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  City
  Station Logo
  Station Slogan
  Station Branding WUSA 9 (general)<br>9 News Now (newscasts)
  Analog 9 ( VHF )
  Digital 34 ( UHF )
  Other Chs
  Affiliations CBS
  Network
  Founded January 16 , 1949
  Location Washington, DC
  Callsign Meaning '''USA''' Today <br>(published by Gannett)
  Former Callsigns WOIC-TV (1949-1950)<br>WTOP-TV (1950-1978)<br>WDVM-TV (1978-1986)
  Former Channel Numbers
  Owner Gannett
  Licensee Detroit Free Press, Inc
  Sister Stations
  Former Affiliations
  Effective Radiated Power 316 KW (analog)<br>1000 kW (digital)
  HAAT 235 M (analog)<br>254 m (digital)
  Class
  Facility Id 65593
  Coordinates
  Homepage wwwwusa9com


WUSA, channel 9, is the Washington, D.C. affiliate of the CBS television network. The flagship of the Gannett Company , WUSA's studios and transmitter are located in the Tenleytown area of Washington (the tower is shared with WJLA-TV ). WUSA was CBS' largest station in market size not to be Owned And Operated by the network until the 2007-08 television season, when the Atlanta market passed up Washington, D.C. in the market rankings; however, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta is on UHF , making WUSA the largest VHF CBS affiliate to not be a network O&O.


HISTORY

The station officially went on the air on January 11 , 1949 as WOIC-TV, and began full-time operations on January 16 . It is the fourth-oldest station in the nation's capital. Its original owner was the Bamberger Broadcasting Service, a subsidiary of R.H. Macy And Company , which also owned WOR-AM - FM in New York City , and was working to put WOR-TV (now WWOR-TV ) on the air at the same time. Nine days later, WOIC broadcast the first televised American presidential inaugural address, given by President Harry S. Truman .

WOIC-TV picked up the . However, Mutual Television never made it to air, leaving channel 9 to remain a CBS station.

In June 1950 , CBS teamed up with the '' Washington Post '' to purchase WOIC-TV from Bamberger/Macy's. The new owners, WTOP Incorporated (the ''Washington Post'' owned 55 percent, and CBS held the remaining 45 percent), changed the station's Call Sign to '''WTOP-TV''', after its new sister stations WTOP radio (then at 1500 kHz.) and WTOP-FM (96.3 MHz., now WHUR-FM ).

In July 1950, WTOP-TV became the first television station in Washington authorized to broadcast color television in the 405-line field sequential color standard, which was incompatible with the black-and-white 525-line NTSC standard. Color broadcasts would continue for nearly 30 months, when regulatory and commercial pressures forced the FCC to rescind its original color standard and begin the process of adopting the 525-line NTSC-3 standard, developed by RCA to be backwards compatible with the existing black-and-white televisions.

In 1954, the WTOP stations moved into a new facility, known as "Broadcast House", at 40th and Brandywine streets NW in Washington. The building was the first in the country designed as a unified radio and television facility. Its name was in honor of Broadcasting House , home of the BBC in London . The building was well-known to WTOP's president. since he had spent much of World War II assigned to the BBC. Previous to the move to Broadcast House, the radio stations operated out of the Earle Building (now the Warner Building, home of the Warner Theatre ), and WTOP-TV had operated out of the small WOIC studios at the same location. When Broadcast House was completed and the new television studios were inaugurated, the old studio became the garage for Broadcast House and the old master control room became both the master control and transmitter room for channel 9, since Broadcast House had been built around the station's original, four-sided tower. People can still see the building with the tower in the middle at the same location, although it is now an office building and retail store front operated by Douglas Development Corp.

The WTOP-TV tower was well known in Washington for two things. First, at Christmas time, the tower was strung with Christmas lights and glowed brightly on top of Mount Reno, the tallest point in the District of Columbia. Second, the tower tended to sway much more than three-sided towers. In a strong wind the tower could be seen swaying back-and-forth, and during the winter ice from the tower fell quite often on the streets below.

Also in 1954, CBS sold its share of WTOP Inc. to the ''Post'' to comply with the Federal Communications Commission 's new seven-station-per-group ownership rule. CBS's partial ownership of WTOP radio and WCCO Radio in Minneapolis exceeded the FCC's limit for AM stations. CBS opted to sell its share of WTOP. It had bought the station in 1932, selling controlling interest to the ''Post'' in 1949. After the sale closed, the ''Post'' merged the WTOP stations with its other broadcast property, WMBR -AM- TV in Jacksonville, Florida and changed the name of the licensee from "WTOP Inc." to "Post Stations, Inc." WMBR-AM was sold off in 1958 , and WMBR-TV became WJXT . The ''Post'' renamed its broadcasting group '''" Post-Newsweek Stations "''' in 1961 after the ''Post'' bought '' Newsweek '' magazine. Post-Newsweek acquired its third television station, WLBW-TV (now WPLG ) in Miami in 1970 and in 1974 added WTIC-TV (now WFSB ) in Hartford, Connecticut to the group.

In 1972 WTOP-TV joined with the Evening Star Broadcasting Company (owned by the ''Post's'' rival, the now-defunct '' Washington Star '' and licensee of WMAL-TV) to build the Joint Tower, a 1040-foot, three-sided tower across the alley from Broadcast House at 4010 Chesapeake Street, NW. Transmission lines were extended from Broadcast House's transmitter area to the new tower for both WTOP-TV and WHUR-FM (the former WTOP-FM, which had been donated by Post-Newsweek to Howard University in 1971 ). The old tower continued to serve as the backup antenna for channel 9 until the station sold Broadcast House in 1996 .

In 1974, WTOP and the other Post-Newsweek stations adopted the slogan ''The One and Only''. The moniker was part of a trend toward group identification of stations, with each station being ''The One and Only Channel (channel number)''. Staff members from the ''One and Only'' period usually refer to themselves as "the one and onlies" as a source of pride. The slogan was dropped from active use in the late 1990s and has not been used as part of an image campaign since 1996 . The slogan no longer appears on the air, but was revived in a sense when channel 9 adopted its current slogan, ''First and Only with Local News in HDTV.''

In July , V for Virginia , and '''M''' for Maryland . The ''Washington Post'' and the Evening News Association, which published the '' Detroit News '', decided to swap their stations for fear the FCC would force them to sell the stations at unfavorable terms or revoke their very valuable licenses because the FCC at the time was considering forbidding ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations in the same market.


WUSA-TV moved to a new Broadcast House at 4100 Wisconsin Avenue, NW in January 1992. WTOP-FM had left the old Broadcast House in 1971 , but kept its transmitter there. WTOP-AM departed in 1978; the Post had sold it a year earlier to the Outlet Company . The move to the more modern building was tinged with sadness due to the death from a brain tumor of channel 9's popular sportcaster, Glenn Brenner just days before the move.

WUSA-TV began broadcasting digital television in 1999 on WUSA-DT, channel 34. From the start of transmissions, WUSA-DT carried the HDTV transmissions of the CBS Television Network in the network's chosen standard, 1080i. On May 2 , 2005 at 11:00PM EDT, WUSA-DT became the first station in the D.C. Metropolitan Area to broadcast their local newscasts in HDTV using the 1080i standard. The newscast promos, traffic cameras, and "Doppler 9000" has changed to 16:9 HD, and the remote reports are usually SD widescreen, although, occasionally, featured stories will be done in HDTV. The station has said that they would be ready to carry syndicated programming in HDTV, if the content becomes available.


PERSONALITIES

WUSA-TV was the launchpad for several well-known news anchors. Sam Donaldson and Warner Wolf are among WUSA-TV's most successful alumni. The late Max Robinson was co-anchor of Eyewitness News with Gordon Peterson from 1969 to 1978 before he became the first black anchorman on network television and one of the original anchors of ABC's World News Tonight . James Brown of CBS Sports was a sports anchor at the station in the 1980s.


Current Personalities



Anchors



Reporters



Weather



Sports



Traffic



Managers




Past Personalities


(D) - Deceased

This list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it .


SLOGANS



AWARDS

2001 Emmy: NEWS SPECIALS, ", Producer, Catherine Snyder-Charlip , Producer, Samara Martin Ewing , Producer {Link without Title}


FOOTNOTES



EXTERNAL LINKS