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| Operator | Sinclair Broadcast Group viaLMA |
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Call sign meaning | taken from former sisterWHAM radio, pronounced like "wham" |
| Technical information[4] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 73371 |
| ERP | 30kW |
| HAAT | 155 m (509 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 43°8′7″N77°35′2″W / 43.13528°N 77.58389°W /43.13528; -77.58389 |
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Public license information | |
| Website | 13wham cwrochester |
WHAM-TV (channel 13) is atelevision station inRochester, New York, United States, affiliated withABC andThe CW. It is owned byDeerfield Media, which maintains alocal marketing agreement (LMA) withSinclair Broadcast Group, owner ofFox affiliateWUHF (channel 31), for the provision of certain services.[5] The two stations share studios on West Henrietta Road (NY 15) inHenrietta (with a Rochestermailing address); WHAM-TV's transmitter is located on Pinnacle Hill on the border between Rochester andBrighton.
The station signed on at 4 p.m. on September 15, 1962, as WOKR (for "We're OK Rochester"). It has always been an ABC affiliate, and is the only commercial station in the area that has never changed its affiliation. It originally operated from studios located on South Clinton Avenue in Rochester.
The station's original local owner, Channel 13 of Rochester, Inc., was composed of the Flower City Television Corporation, the Rochester Educational Television Association, the Genesee Valley Television Company, Star TV, Inc., Community Broadcasting, Inc., Heritage Radio and Television Broadcasting Company, Main Broadcasting Company, Federal Broadcasting Systems, Citizens Television Corporation, Rochester Broadcasting, Inc., and Rochester Telecasters, Inc., all of whom were equal shareholders[6] until March 1970, when Flower City bought out its partners.[7] Flower City sold the station toPost Corporation, a media conglomerate based in theFox Cities region ofWisconsin, in 1977.George N. Gillett Jr. purchased the Post Corporation stations in 1984, transferring it into Gillett Holdings, Inc. Hughes Broadcasting Partners (Paul Hughes andVeronis, Suhler & Associates) purchased the station in 1991. Hughes then sold WOKR toGuy Gannett Communications in 1995.
Guy Gannett sold its stations to theSinclair Broadcast Group in 1998; as Sinclair already owned WUHF, it then spun off WOKR to theAckerley Group, with the acquisition closing in April 1999. The station came under common ownership withWHAM radio (1180 AM), in June 2002 after the Ackerley Group merged with Clear Channel Communications, WHAM radio's owner. Speculation immediately started about whether WOKR would take on the WHAM-TV calls, which had been used on what is nowWROC-TV from 1949 until 1956. On January 10, 2005, at 1:42 a.m., channel 13 signed off-the-air for the last time as WOKR and returned to the air at 4:59 a.m. that same day as WHAM-TV. The WOKR call letters then moved to sister station WUCL inRemsen, New York (nowAir 1 affiliateWAWR; in 2015, when the Remsen station dropped the calls, a radio station in Rochester picked up theWOKR calls and returned them to the market, swapping them withCanandaigua sister stationWRSB in 2017). This was part of a strategy that Clear Channel would use the older callsign for an existing TV station they co-owned with the radio stations, the others were inSan Antonio andSyracuse.[8][9]
For many years, WOKR was one of three Rochester area stations offered on cable in theOttawa–Gatineau andEastern Ontario regions. The Rochester area stations were replaced withDetroit channels in September 2003 when the microwave relay system that provided these signals was discontinued. Until January 2009, WHAM-TV was also the ABC affiliate carried in severalCentral Ontario communities such asBelleville,Cobourg, andLindsay.Buffalo ABC affiliateWKBW-TV replaced WHAM-TV in these communities.
On November 16, 2006, Clear Channel announced its intention to sell off all of its television stations after the company was bought by private equity firms. On April 20, 2007, the company entered into an agreement to sell its entire television stations group toNewport Television, a broadcasting holding company established by the private equity firmProvidence Equity Partners.[10] The sale separated WHAM-TV from WHAM radio (which remains owned by Clear Channel, nowiHeartMedia); however, the WHAM-TV call sign has been retained, and the two stations have continued a news partnership.
WHAM-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, overVHF channel 13, 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 relocated from its pre-transitionUHF channel 59, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its analog-era VHF channel 13.[11]
On July 19, 2012, Newport Television announced the sale of 22 of its 27 stations to theNexstar Broadcasting Group, Sinclair Broadcast Group andCox Media Group.[12] While most of WHAM-TV's New York State sisters were sold to Nexstar, a buyer for WHAM-TV was not announced until December 3, when Newport sold its non-license assets to Sinclair.[5] The license was sold toDeerfield Media for $54 million. Sinclair could not acquire the WHAM-TV license because of its continued ownership of WUHF (though it holds an option to do so[5]); Nexstar could not purchase WHAM-TV because it already ownedCBS affiliate WROC-TV. Rochester has only five full-power stations—not enough to legally permit a duopoly. WHAM-TV is also the only ABC affiliate owned by Newport Television that was not sold to Nexstar. With the announced sales in November of two additional stations to Nexstar andKMTR inEugene, Oregon, toFisher Communications (which was later sold itself to Sinclair in May 2013), WHAM-TV was the last Newport Television station without a buyer. On January 30, 2013, theFederal Communications Commission (FCC) granted approval of the transaction, and it was consummated two days later.[13][14]
On December 31, 2013, WUHF terminated its eight-year SSA with WROC-TV, and the station was re-located to WHAM-TV's studios. On January 1, 2014, WUHF introduced two WHAM-TV-produced newscasts,Good Day Rochester and a 10 p.m. newscast, which were both previously seen on itsCW-affiliated subchannel WHAM-DT2.[15]
On July 28, 2021, the FCC issued a Forfeiture Order against Deerfield Media stemming from a lawsuit involving WHAM-TV. The lawsuit, filed byAT&T, alleged that Deerfield Media failed to negotiate for retransmission consent in good faith for WHAM-TV and other Sinclair-managed stations. Deerfield was ordered to pay a fine of $512,228 per station named in the lawsuit, including WHAM-TV.[16]
WHAM-DT2, branded asCW Rochester (formerlyCW WHAM), is the CW-affiliated seconddigital subchannel of WHAM-TV, broadcasting in high definition on channel 13.2.
The station began as a cable-onlyWB affiliate in 1996 onTime Warner Cable channel 26. The station was created by Lynette Baker, Time Warner Cable's local programming manager, as an entertainment programming replacement for theindependent channel WGRC channel 9, which was in the process of being relaunched as 24-hour news channelR News. Baker approached The WB to launch a cable only affiliate as all the broadcast licenses in the Rochester market were allocated (this preceded the launch ofThe WB 100+ Station Group in 1998, which afforded cable providers the opportunity to launch cable-exclusive WB affiliates in smaller markets, displacing thesuperstation feed of Chicago'sWGN-TV, which served as the national feed of The WB until then). The network distribution staff headed by Ken Werner and Hal Protter agreed to the cable license. In December 2000, the station became a joint venture of Time Warner Cable and The WB, named Rochester Television Ventures, LLC; it used the fictional call sign "WRWB-TV". The venture kept Lynette Baker as the Director of Operations and hired Tish Robinson as general manager and Steve Arvan as general sales manager.[17][18]
Rochester Television Ventures choose Jay Advertising Inc. as marketing and advertising agency of record for the channel in November 2000. At that time, the channel was expected to go live in January 2001. Tish Robinson was the channel's initial general manager.[18] WRWB re-launched in December[17] on channel 26, only to be moved to channel 16 in late December 2000.[19]
Robinson planned for the channel to launch its own news programming in 2001, but revenue was below expectations, forcing its postponement until 2003.[20] After theSeptember 11 attacks, the channel replaced an airing of themartial arts movieMortal Kombat with the family comedyDennis the Menace.[21] In May 2003, the channel began carryingRochester KnighthawksNational Lacrosse League games.[22]
In mid-2004, Rochester Television Ventures added marketing and communications services to improve the channel's revenues and to fill the void of the loss of smaller advertising agencies. By this time, the cable channel had scrapped plans for newscasts and carriedThe Daily Buzz morning news show with local weather updates from TWC's R News.[23]
On January 24, 2006, theWarner Bros. unit ofTime Warner andCBS Corporation announced that they would shut down and merge theirUPN and WB networks to create a new network called The CW. WRWB's CW affiliation was officially announced in early March.[24] On November 13, 2006, WHAM-TV purchased WRWB-TV from Time Warner Cable. It renamed the service "CW WHAM" and began to simulcast on a new second digital subchannel of WHAM to offer over-the-air viewers access to CW programming. CW WHAM moved its operations and four of its staff from the downtown Rochester into WHAM-TV's facilities in Henrietta.[25][26]
WHAM-TV has led the news ratings in Rochester for most of the last four decades. The station's lead anchorman,Don Alhart, was with the station from June 6, 1966, until his retirement on June 6, 2024.[27] As of 2007, portions of WHAM-TV's programming (including its weekday noon newscast) is streamed live on its website. On January 15, 2007, the station expanded its weekday morning show to include two hours (7 to 9 a.m.) on WHAM-DT2. On September 13, 2010, WHAM-TV became the first station in Rochester to broadcast newscasts in high definition. The station debuted an updated logo featuring the "circle 13" design (a derivative of thecircle 7 logo) similar to fellow ABC affiliateWTVG inToledo, Ohio. The shows on WHAM-DT2 were included in the upgrade and currently can be seen in HD over-the-air or on Spectrum channels 16 and 1212.[28][29][30]
On January 1, 2011, WHAM-DT2 began to air a half-hour 10 p.m. newscast,13 WHAM News on Rochester's CW. The newscast competed primarily withWUHF's WROC-produced newscast.[31] On January 1, 2014, after WUHF merged with WHAM, this newscast was moved to the station as13 WHAM News on Fox Rochester. WUHF also added a morning show,Good Day Rochester, airing from 7 to 9 a.m.[32] In September 2014, theGood Day Rochester title was extended to WHAM's morning show, while WUHF also began to simulcast the 6:30 a.m. segment of the program.
WHAM-TV also provided sports and weather reports forWUTV in Buffalo from 2021 to 2023.[33][34]
The station's signal ismultiplexed:
| Channel | Res. | Aspect | Short name | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 13.1 | 720p | 16:9 | WHAM-HD | ABC |
| 13.2 | CW-WHAM | The CW | ||
| 13.3 | 480i | 4:3 | Grit-TV | Charge! |
| 31.2 | 480i | 4:3 | Antenna | Antenna TV (WUHF) |
| 31.3 | Comet-T | Comet (WUHF) |
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