WJAR-TV marks 60th birthday tonight

CRANSTON – WJAR-TV (NBC 10), Rhode Island’s first television station and still the state’s dominant broadcaster, is celebrating its 60th anniversary today.

The station, owned by Richmond, Va.-based Media General Inc., will mark the occasion with a prime-time television special entitled “Celebrating 60” that will air at 8 p.m. tonight. The program will feature current and former anchors reflecting on the channel’s history.

“Today Show” hosts Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, both of whom worked at WJAR early in their careers, appeared on WJAR this morning from their studio in New York to share their own recollections of the station. Another prominent alumna of WJAR is Christiane Amanpour, the CNN foreign correspondent.

WJAR-TV signed on the air for the first time on July 10, 1949, taking the call letters of its radio sister station, WJAR-AM, which first began broadcasting in 1922. The station started out on channel 11, moving to channel 10 in 1952.

- Advertisement -

Both WJAR stations were owned by The Outlet Company, a downtown Providence department store that first opened its doors in 1894. Outlet went on to buy a number of stations in other parts of the country during the 1960s. The company was led by Bruce Sundlun, who later became governor of Rhode Island, in the late 1970s.

In 1980, the company sold the department store to focus full-time on its broadcast holdings and was renamed Outlet Communications, which was eventually bought by the Rockefeller family. In 1996, NBC purchased WJAR and for a decade the station was owned and operated by the television network. Media General acquired WJAR in 2006. (Providence Business News and WJAR-TV have a content-sharing agreement.)

One of the personalities who appeared on WJAR in its early days was Ted Knight, who later became famous playing the pompous anchorman Ted Baxter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” WJAR also was the first station in New England to calculate election returns using a computer, according to the trade journal Television/Radio Age.

Additional information is available at Turnto10.com.

No posts to display