WNOL-TV

Overview

WNOL-TV is a television station in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, broadcasting on virtual channel 38. It serves the New Orleans market as the local outlet for The CW, branding itself as NOLA CW38 in its current presentation, earlier as NOLA 38. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside the market's ABC affiliate WGNO on channel 26. The two stations share studios at The Galleria in Metairie, Louisiana, and WNOL-TV's programming is presented online through WGNO's wgno.com site, at its NOLA 38 section. Nexstar's Tegna subsidiary separately owns New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV and independent and MyNetworkTV station WUPL in the same market.

Channel 38 was New Orleans' second independent station when it began broadcasting in 1984, entering a market where WGNO had been the only major independent for seventeen years. It became the city's Fox affiliate at that network's launch, then, in a market-wide affiliation shuffle in 1996, took over The WB from WGNO, and in 2006 it followed The WB into The CW, the affiliation it still holds. Its history also runs through one of the defining events in its city's history: Hurricane Katrina destroyed the transmitter facilities it shared with WGNO in August 2005 and reshaped the station's technical plant.

History

WNOL-TV signed on on March 25, 1984, as an independent station owned by Channel 38 Associates, a consortium made up mostly of investors from outside New Orleans, led by a group associated with Hal Protter. Its schedule was the standard independent mix of the era: films, cartoons, religious programmes, drama series and other general entertainment. The new station made a credible start in ratings, but its position weakened as Tribune Broadcasting, which had bought WGNO in 1983, invested heavily in its established competitor. TVX Broadcast Group acquired the financially pressed channel 38 in late 1985. In July 1985, before that sale, the station had become the first commercial television station in the New Orleans market to broadcast in stereo.

Under TVX the station slowly closed the ratings gap with WGNO, helped by its new network affiliation, but TVX's own financial problems forced another sale. In 1989 the station was sold to a group controlled by the musician Quincy Jones. It remained under that ownership, which evolved into Qwest Broadcasting in the mid-1990s, through the affiliation changes of 1996 and until Tribune, which held a minority stake in Qwest and provided it financial backing, bought WNOL-TV outright after duopolies were legalised in 1999, completing the purchase in 2000 and creating the first television duopoly in the New Orleans market. Operations of the two stations were not fully combined in one facility until July 2005, when they moved into the New Orleans Centre, only a month before Hurricane Katrina forced them out again.

Network Affiliation

WNOL-TV joined Fox at the network's launch, signing its affiliation on October 6, 1986 by most accounts, with Fox prime time beginning in the 1986-87 season; some summaries date its status as a Fox affiliate from 1987, when the network's prime-time service expanded. It carried Fox through the network's growth years, adding the network's children's and sports programming to its independent-style schedule, and by the turn of the decade it had drawn level with WGNO in total-day ratings.

The affiliation ended because of a national deal. In 1994 a group in which Fox held a minority stake bought WVUE, channel 8, New Orleans' ABC affiliate, and Fox programming was destined for that station. In the resulting switch on January 1, 1996, ABC moved to WGNO and Fox to WVUE, while WNOL-TV became the new home of The WB in New Orleans, absorbing the network affiliation and some syndicated programmes from WGNO; The WB had aired on WGNO since the network's January 1995 launch. Ten years later, when The WB and UPN were merged into The CW, Tribune signed a ten-year agreement affiliating sixteen of its nineteen WB stations with the new network, and WNOL-TV was announced as The CW's New Orleans affiliate. It took the affiliation at The CW's debut in September 2006 and has held it since.

Ownership

The ownership sequence runs from Channel 38 Associates to TVX Broadcast Group in 1985, to the Quincy Jones-controlled group in 1989, which became Qwest Broadcasting with Tribune as a minority partner and backer, to Tribune itself, which operated the station under a local marketing agreement from the mid-1990s and purchased it outright in 2000. Tribune owned both New Orleans stations for nearly two decades. An attempted sale of Tribune to Sinclair Broadcast Group, announced in May 2017, was abandoned on August 9, 2018. Tribune was instead acquired by Nexstar Media Group in 2019, in a transaction valued at $6.4 billion in cash and debt, and WNOL-TV and WGNO became Nexstar stations, the ownership under which channel 38 operates today.

Programming

As a CW affiliate, WNOL-TV's prime time is given to the network, and the rest of its schedule is built from syndicated entertainment: off-network sitcoms, talk shows, court programmes and drama reruns. Long-running syndicated comedies have been a mainstay of its early evening lineup, a deliberate strategy the station leaned into after 2010, when it refocused its schedule to emphasise its syndicated sitcom reruns and shifted CW prime time an hour later, airing the network from 8 to 10 p.m. instead of 7 to 9 p.m. In its independent and Fox years the mix was broader, with films, cartoons and children's programmes alongside network shows, and as a WB affiliate it carried that network's youth-oriented prime time and children's blocks.

News Operation

WNOL-TV had no long-standing news tradition of its own. Its one significant local news effort was produced by its sister station: on May 1, 2006, WGNO began producing a half-hour prime-time newscast at 9 p.m. for WNOL-TV, an idea that had been discussed for years under Tribune management. The weeknight-only programme competed with the longer-established hour-long 9 p.m. news on Fox affiliate WVUE and, from June 2007, with a half-hour programme produced by WWL-TV for WUPL in the same slot. Ratings were very poor, and the newscast was cancelled after four years, airing for the last time on June 4, 2010. Since then channel 38 has had no regular local newscast of its own, with viewers directed to WGNO for the duopoly's news coverage.

Subchannels

WNOL-TV's main subchannel, 38.1, carries The CW in high definition. Its second subchannel, 38.2, carried This TV for an extended period, appearing in cable listings as WNOL This TV, and the station's digital service has followed the usual pattern for CW affiliates in the Nexstar group, with entertainment diginets filling the secondary channels. The station's over-the-air identity remains virtual channel 38, the number it has used since 1984, regardless of the physical channel its digital signal occupies.

Studios and Transmitter

WNOL-TV shares studios with WGNO at The Galleria in Metairie, on Galleria Drive, the facility the combined operation occupied from August 29, 2007, the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in a new high-definition-ready plant with a purpose-built news set and weather centre. Its transmitter is located in Chalmette, Louisiana, southeast of New Orleans. Before the Galleria move, the stations endured two unsettled years after Katrina: the hurricane demolished the transmitter facilities of both WGNO and WNOL-TV on August 29, 2005, and evicted the stations from the New Orleans Centre studios they had occupied for only a month. The rebuilding that followed rearranged their digital assignments. WGNO had been assigned channel 15 for digital use and WNOL-TV channel 40, but Tribune chose to rebuild WNOL-TV on channel 15, carrying both stations, and to convert WGNO to digital on its own channel 26 at the analog transition, sharing a site with NBC affiliate WDSU.

Digital Transition

WNOL-TV broadcast in analog on channel 38 from 1984 until the national transition in 2009. Its post-Katrina digital rebuilding placed its digital signal on VHF/UHF assignment channel 15 rather than its originally planned channel 40, an arrangement that let the duopoly restore digital service for both of its stations from shared facilities. Receivers have always displayed the station as channel 38. The technical story of the station is therefore inseparable from the post-hurricane reconstruction of New Orleans broadcasting, in which transmitter sharing and revised channel assignments were used to return stations to the air.

Market Role and Availability

WNOL-TV's role in New Orleans is that of the market's CW station and the entertainment partner in Nexstar's duopoly with ABC affiliate WGNO. It gives the market a full-power home for The CW network, a deep library of syndicated comedy and talk programming, and a second broadcast outlet under the same roof as one of the city's network affiliates. It is available over the air on channel 38 across southeastern Louisiana, on cable systems in the New Orleans area, where listings have placed it at channel 13 on the principal local system, through satellite and streaming providers, and online through WGNO's website. Its four decades on air cover the whole modern era of independent and network television in New Orleans, from the first challenge to WGNO's independent monopoly, through the Fox and WB years and the recovery from Katrina, to its present place in the Nexstar group.