FOX 6 (WITI ) Milwaukee, Wisconsin

FOX MILWAUKEE

WITI, channel 6, is a Fox-affiliated television station located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. WITI is owned by Local TV, the broadcasting subsidiary of private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners, and has studio and office facilities in Brown Deer, Wisconsin (though with a Milwaukee address) and its transmitter based in Shorewood, Wisconsin.

The station began broadcasting on May 21, 1956, and was originally owned by Independent Television, Inc., to whom the channel 6 license was granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on June 11, 1955. The station was originally licensed to the North Shore village of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin on a technicality in order to address short-spacing concerns with Davenport, Iowa station WOC-TV (which also broadcast on channel 6) before the FCC fully finessed spacing among television station signals in different markets.

WITI started out as an independent station; in October 1956, the station affiliated with the NTA Film Network, which provided the station with 52 20th Century Fox films and syndicated programming. Among the programs aired by WITI were The Passerby, Man Without a Gun, and This is Alice.

In early 1994, New World announced a long-term program development and station affiliation deal with the Fox Broadcasting Company, resulting in most of the stations that were part of the New World station group switching their affiliations from one of the Big Three television networks to Fox – including WITI.

WITI presently broadcasts 52 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (8½ hours on weekdays, and five hours on Saturdays and 5½ 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 Milwaukee market and the state of Wisconsin in general. The station's morning newscasts usually place a strong first or second in the demographic ratings with WISN and WDJT finishing third or fourth. With the November 2011 ratings book, the Fox 6 Wake Up News beat all its competitors to finish first in the ratings and officially holding that position for two straight years.

Channel 6's news department began with the launch of the station in 1956, its newscast was then known as Milwaukee Newsreel. When WITI became a Fox-owned station in the mid-1990s, the station placed more emphasis on its local newscasts; newscasts expanded to include an additional two hours of its morning newscast in the 7-9 a.m. slot, the 5 p.m. newscast expanded from 30 minutes to one hour on weekdays and an hour-long nightly primetime newscast at 9 p.m. was added. The station is also one of several Fox stations with a newscast in the traditional late news timeslot (in WITI's case, 10 p.m. Central time), in addition to the primetime 9 p.m. newscast, along with one of the few to continue their existing Big Three-era 10 p.m. newscast after the affiliate switch, and one of a handful of Fox stations to run a 10 p.m. (or 11 p.m.) newscast seven nights a week.

On December 3, 2007, the weekday noon newscast moved to 11 a.m. Two days prior on December 1, the Saturday morning edition of Wake-Up News was expanded to two hours beginning at 7 a.m., and the Sunday morning broadcast was also moved to 7 a.m., but remained one hour long. In addition, Gus Gnorski's Saturday morning DIY program Ask Gus, was put on hiatus, with Gnorski's segments merged into the Saturday morning newscast; the program's former studio became the new home of Wake-Up in May 2008. On March 28, 2009, the station suspended its morning and early evening newscasts on weekends; the weekend morning newscasts were briefly replaced by reruns of Ask Gus on April 4 (Gus Gnorski's medically necessitated retirement put an end to the station's plans to revive Ask Gus, with the how-to program ending its 15-year run on November 24, 2007).

On December 5, 2009, WITI became the second station in Milwaukee (behind WTMJ-TV) to begin broadcasting their local newscasts in high definition. WITI is the first and (as of June 28, 2011) only Milwaukee area station to broadcast all locally originated portions of its newscasts, including live field reports in high definition (WTMJ, WDJT and WISN also produce HD newscasts, though WTMJ and WDJT both carry a mix of HD and SD news footage, footage from WTMJ's helicopter is upconverted to widescreen, and most field video shown on WISN's newscasts are broadcast in widescreen SD). In February 2010, WITI extended its weekday morning newscast to 4½ hours, with the start time moved one hour earlier to 4:30 a.m. On April 2, 2011, WITI resumed the Saturday and Sunday morning newscasts after a two-year absence, airing for two hours from 7 to 9 a.m. on both days. Weekend early evening newscasts were subsequently restored at the start of April 2012.

In December 2012, WITI began construction of a new Studio A set designed by FX Group, resulting in the dismantling of the "Milwaukee's Newscenter" set, which had received three refreshes over the course of its 14 years of use. All newscasts and Real Milwaukee then temporarily originated from the in Studio B set that houses the station's morning newscast (WakeUp News). The new Studio A was partially introduced on February 11, 2013, with modifications to the secondary set continuing for a couple of weeks after. A new graphics package and the debut of a new music package ("Extreme" by Stephen Arnold) was introduced on April 22, 2013.  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia