FOX 5 (WTTG) Washington DC

FOX 5 (WTTG) Washington DC

WTTG, channel 5, is a Fox owned-and-operated television station located in the capital city of Washington, District of Columbia, United States. The station is owned by the Fox Television Stations subsidiary of 21st Century Fox, and is part of a duopoly with MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station WDCA (channel 20). The station's studios/office facilities and its transmitter are co-located in the Tenleytown neighborhood on the northwest side of Washington.

The station's signal is rebroadcast on a low-powered translator station, W46BR-D, in Moorefield, West Virginia. (which is owned by Valley TV Cooperative, Inc.). On cable, the station is carried on Xfinity channel 25 in standard definition and on digital channel 213 in high definition.

WTTG presently broadcasts 45 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with eight hours on weekdays, two hours on Saturdays and three hours on Sundays); in regards to the number of hours devoted to news programming, it is the highest local newscast output of any television station in the Washington, D.C. market. As is standard with Fox stations that carry early evening weekend newscasts, WTTG's Saturday and Sunday 5 p.m. newscasts are subject to preemption or delay due to sports coverage.

WTTG has carried local news programming since shortly after the station launched; for many years, the only news program on the station was a nightly primetime broadcast at 10 p.m. Then on June 25, 1990, channel 5 became the second Fox-owned station and the fourth or fifth Fox affiliate with a weekday morning news program, with the debut of the two-hour Fox 5 Morning News, which replaced a block of cartoons that previously aired during the program's timeslot. In the late 1990s, a noon newscast was added to the schedule.

In 2002, early evening newscasts were brought to the station with the launch of an hour-long newscast at 5 p.m. on weekdays; a half-hour newscast at 6 p.m. on weekends followed soon after. WTTG then launched a half-hour 11 p.m. newscast called NewsEdge (previously titled The Edge until October 2006) on July 31, 2006. Concurrent with the launch of the 11 p.m. broadcast, the station expanded its 6 p.m. broadcast to weekdays. NewsEdge also later expanded to a seven-day-a-week schedule, with the weekend editions of the newscast running for 15 minutes, with the remainder of the timeslot being padded out by the sports highlight program Sports Extra.

On September 4, 2006, WTTG began simulcasting its weekday morning and nightly 10 p.m. newscasts on then-Baltimore sister station WUTB (now owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group partner company Deerfield Media), under the banner of My 24 News. Management at both stations cited the decision to simulcast as a by-product of cross-regional news interests and increasing overlap between the Baltimore and Washington media markets. In October 2006, while WTTG aired Fox Sports' coverage of the 2006 Major League Baseball postseason, the first half-hour of the 10 p.m. newscast was broadcast by sister station WDCA under the title Fox 5 News at Ten: Special Edition; this also occurred in 2007, with the WDCA broadcast of the program being titled My 20 News at 10.

On July 2, 2007, WTTG discontinued its noon newscast and replaced it with an hour-long newscast at 11 a.m., titled Fox 5 News Midday. On September 10, 2007, the station reformatted its 6 p.m. newscast into an early evening edition of NewsEdge; the addition of NewsEdge at 6 p.m. was due in part to the success of its current 11 p.m. counterpart. On January 14, 2009, WTTG and WRC-TV entered into a Local News Service agreement in which the two stations pool video and share news helicopter footage.

On January 30, 2009, starting with its 6 p.m. newscast, WTTG became the third television station in the Washington, D.C. market (behind CBS affiliate WUSA and ABC affiliate WJLA-TV) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. On September 14, 2009, WTTG expanded its weekday morning newscast to five hours by adding an additional hour at 9 a.m.; in turn, its hour-long 11 a.m. midday newscast was discontinued. In early 2010, WTTG became the second station in the market (behind WUSA) to expand its weekday morning newscast to 4:30 a.m.  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia