Prior to launch On July 9, 1953, Tri-City Broadcasting Company, owner of
WNOP (740 AM) in Newport, filed with the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a construction permit to build a television station on channel 74, which had been assigned to Newport. After Gordon Broadcasting, owner of Cincinnati radio station
WSAI, dropped its application for the channel, Tri-City became unopposed, and a construction permit for WNOP-TV was granted on December 24, 1953. Jim Lang, the former
Campbell County sheriff that controlled Tri-City, envisioned the studios being adjoined by an amusement complex, complete with glass-enclosed restaurant, indoor ice rink, and outdoor swimming pool. With Lang noting the tribulations of other UHF television stations around the country, however, Tri-City opted not to build its station right away. In April 1956, Lang told a reporter for
The Cincinnati Enquirer that it would only be a "matter of time" until channel 74 went on air. Some conversation around the construction permit emerged in late 1962, when Lang sold WNOP radio and the WNOP-TV construction permit to television actor Dean Miller in a deal that ultimately fell through; Tri-City had presented to the FCC a proposal to add a lower-power channel 3 station to Cincinnati (between
channel 2 in
Dayton and
channel 3 in
Louisville), which Miller also supported, though chances of approval were slim. In early 1965, channel 74 was no closer to going on the air than it had been a decade prior, but a change in ownership would lead to the foundation being laid to start a new commercial television station in Greater Cincinnati. That March, Tri-City sold the WNOP-TV permit to
Daniel H. Overmyer, who was seeking to build a chain of major-market UHF television stations, for $100,000. Two changes were nearly immediate after the purchase closed. On September 14, 1965, the call letters were changed to WSCO-TV; Overmyer's stations all bore the initials of family members, with the new designation representing his wife, Shirley Clark Overmyer. The FCC was in the process of overhauling the UHF table of allocations at the time, which—together with a rulemaking petition from Overmyer—resulted in the lower channel of 19 being substituted for 74 in 1966. Overmyer selected the Bald Knob tower site, negotiated to lease a studio facility on Eighth Street in the Queensgate neighborhood, and announced that the new station would be affiliated with the new
Overmyer Network once it started. Civic leaders in Newport objected, to no avail, to the idea of the station leaving Northern Kentucky. A launch date of February 1, 1967, was initially slated, but the station did not start on that date. Instead, in April, Overmyer reached a deal to sell 80 percent of his television station group to the
American Viscose Corporation (AVC).
Startup and early years The FCC approved the purchase of the Overmyer stations by AVC (which organized its television holdings under the name U.S. Communications Corporation) in December 1967. The following May, the call letters changed one more time to WXIX-TV, representing the
Roman numeral for 19; station manager Doug McLarty also cited possible confusion with
WCPO-TV in changing the call sign. From the Overmyer-built transmitter facilities and a studio site within an office suite at 801 West Eighth Street in Cincinnati, WXIX-TV debuted on the afternoon of August 1, 1968. The site from which channel 19 went on air was not the one Overmyer had selected; channel 19 was then sued by that property's owners. Cincinnati's first commercial independent station featured a schedule consisting primarily of movies, sports, and syndicated programs, though it also produced a local daytime children's program hosted by puppeteer
Larry Smith. The next year, the station debuted "
The Cool Ghoul", a host of
Scream-In, channel 19's Saturday night science fiction and horror movie played by Dick VonHoene. By the start of 1970, an
American Research Bureau study had determined WXIX-TV was the number-one UHF independent station in the United States and in the top ten of all independents, VHF or UHF, nationwide. In 1970, the station purchased a facility on Taconic Terrace in
Woodlawn, Ohio, from the defunct K & S Films for use as a larger studio base.
Sale to Metromedia Channel 19 was demonstrating success and attracting viewership, which made it an outlier in the U.S. Communications portfolio. In March 1971, the company suspended operations at its stations in
Atlanta and
San Francisco, and channel 19 had cut back its broadcast day in the second half of 1970. WXIX-TV came close to joining them in silence. On August 5, 1971,
The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Communications had asked the FCC for permission to take channel 19 and
WPGH-TV in
Pittsburgh off the air. The two stations, however, got a reprieve because they had instead attracted potential buyers. It was initially announced that a Washington, D.C., communications law firm, Welch and Morgan, would buy the station, but AVC insisted on the buyers endorsing the $2 million in debt associated with channel 19, which caused them to balk at the deal. By month's end,
Metromedia was in negotiations to purchase WXIX-TV, and a deal was reached in early October to purchase the station for the assumption of $3 million in liabilities. The FCC approved of the deal in August 1972. Metromedia was able to stabilize WXIX-TV, increasing its ability to attract quality programming and contributing its own productions. Furthermore, WXIX-TV started a commercial production division; as none of the other stations had entered this specialty, channel 19 was able to corner between 70 and 80 percent of this market in the Cincinnati area. In the late 1970s, the station's local programs included
Cincinnati Stingers hockey games and a news magazine,
In Cincinnati. While a second independent station began broadcasting in 1980,
WBTI (channel 64) was a part-time subscription television station which had trimmed its ad-supported schedule to a handful of programs by 1983.
Malrite ownership and the arrival of Fox In 1982, Metromedia entered into an agreement to buy
WFLD-TV in
Chicago. This $136 million deal—the most expensive purchase of an independent station and far and away the highest sale price of any UHF outlet—required it to divest of one of its two UHF stations, WXIX or
KRIV in
Houston, under the ownership limits of the day that allowed one company to own as many as five VHF and two additional UHF television stations. It chose to sell the Cincinnati outlet, which was in the smallest market of any in which the firm owned TV properties, and it also sold
WTCN-TV in
Minneapolis to finance the purchase. The buyer was Cleveland-based
Malrite Communications Group. The $45 million sale was approved by the FCC in December 1983. Under Malrite, WXIX-TV continued to be the market's leading non-network station, not far behind the network stations in early evening hours and way ahead of WBTI, which had become a full-time ad-supported station again as WIII in 1985. One advertising agency president declared it had become "one of the big boys" in local television. In the early years under Malrite, the station telecast
Xavier Musketeers men's basketball before picking up a multi-year deal to air
University of Cincinnati basketball games in 1987. UC basketball had previously aired on the station in the Metromedia era. It joined Fox as a charter member in 1986. When Fox made a push into children's programming with the startup of the
Fox Children's Network (later known as Fox Kids), WXIX started its own Fox Kids Club; within nine months, channel 19 had 80,000 members, outpacing projections of 50,000 in the first year. It also started a new weekly local children's show,
Fridays Are Fun, hosted by Michael Flannery.
News startup, studio move, and Raycom purchase From the Malrite purchase until his death from
esophageal cancer in 1992, Bill T. Jenkins was channel 19's general manager; he also served on the first Fox affiliate association board and advised the creation of Fox Kids, and within Malrite, he was named executive vice president of its television station division, securing Fox affiliations for multiple Malrite stations. He was replaced by Stu Powell, WFLD's general manager; Stu then hired Greg Caputo, who had overseen the launch of a local newsroom at WFLD in 1987, to do the same in Cincinnati. Launching local news made the Woodlawn site, from Cincinnati on
Interstate 75, a hindrance for news crews. As a result, in 1993, WXIX-TV purchased the former
Harriet Beecher Stowe School building in the Queensgate neighborhood, spending $2 million at a sheriff's sale to acquire the former black junior high school which had since been converted into offices. The station converted a third of the structure for its own use, including using the former gymnasium as its primary studio. The station moved into what was renamed "19 Broadcast Plaza" in December 1995; at the same time, it dropped its "19XIX" moniker used for a decade and became known as "Fox 19". Between 1992 and the launch of a morning newscast in 1996, WXIX-TV's staff swelled from 63 to 141 employees. In 1998,
Raycom Media purchased Malrite Communications and its five stations, three of them in Ohio. Under Raycom, the station made a series of news expansions and analyzed leaving 19 Broadcast Plaza for a larger building that could be owned rather than leased.
Sale to Gray Television On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based
Gray Television announced that it had reached an agreement with Raycom to merge their respective broadcasting assets (consisting of Raycom's 63 existing owned-and/or-operated television stations, including WXIX-TV, and Gray's 93 television stations) under Gray's corporate umbrella in a cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion. The sale was approved on December 20 of that year and was completed on January 2, 2019. ==Programming==