) affiliates
• Television channels and stations established in 1999
• Television stations in Buffalo, New York

• CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list
• Webarchive template wayback links
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from March 2025
• Pages using gadget WikiMiniAtlas