WICS
WICS, channel 20, branded as WICS ABC 20 with newscasts titled NewsChannel 20, is a television station in Springfield, Illinois, in the United States, affiliated with ABC for the Central Illinois market of Champaign, Springfield and Decatur. It is owned by Community News Media LLC and operates Champaign-licensed semi-satellite WICD, channel 15. Its sister stations in the market include Fox affiliates WRSP-TV and WCCU and CW affiliate WBUI, which are operated with WICS from shared studios at 2680 East Cook Street in Springfield's Eastside. WICS is one of the oldest television stations in Illinois outside Chicago, having signed on on September 17, 1953. For most of its first half-century it was an NBC affiliate; it became an ABC affiliate on September 5, 2005, in a swap with Decatur station WAND. Its call sign is explained as standing for "We're Illinois' Capital, Springfield", a reference to Springfield's status as the capital city of Illinois. Its website is newschannel20.com.
Sign-On in 1953 and the Four-Network Era
WICS began operations on September 17, 1953. It was owned by Plains Television Partners of Springfield, a fifty-fifty joint venture of Transcontinental Properties and the H & E Balaban Corporation. It carried programming from all four networks of the era, NBC, CBS, ABC and DuMont, although it was a primary NBC affiliate. The mixture reflected the structure of the market at the time. Although the Federal Communications Commission had collapsed most of east central Illinois into one large television market, WICS took on a secondary CBS affiliation because the primary CBS affiliate, WCIA in Champaign, provided only a marginal signal to Springfield. It also aired ABC programmes that WTVP in Decatur, now WAND, had to turn down in order to air CBS shows not cleared by WCIA. The station originally had facilities at the Leland Hotel on Capitol Street in downtown Springfield. By 1958, as DuMont had closed and network affiliations settled, WICS was an exclusive NBC affiliate, the identity it would keep until 2005.
Studios, Signal and the Creation of WICD
In 1964 WICS moved to its current studios on East Cook Street in east Springfield. The FCC at one point considered making east central Illinois an all-UHF market but dropped those plans under heavy lobbying from WCIA. A persistent problem was coverage: WICS's signal was not strong enough to reach the eastern portion of the market, because UHF signals at the time were not strong enough to cover large amounts of territory. Accordingly, in 1959 Plains Television signed on WCHU in Champaign as a low-powered satellite of WICS. In 1960 it bought WDAN-TV, another low-powered station in Danville, and changed its calls to WICD. At the same time, WCHU began breaking away from the WICS signal to air some local programming for the eastern side of the market, which was simulcast on WICD. In 1967 Plains Television merged WCHU and WICD into a new full-power station on UHF channel 15 under the WICD calls, operating under the WCHU licence. That station remains WICS's semi-satellite in Champaign, extending the Springfield station's network and news brand across the whole combined market.
Plains Television, Guy Gannett and Sinclair
Plains Television owned the Springfield and Champaign stations for four decades. In 1994 Plains sold WICD, and with it the paired operation, to Guy Gannett, which put significant resources into the stations, particularly the news department. Guy Gannett then sold most of its television properties, including WICS and WICD, to Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1999; the Illinois Times account of Springfield broadcasting likewise dates Don Hickman's difficulties at the station to the year after Sinclair acquired WICS from Guy Gannett. Soon after taking over, Sinclair announced it was selling WICS and WICD, as well as KGAN in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Sunrise Television. The FCC did not allow Sunrise to buy WICS and WICD, because of Sunrise's ownership structure: Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, an investment firm that owned a large block of Sunrise stock, was also the majority stockholder of LIN TV Corporation, then owner of WAND in Decatur. The FCC ruled that the firm held enough stock in Sunrise that an acquisition of WICS and WICD would create a duopoly between two of the four highest-rated stations in the market, which was forbidden by FCC rules. Sinclair subsequently withdrew the offer to sell the three stations in 2000, and with the eventual relaxation of ownership limits, Sinclair took the stations off the market and retained them.
The 2005 Swap from NBC to ABC
The station's forty-six-year affiliation with NBC, counting WICD's parallel history, ended on September 5, 2005, when WICS and WICD swapped affiliations with WAND and became ABC affiliates. The swap was part of a larger national deal between LIN TV and NBC that also involved WDTN in Dayton, Ohio, which had swapped affiliations with the Dayton sister station WKEF the year before. WICS and WICD were to have switched to ABC at the beginning of the 2004-05 television season, but were required to remain with NBC for another year because the affiliation contract did not expire until September 4 of the following year. The change rebranded the station as ABC NewsChannel 20, a title it has kept in updated form as NewsChannel 20. For viewers, the practical effect was that ABC's prime-time, sports and news programmes replaced NBC's on channel 20 in Springfield and channel 15 in Champaign, while NBC moved to channel 17 in Decatur. Network swaps of this kind were a characteristic product of group-level affiliation negotiations in the 2000s, decided nationally rather than by the individual station.
Carriage Beyond the Market: Terre Haute
An episode after the ABC switch illustrates the reach of the WICS signal and the oddities of market boundaries. On November 17, 2010, WICS became available to Dish Network customers in Terre Haute, Indiana, as the ABC affiliate, since that market lacked an affiliate of its own at the time. WICD's transmitter is near the border between Illinois and Indiana, and WICD was carried on most cable systems on the Illinois side of the Terre Haute market. However, WICS was the only station uplinked by satellite providers, because of contractual obligations, since it was considered the main station of the pair. WICS disappeared from the Terre Haute local feed in the fall of 2011, after that city's Fox affiliate, WFXW, rejoined ABC as WAWV-TV, giving Terre Haute a local ABC affiliate of its own. For about a year, therefore, Springfield's channel 20 served as the satellite-delivered ABC station for a market in another state.
Consolidation with WRSP, WCCU and WBUI
On December 31, 2012, Sinclair closed on the purchase of the non-license assets of GOCOM Media's three television stations in the market, Fox affiliates WRSP-TV and WCCU and CW affiliate WBUI, for approximately $25.6 million. Sinclair provided sales and other non-programming services to those stations under shared services and joint sales agreements. WRSP, WCCU and WBUI were initially operated from separate facilities from WICS and WICD. WCCU quickly moved its advertising sales operation from its location on South Neil Street in Champaign into WICD's studios. Eventually WRSP and WBUI also moved from their offices on Old Rochester Road in Springfield and were consolidated into WICS's East Cook Street facility. The station group also took part in the market's launch of NextGen TV, the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, in the Champaign and Springfield-Decatur market, in an industry launch involving WICS and WICD alongside the market's Nexstar, GOCOM and Block Communications stations. The consolidation explains the present structure in which WICS shares studios and services with WRSP, WCCU and WBUI while retaining separate licences and network affiliations.
News Operation and NewsChannel 20
News is the station's principal local product, presented as NewsChannel 20. Historical titles for its newscasts include Standard Oil News in the 1960s, WICS 20 News from 1979 to 1991, 20 News from 1991 to 1994, WICS NewsChannel 20 from 1994 to 2005, and ABC NewsChannel 20 from 2005. Its production also serves sister stations: WICS produces news for the Fox pair WRSP and WCCU, including a prime-time NewsChannel at 9 that was expanded to an hour on weekdays in October 2013 and a two-hour weekday morning show, Good Day Illinois, from 7 to 9 a.m., launched in January 2014. WICS meteorologists have also provided weather segments for WBUI. Local newscasts on WICS were upgraded to high definition in December 2012, with a new set at the Springfield studios and updated Sinclair corporate graphics; rival WAND had been first in the wider east-central Illinois area to upgrade, in June 2010. On March 26, 2011, semi-satellite WICD ceased airing its own weekend newscasts and began simulcasting those from WICS, while multimedia journalists based at WICD's Champaign studios continued to provide coverage of the eastern areas of the market. It was the second attempt at a joint market-wide news product by the pair; at one point there had also been a weeknight 5 p.m. newscast simulcast on both stations from Springfield.
Don Hickman and the Station's Public Face
For twenty-nine years the best-known face of WICS news was anchor Don Hickman. Hickman came to Springfield in April 1972 to serve as Channel 20's 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. anchor, after a career that included covering civil rights-era events for WMC-TV in Memphis, including the aftermath of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr on April 4, 1968, only blocks from that station's studios, and work as an NBC correspondent covering the trial of the Chicago Seven in 1969 and 1970. In Springfield he earned the nickname "Old Stoneface" for his serious on-air persona. In 2000, the year after Sinclair acquired the station, he was taken off the 6 p.m. newscast, and in early 2001 he and other veterans were offered early retirement; his departure was involuntary, and viewers regarded him as an institution. The State Journal-Register compared him editorially to Walter Cronkite's place in national life. Hickman died on November 19, 2011. His long tenure, from 1972 to 2001, spans most of the station's NBC era and is a reminder that, in a capital-city market, a local anchor could become one of the most recognisable public figures in the community.
Technical Information and Digital Channels
WICS broadcasts digitally on UHF channel 15, with virtual channel 20 retained from its analog era, when it occupied channel 20 from 1953 to 2009. Its earlier digital channel was 42, used from 2001 to 2020 before the repack move to 15. Its Federal Communications Commission facility ID is 25686. Listed effective radiated power is 300 kilowatts, with a height above average terrain of 436 metres, about 1,430 feet, making its tower one of the market's major transmission structures. Transmitter coordinates are approximately 39 degrees 48 minutes north and 89 degrees 27 minutes west, at the tower site west of Mechanicsburg in Sangamon County; the station's older sign-off announcements described its transmitter and 1,430-foot tower as located on WICS Drive in Sangamon County. Its main subchannel, 20.1, carries ABC in high definition, with additional multicast services on further subchannels that change as national networks are added or renamed.
Recent Ownership: Rincon and Community News Media
After decades under Sinclair, WICS changed hands twice in quick succession in the mid-2020s. In March 2025 Rincon Broadcasting Group bought WICS as part of a purchase from Sinclair reported at about $29.5 million, a batch of stations across Illinois, Missouri and Wisconsin that also included WICD, KHQA in Quincy, KTVO in Kirksville, Missouri, and WVTV in Milwaukee. Then, according to an application filed with the FCC on March 24 and reported in 2026, Rincon planned to sell WICS, along with a number of its other stations nationally, to Community News Media LLC as part of a $116.5 million deal, a transaction that would also include semi-satellite WICD. Station references now list the owner as Community News Media LLC, with Rincon Broadcasting Group president Todd Parkin named as the filing party for the seller. Community News Media is represented by chief executive Deborah McDermott and, according to the State Journal-Register's reporting, did not own other broadcast stations after an earlier sale to Rincon. Subject to FCC approval as reported, that sale makes WICS one of the clearest local examples of how quickly small-market stations now move between newer, smaller station groups.
