WFUM The station first signed on the air on August 23, 1980, as WFUM under the ownership of the
University of Michigan–Flint with coverage of the
Crim race. Initially promoted using its WFUM call letters, the station eventually began to brand itself as "Michigan Television". Prior to WFUM's sign-on, Flint had been one of the few areas of Michigan that was not served by an over-the-air PBS station. Most cable providers in the area (then as now) piped in WCMU-TV,
WDCQ-TV in
Bay City,
WTVS in
Detroit,
WKAR-TV in
East Lansing or
WGTE-TV in
Toledo. In 2002, the University of Michigan moved all media assets including WFUM into Michigan Public Media, which reported to the main UM Ann Arbor campus. In 2007, the station broadcast the Crim Festival of Races for the last time as its producer had retired the year before and costs were too high to produce. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 52, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its analog-era UHF channel 28. In 2008, the Michigan Chapter of the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded the station nine regional Emmy awards for several programs. The programs included
Childhood Places, Secret Spaces in which children's author Christopher Paul Curtis returns to his native Flint and a documentary about a
Howell World War II Army Air Corps photo officer.
Sale to CMU and call sign change to WCMZ-TV On April 23, 2009, the University of Michigan announced plans to discontinue its operation of WFUM-TV. While WFUM was transitioned into a satellite of WCMU-TV, CMU vowed to include Flint-area events and issues in its programming, as well as produce new programming that would originate from the region. however, CMU took over operations of WFUM at 1:00 a.m. on January 15, 2010. The
Federal Communications Commission approved the transfer of the station's license on March 16, 2010. CMU officially took over WFUM on May 18, 2010, and the call letters were changed to WCMZ-TV. The agreement gave CMU Public Television one of the largest footprints in the PBS system, with at least secondary coverage from
Petoskey to northern
Monroe County. The station's former studios in the William L. White Building at the University of Michigan-Flint is now a newsroom and satellite studio for
all-news NPR affiliate
WFUM Radio.
FCC spectrum sale and closure On February 8, 2017, Central Michigan University announced it would sell WCMZ-TV in the FCC spectrum auction for $14,163,505, citing the easy availability of surrounding PBS member stations over-the-air and on pay services, namely
Delta College's
WDCQ-TV and stations from Detroit (
WTVS) and Lansing (
WKAR). It was later announced that
Spectrum,
AT&T U-verse,
DirecTV and
Dish Network will continue to offer WCMU's programming in WCMZ's viewing area; Mount Pleasant is part of the
Flint/Tri-Cities market. It is unknown to date if
Comcast, which serves much of the Flint and Detroit metro areas, would follow suit. WCMZ-TV closed on April 23, 2018, and the license was canceled the next day. ==Programming==