WLS Chicago

For more than 25 years, the sun rose over WLS Chicago. But now the ABC O&O’s dominance of Chicago viewership from dawn to high noon may be slipping away. ABC 7 News This Morning has fallen out of first place from 5 to 7 a.m. Monday-Friday in overall audience and, more significantly, among adults 25-54. In addition, the move earlier this month of Windy City Live to 11 a.m. in order to make room for Live with Kelly and Michael at 9 a.m. has cost the station viewership in both time periods.

Chicago’s top-rated television station is dropping its 11 a.m. Monday-through-Friday newscast after more than 20 years this fall and replacing it with the locally produced Windy City, which has been airing at 9 a.m. Windy City is being dislodged from the 9 a.m. slot by Live with Kelly and Michael, which has been airing on Tribune’s WGN. Like WLS, Live is owned by Disney/ABC.

Look for ABC’s Chicago O&O to begin promoting its top-rated newscasts and other programs more aggressively than it has in years. Tom Hebel, a 15-year veteran of the station, resigned Friday as VP of programming and creative services. The move signals a change in strategy under John Idler, who took over as the station’s president-GM in June.

For the second time in recent weeks, Chicago’s No. 1 broadcast news operation found itself bedeviled by new technology. This time trouble with a bonded cellular feed disrupted a feed from a news conference.

Can Larry Wert at long last bring home the gold? Now may be the best opportunity in a long time for long-standing NBC-owned WMAQ Chicago GM Wert and his local news team to make a legitimate run at dethroning ABC-owned WLS, the longtime champion in the market’s late local news ratings competition.

The current GM of WTVD Raleigh-Durham, N.C., will succeed Emily Barr as president-GM of the ABC O&O. Idler has shuttling back-and-forth between WLS and WTVD since joining the ABC O&Os in 1998. He moved to WTVD in 2007 to become the GM there.

Katie Couric and Kelly Ripa are coming to the station that Oprah Winfrey used to call home. But adding their daytime talk shows to Chicago’s ABC O&O will mean disrupting a lineup that has led the ratings in Chicago for more than 25 years.

When Oprah Winfrey announced last fall that she would be abdicating her throne after 25 years as the queen of daytime television, it prompted months of tears, long goodbyes and hand-wringing. And that was just among some of the TV executives who carried her show. For Emily Barr, longtime general manager of ABC O&O WLS Chicago, the station where Oprah started as the host of AM Chicago in 1984, it was another call to weather the storm and perhaps catch some lightning in a bottle.

Solid State Logic has installed one of its C100 HDS Digital Broadcast Console at ABC O&O WLS Chicago. The console was installed as an upgrade for the TV1 production control […]

ABC O&O WLS Chicago has selected Tim Voit’s Sewee Entertainment to handle syndication and distribution for their fourth quarter holiday special The Magnificent Mile Lights Festival. This annual one-hour event […]

The Chicago ABC O&O has just made a large investment in bonded cellular technology that lets crews send live video back to the station over public wireless broadband networks. The gear comes from Dejero Labs. Portable transmitters the size of small suitcases send signals using an online system manager to in-station receivers, which capture the incoming video and convert it to genlocked SDI video ready for ingest into the station’s workflow.

ABC Owned station WLS Chicago has purchased multiple LIVE Platform systems from Dejero Labs Inc. with mobile 4G wireless capability that transmit live SD/HD video and transfer files remotely. The […]

The hottest Chicago talent search in years has come down to two winners: Ryan Chiaverini, weekend sports anchor at WLS, and Valerie Warner, the early morning news anchor and traffic reporter at WGN. Sources say Chiaverini and Warner have been chosen to host the live, local morning show expected to air at 9 a.m. weekdays in place of The Oprah Winfrey Show on WLS.