WJHL-TV: News Channel 11 and ABC Tri-Cities in Johnson City, Tennessee
WJHL-TV, channel 11, is a television station licensed to Johnson City, Tennessee, in the United States. It serves the Tri-Cities area of northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia, a market built around Johnson City, Kingsport and Bristol. The station carries CBS programming on its main channel and ABC programming on a second digital channel, branded on air as ABC Tri-Cities. Its main brand for local journalism is News Channel 11, and its website is wjhl.com.
WJHL-TV is owned by Nexstar Media Group, the large American station group that also owns the Knoxville ABC affiliate WATE-TV in the neighbouring market. The station's studios have long been in downtown Johnson City, in the former main post office building on East Main Street, and its transmitter site has been associated with Holston Mountain and, earlier in its history, Buffalo Mountain. For viewers across Washington, Sullivan, Carter, Greene, Unicoi, Johnson and Hawkins counties in Tennessee, and into parts of Virginia and Kentucky, WJHL has been a familiar source of local news, weather and sports for more than seventy years.
Overview
WJHL-TV is unusual among American stations because it carries two major networks in one market. CBS has been its primary affiliation since the 1950s, a relationship that grew out of the network ties of its sister radio station. ABC, which the station also carried on a secondary basis in its earliest years, returned in a modern form in February 2016, when the station's second channel became the Tri-Cities ABC affiliate. That arrangement gives one newsroom responsibility for two network schedules, two sets of network news and entertainment programmes, and a combined local news operation that serves both channels.
The Tri-Cities is a geographically spread market. Its three namesake cities are separated by mountains and valleys, and its audience also includes smaller towns and rural counties in three states. A station licensed to Johnson City is required in its legal identification to name Kingsport and Bristol, Tennessee and Virginia, as well, a reminder that the licence has always been understood as regional rather than limited to a single city.
History
The WJHL story begins with radio. WJHL radio first signed on on December 13, 1938, founded by Hanes Lancaster Sr. and J. W. Birdwell. It was the first radio station in Johnson City and the second in the Tri-Cities. The radio station moved through several frequencies in its early years, increased its power, and became affiliated first with the NBC Blue Network, later ABC, and by 1956 with the CBS Radio Network. The Lancasters added an FM station in 1948 and then moved into television.
WJHL-TV made its debut on October 26, 1953. A congressional tribute marking the station's seventieth anniversary in 2023 described it as the first television voice in Northeast Tennessee and the second television station to sign on in the state. Its launch was not smooth. In the summer of 1953 the station was preparing to begin operations from a tower on Tannery Knob in downtown Johnson City when guy wires snapped and the 550-foot tower crashed to the ground, falling only inches from transmission equipment and injuring two people. The accident allowed a Knoxville station to reach the air first, and the Lancasters had to raise further funding and mount a much smaller replacement antenna on a wooden power pole installed at the last minute. The station still signed on a little more than a week after its planned date.
In 1954 the transmitter was moved to Buffalo Mountain, southwest of Johnson City and considerably higher than Tannery Knob. From there the signal could better reach Bristol, Kingsport and the wider region of eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina.
Early Affiliations
Like many stations that signed on in the early 1950s, WJHL-TV at first carried programming from all four networks of the era: CBS, NBC, ABC and DuMont. CBS was always the primary affiliation, reflecting the radio station's network relationship. NBC programming moved to WCYB-TV in Bristol when that station signed on in 1956. DuMont disappeared when that network shut down. WJHL and WCYB shared ABC programmes until 1969, when WKPT-TV in Kingsport signed on and became the market's ABC affiliate.
That early history matters to the station's later development. WJHL was never simply a single-network outlet imposed on a new market. It was the region's first television station, sorting out network relationships as competing stations arrived, and it retained CBS through every subsequent change of ownership and technology.
Ownership
The Lancaster family sold its radio interests in 1960, while channel 11 kept the WJHL-TV call sign. In 1964 the Lancasters sold WJHL-TV to Roy H. Park Broadcasting, which later became Park Communications. Around the time of the Park purchase the station adopted a logo based on a United States highway shield with the number 11 inside it, a design that remained in use until about 1987 and drew on the familiarity of routes 11E and 11W through the Tri-Cities.
Media General acquired Park Communications, and with it WJHL, in 1997. Under Media General the station moved away from the long-used TV 11 brand in favour of NewsChannel 11, began digital broadcasting on UHF channel 58 in 1998, briefly used the name 11 Connects from 2009, and then returned to NewsChannel 11 in October 2012. Nexstar became the owner after its merger with Media General, the transaction that brought many former Media General stations into the Nexstar group. By its seventieth anniversary the station was publicly described as part of Nexstar Media Group, encompassing both News Channel 11 and ABC Tri-Cities.
Affiliation and Programming
On its main channel, WJHL-TV carries the CBS schedule, including network news, prime-time entertainment, daytime programming and CBS Sports. On channel 11.2 it carries ABC as ABC Tri-Cities. A third subchannel has carried Antenna TV, according to market channel listings. The combination means local viewers can receive two of the traditional big networks from the same transmitter and the same local owner, while competing stations in the market carry NBC, Fox and other services.
The ABC move was announced on January 4, 2016, by Media General and ABC, and took effect on February 1 that year. It ended ABC's affiliation with WKPT-TV in the Tri-Cities. For WJHL-DT2, ABC replaced a general entertainment format built around MeTV, which the subchannel had carried since August 2011 after beginning in late 2006 as a simulcast of a cable weather channel. MeTV in turn moved within the market to a sister service of WKPT. For WJHL, the change was also a reunion: the station had held a secondary ABC affiliation in its earliest decades, before WKPT's launch in 1969.
News Operation
Local news is the centre of WJHL's identity. The station has long promoted itself around reporting news that matters to local families, and its newsroom serves both the CBS channel and ABC Tri-Cities. At the seventieth anniversary in 2023, the station was led by general manager Paula Jackson and was described in Congress as employing more than eighty people, including writers, producers, reporters, technicians and support staff, serving more than 300,000 households.
In the autumn of 2019 the station opened a new state-of-the-art studio in downtown Johnson City, a visible investment in its long-standing downtown base rather than a move to a suburban office park. Its digital operation centres on wjhl.com and mobile apps, where the station publishes local news, weather and sports headlines alongside its broadcast newscasts.
Because the market crosses a state line, the newsroom's routine work includes Tennessee and Virginia government, schools, courts, health care and weather in mountain terrain, where conditions can vary sharply between valleys and higher ground. That geography has shaped the station since the Buffalo Mountain transmitter move in 1954.
Market and Audience
The Kingsport-Bristol-Johnson City market has been listed around ninety-ninth among United States television markets. It is not a large metropolitan market, but it is a distinct one, separated from Knoxville to the southwest and from other Virginia markets by distance and mountains. WJHL competes principally with WCYB-TV for NBC, WKPT and its associated low-power stations for other network and classic television services, and WEMT for Fox.
WJHL's position as the market's first television station and its dual CBS and ABC role give it a reach that goes beyond a single network audience. It is also an example of how consolidation has changed small and mid-sized markets: programmes that were once divided among separately owned local stations are now, in part, combined under one national owner and one local newsroom.
Technical Details
WJHL-TV broadcasts as virtual channel 11. Its early television transmitter was first placed on Tannery Knob, then moved in 1954 to Buffalo Mountain. Later technical listings place the transmitter on Holston Mountain. The station began digital broadcasting in 1998 on UHF channel 58, in the Media General period. Its multiplexed signal carries CBS in high definition on 11.1, ABC in high definition on 11.2, and Antenna TV on 11.3 in published market listings.
The station's studios remain in downtown Johnson City, in the former main post office building where channel 11 was based at sign-on. That continuity of place is unusual and forms part of the station's local identity.
Notable People and Recognition
The founding figures most closely associated with WJHL are Hanes Lancaster Sr., Hanes Lancaster Jr. and Jay Birdwell, whose radio work created the platform from which television was launched. Dr. Herb Howard, who worked as a staff announcer at WJHL-TV, later became a dean and professor at the University of Tennessee's College of Communication and Information, a link between the station and broadcast education in the state.
General manager Paula Jackson was named in the 2023 congressional recognition of the station's seventieth anniversary, which praised the staff's commitment to integrity, fairness and community service. The tribute is a useful marker of how the station presents itself locally: not only as a network affiliate, but as a long-standing civic institution in Johnson City.
Recent Developments
The most consequential recent changes have been the addition of ABC in 2016, the move into a new studio in 2019, and ownership under Nexstar following the Media General merger. A separate dispute in 2008 and 2019 over retransmission consent with a small cable provider, Inter Mountain Cable and later HolstonConnect, illustrated the economics of modern carriage: WJHL's CBS and ABC signals are valuable to cable systems serving eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee, and negotiations over fees can affect whether viewers receive the station at all. The Federal Communications Commission considered a good-faith negotiation complaint involving Nexstar, WATE and WJHL in 2019.
Today WJHL-TV continues to operate as News Channel 11 on its CBS channel and as ABC Tri-Cities on its second channel, from its downtown Johnson City studios, serving a three-state Appalachian audience that first received local television from the station in October 1953.
