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WLKY 32

WLKY 32 - Louisville, Kentucky
Address: Louisville, KY
Website: http://www.wlky.com/
Published: 31 stories by 12 authors

About

WLKY-TV is a television station located in Louisville, Kentucky USA, and serves the Louisville area and southeastern Indiana. The station is owned by the Hearst Corporation, and is an affiliate of the CBS television network. WLKY's transmitter is located north of Louisville in Floyds Knobs, Indiana.

The station signed on September 16, 1961 as a full-time ABC affiliate. Previously, the ABC affiliation in Louisville was shared between NBC affiliate WAVE-TV and then-CBS affiliate WHAS-TV. Although Louisville had been big enough since the early 1950s to support three full affiliates, it had a fairly long wait for full network service.. The Louisville market is a fairly large market geographically, and also includes some rugged terrain. The nearest VHF allocations, channels 7 and 13, had been allocated to Evansville and Bowling Green, respectively. These factors made perspective owners skittish about setting up shop on one of the available UHF allocations in the area.

WLKY was founded by a local group, Kentuckiana Television, who in 1967 sold it to Sonderling Broadcasting (which would acquire several medium-market radio and television stations such as WAST in Albany, New York (now WNYT) until that company merged with Viacom in 1979). In 1973, Sonderling sold the station to Combined Communications. In 1979, Combined Communications merged with the Gannett Company.

In the spring of 1983, Gannett sold WLKY, along with WPTA in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Pulitzer after it purchased WLVI-TV in Boston (currently owned by Sunbeam Television) from Field Communications. Pulitzer kept WLKY but sold WPTA to Granite Broadcasting in 1989.

In September 1990, just over seven years after Pulitzer completed its purchase of the station, WLKY swapped network affiliations with WHAS (by then owned by the Providence Journal Company, now owned by Belo), with WLKY taking the CBS affiliation and WHAS becoming the ABC affiliate?much to that station's chagrin. This came after then-second-place ABC became dissatisfied with the viewership ratings at some of its affiliates (while CBS was in distant third at this midpoint of the Laurence Tisch era of the network's history), and ABC wanted a stronger affiliation. WLKY had long been one of ABC's weaker affiliates, while WHAS had been the dominant station in Louisville for almost 20 years at the time.

However due to the varying terrain of the Kentuckiana area, cable television is almost a requirement for effective viewing, and with the combination of a low universal cable channel number (Channel 5 on both Comcast and Insight), Hearst's aggressive station marketing efforts, and the digital transition leaving only WHAS and WBNA on the VHF band after the June 12, 2009 deadline, WLKY's former weakness of being a UHF station has been almost completely nullified.

Pulitzer sold its entire broadcasting division, including WLKY, to what was then Hearst-Argyle Television in 1999. From 1977 to 1986, WLKY was known as "32 Alive." At the time, Combined Communications used the "Alive" moniker on four of its stations-- WLKY, KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City, WXIA-TV in Atlanta and WPTA in Fort Wayne. Gannett-owned WXIA still uses the "Alive" moniker, as does WPTA, although that station is no longer owned by Gannett.

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Stories (31) Page 1 of 2

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Thursday, May 21st, 2020 @ 10:50AM
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Monday, December 24th, 2018 @ 09:22PM
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Friday, February 16th, 2018 @ 06:44AM
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Wednesday, March 29th, 2017 @ 10:57AM
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Thursday, January 19th, 2017 @ 10:06PM
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Monday, May 23rd, 2016 @ 08:24AM
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Friday, March 6th, 2015 @ 08:13PM
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Monday, October 28th, 2013 @ 10:45PM
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Tuesday, June 18th, 2013 @ 08:25PM
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Monday, February 11th, 2013 @ 11:50PM
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Sunday, November 18th, 2012 @ 09:48PM
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Thursday, October 4th, 2012 @ 05:17PM
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Sunday, August 12th, 2012 @ 09:57PM
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Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 @ 05:52PM
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Monday, April 16th, 2012 @ 06:37PM
UPDATED: Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 @ 09:23PM
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Sunday, January 15th, 2012 @ 07:16PM
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Saturday, October 15th, 2011 @ 12:38AM
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Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 @ 07:13PM
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Friday, January 14th, 2011 @ 07:29AM
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Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 @ 06:46PM
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Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 @ 02:04PM
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Monday, December 6th, 2010 @ 10:05PM
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Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 @ 08:54AM
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Saturday, October 24th, 2009 @ 07:08AM
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Thursday, July 30th, 2009 @ 01:28AM
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