A report on Independent station (North America) and WGN-TV

Due to factors including Tribune Broadcasting's decision not to have an ownership stake in The CW, subsequent affiliation changes, and Tribune's 2019 sale to Nexstar Media Group with accompanying divestments, The CW's stations in the three respective top markets (WPIX, KTLA and WCIU) are actually affiliates of the network; CBS Corporation owns secondary stations – both independents – in two of the three markets, KCAL-TV in Los Angeles and WLNY-TV in the New York City market (however, while KCAL was owned by CBS at the network's launch, WLNY was not acquired by CBS until 2011; neither station carries CW programming, though, because of the network's affiliation deals with formerly Tribune-owned stations in those markets, and in the latter case, WLNY's over-the-air signal does not serve the entire New York City market – resulting in most residents in the metropolitan area receiving the station mainly through cable or satellite – due to being licensed to the Long Island community of Riverhead, restricting its transmitter from being located more than 15 mi from its city of license under FCC regulations).

As part of the deal, Tribune's Chicago flagship WGN-TV would leave the network and revert to being an independent station after nearly 21 years of being affiliated with The CW and its predecessor network, The WB.

Independent stations, even more than network affiliates, were feeling the growing pressure of audience erosion to cable television in the 1980s and 1990s; there were unaffiliated commercial television stations in most of the major television markets, even after the foundation of Fox in 1986.

This gave UPN the rare distinction of being one of the only broadcast networks to not have had owned-and-operated stations (O&O) in the three largest media markets, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago (with The WB – the only network that never have had an O&O – being the only other, as minority owner Tribune Broadcasting owned most of its charter affiliates including those in all three markets, while majority owner Time Warner only owned WTBS-TV, an independent station that originated then-superstation TBS).

Although six American television stations—none of which has widespread national distribution beyond home satellite or regional cable coverage—still are designated under this classification, these stations were primarily popularized between the late 1970s and the 1990s, in large part because of their carriage of sporting events from local professional sports franchises and theatrical feature films, offerings that were common of the time among independent stations that composed the superstation concept.

Other microwave firms were also developed to relay independent television stations to cable systems, including H&B Microwave (a subsidiary of H&B Communications Corp., a major provider of CATV service and microwave relays throughout the U.S.), which began retransmitting the signal of WGN-TV (channel 9) in Chicago to subscribers of the Dubuque TV-FM Cable Company in Dubuque, Iowa; WGN's signal soon began to be imported via microwave to other CATV systems throughout the Midwest.

WOR-TV entered the New York market as the last of the city's VHF stations to sign on, and one of three independents—the others being WPIX (channel 11) and Newark, New Jersey-based WATV (channel 13).

In April 1979, Syracuse, New York-based Eastern Microwave, Inc. began distributing WOR-TV to cable and C-band satellite subscribers across the United States, joining WTBS (now WPCH-TV) in Atlanta and WGN-TV in Chicago as national superstations.

In fact, as part of a ten-year affiliation deal with The WB's part-owner, Tribune Broadcasting, the coveted New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago affiliations all went to Tribune-owned stations (WPIX, KTLA and WGN-TV, respectively).

Media reports speculated that the Fox-owned UPN affiliates would all revert to being independent stations, or else form another network by uniting with other UPN and WB affiliated stations that were left out of The CW's affiliation deals.

Much like its competitor UPN, The WB was summoned in reaction primarily to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s then-recent deregulation of media ownership rules that repealed the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, and partly due to the success of the Fox network (which debuted in October 1986, nine years before The WB launched) and first-run syndicated programming during the late 1980s and early 1990s (such as Baywatch, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and War of the Worlds), as well as the erosion in ratings suffered by independent television stations due to the growth of cable television and movie rentals.

On December 3, 1993, The WB announced a separate affiliation agreement with Tribune for its Chicago flagship station WGN-TV (which originally planned to remain an independent station due to concerns about handling its sports programming commitments while maintaining a network affiliation ); through this deal, WGN's superstation feed would provide additional national distribution for The WB as a cable-only affiliate, in order to give the network time to fill gaps in markets where it was unable to find an affiliate at launch.

The station first signed on the air on June 15, 1948; it was the fifth television station to sign on in New York City and was the market's second independent station.

Until becoming owned outright by Tribune in 1991, WPIX operated separately from the company's other television and radio outlets (including WGN-TV in Chicago, which signed-on two months before WPIX in April 1948) through the News-owned license holder, WPIX, Incorporated – which in 1963, purchased New York radio station, WBFM (101.9 FM) and soon changed that station's call letters to WPIX-FM.

Although not as widespread in national carriage as its Chicago sister station WGN-TV, KTLA is available as a superstation via DirecTV and Dish Network (the latter service available only to grandfathered subscribers that had purchased its a la carte superstation tier before Dish halted sales of the package to new subscribers in September 2013), as well as on cable providers in select cities within the southwestern United States and throughout Canada.

KTLA was originally affiliated with the DuMont Television Network, of which Paramount held a minority stake; it disaffiliated from the network in 1948 and converted into an independent station.

and then signed-on a television station in Chicago, WGN-TV on April 5, 1948, initially as a dual affiliate of CBS and the DuMont Television Network.

Two months later, the Tribunes then-sibling newspaper in New York City, the Daily News, established its own television station, independent WPIX.

Channel 2's call letters were changed that same year to KTVR; the station lost the DuMont affiliation when the network shut down on August 6, 1956, after which it became an independent station.

After the sale was finalized in March 1966, the new owners changed the call letters to KWGN-TV after its new sister station and the company's flagship, WGN-TV in Chicago (the WGN calls refer to the longtime slogan of the company's former flagship newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, " W orld's G reatest N ewspaper"; the newspaper division was split into a separate company in August 2014 ).