WNYE-TV 25 Celebrates 100 Years of Municipal Broadcasting?

[Rollo-Smokes]

Whatever the motivations were, the sale of channel 31 for $207 million turned out to be a very smart move. Almost nobody in the city was watching it, just as is the case now for 25, and the sale was probably at the absolute peak of TV valuations. There was barely any city-produced programming on it at the time, just leased time to a variety of outside producers.

What exactly would have been "saved" if the city had kept it?

WNYC-TV's audience may not have been as large as that of WNET, but it was a loyal one (Italian football matches certainly helps). Being slotted Channel 3 on NYC's cable systems was a benefit for them as well.

As for municipal-themed shows, they still were running their News from City Hall on weeknights after Video Music Box–the latter being required afterschool viewing for this poster. Brian Lehrer also had a show on channel 31 for a few years in the '90s, and he may not have been the only WNYC Radio personality who double-dipped on the television side.

What WNYC radio was a different animal - the programming there was both internally produced and unique on the dial, with a large and loyal audience.

Imagine an alternate timeline in which the city sold 93.9 and 820 to commercial operators. There would have been a much larger outcry than the shrug that greeted the demise of WNYC-TV.

I'm in agreement with you on that.

Yes and also WNYC-TV had to contend with WNET as the primary PBS affiliate in New York. However the New York TV market also has Connecticut Public Broadcasting covering parts of their area, WLIW Garden City and NJ PBS covering parts of the market. That's is partially a rational on why WNYC 31 had to be sold.

WLIW, NJN ("NJ PBS" didn't exist yet), and CPTV really were non-factors as they served different audiences. Not all of NYC had access to those outlets either, via OTA or cable. Thirteen was then, and today still is the big dawg in NYC.

(I grew up in the Bronx, which [outside of Co-op City] didn't get wired for cable TV until 1994. But I was lucky to be in a "sweet spot" where I could recieve WLIW, NJN and CPTV via antenna. That probably didn't occur in many other areas of NYC proper.)

 

[Rollo-Smokes]

Yes and also WNYC-TV had to contend with WNET as the primary PBS affiliate in New York. However the New York TV market also has Connecticut Public Broadcasting covering parts of their area, WLIW Garden City and NJ PBS covering parts of the market. That's is partially a rational on why WNYC 31 had to be sold.

I meant to add this to my previous reply, but the time on edits ran out.

The presence of the other PBS signals played no role in the City's decision to divest WNYC-TV. As @TheBigA and @fybush earlier intoned, it was a part ideological and part financial. The City needed the money, and the mayor at the time felt that sacrificing TV and radio was worth it.

My take then, as now, is that AM, FM, and TV could have been kept together but the City accountants told Giuliani that TV would bring in a windfall if it were sold separately. And you can't blame the City for getting the bag, as the youngsters say today.

 

[K.M. Richards]

The part of this story not yet mentioned in this thread is that the city sold WNYC-AM/FM/TV under Rudy Guiliani about 25 years ago.

Maybe not in the thread, but it is in my linked article ...

 

[TheBigA]

My take then, as now, is that AM, FM, and TV could have been kept together

You think the Foundation would have wanted to keep the TV?

 

[Rollo-Smokes]

You think the Foundation would have wanted to keep the TV?

If they were given the opportunity, they would have.

Channel 31 remaining a noncomm would have been a whole lot better than what the station eventually ended up as.

 

[TheBigA]

If they were given the opportunity, they would have.

I never got the impression that they were very committed to TV at the time. I also think they were stretched a bit thin financially at that time.

 

[K.M. Richards]

If they were given the opportunity, they would have.

Channel 31 remaining a noncomm would have been a whole lot better than what the station eventually ended up as.

They were never a non-commercial. Channel 31 was always a commercial allocation and in those days you couldn't convert to non-comm status without being an educational institution.

That is why they were able to broker time to outside programmers, and why the idea of "S+" seemed so attractive to Dow Jones and ITT, who were willing to more than triple Giuliani's original asking price for the station. As I wrote in the article on the UHF History site, that was a disaster.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

Just for for some snots and giggles here:
I wanted to be a DJ from back in like 6th grade. Four of us from a Queens grammar school wound up passing what seemed like a four-hour multiple-choice admission exam in Brooklyn Tech's huge auditorium.
Upon *orientation* this wannabee disc jockey was banished to take cosseted English classes for students with one form or another speech impediment. See, I didn't speak or project loud enough for Tech's bigger classrooms. I thought, np, I'd just turn up the volume on any microphone I'd have to use.
I applied for acceptance to the WNYE Page Squad. Myself and two others from that same 'special' speech class got cleared, big button and all, to be gophers for them in their 'offices' during our lunch period. I forget the floor; Tech had eight floors.
I thus got to, in a way, speak my first radio words ever at a station in the nation's #1 market. And with a ten-ton NYC accent that by comparison would make The Fonz sound like Sir Laurence Olivier, I remember them vividly.
'Yo. Waddya want fa lunch?'
See, I had not seen the red light above the door to where some guy was reading news at the time.
Oops. They let it slide, after a short lecture. Good training for later.

 

[Weiserguy]

Just for for some snots and giggles here:
I wanted to be a DJ from back in like 6th grade. Four of us from a Queens grammar school wound up passing what seemed like a four-hour multiple-choice admission exam in Brooklyn Tech's huge auditorium.
Upon *orientation* this wannabee disc jockey was banished to take cosseted English classes for students with one form or another speech impediment. See, I didn't speak or project loud enough for Tech's bigger classrooms. I thought, np, I'd just turn up the volume on any microphone I'd have to use.
I applied for acceptance to the WNYE Page Squad. Myself and two others from that same 'special' speech class got cleared, big button and all, to be gophers for them in their 'offices' during our lunch period. I forget the floor; Tech had eight floors.
I thus got to, in a way, speak my first radio words ever at a station in the nation's #1 market. And with a ten-ton NYC accent that by comparison would make The Fonz sound like Sir Laurence Olivier, I remember them vividly.
'Yo. Waddya want fa lunch?'
See, I had not seen the red light above the door to where some guy was reading news at the time.
Oops. They let it slide, after a short lecture. Good training for later.

Steve, old buddy, reading your musings takes me back to my days of trying to learn computer programming from official IBM manuals. Super-dense, requiring multiple re-reads to catch the gist, each weighing about the equivalent of a second-year calculus text. Though admittedly your stuff's a lot more fun.

BTW, if you really are from Queens, did you ever meet that guy from Jamaica Estates who colored his hair with a chisel-tip yellow highlighter?

Never mind, paint on.