WHY STOOGES FANS, HOLLYWOOD LOVE WCIU

You’ve got to love a TV station that devotes Saturday night prime to locally produced programs built around the often cheesy horror movies and the Three Stooges.

Chicago independent WCIU does just that.

Svengoolie and Stooge-a-Palooza hosted by local TV icon Rich Koz may not draw the biggest audiences on the slow TV night, but they do OK and they help project the station's local, fun-loving image.

Hollywood syndicators love the station, too, but for a different reason.

As a full-blown independent, WCIU gives distributors another place to go in the must-have third-largest TV market (3.5 million TV homes) if they can’t get the deal or the time slot they want on the network affiliates.

Come this fall, in fact, it will be the outlet for CBS Paramount Television’s new first-run offering, The Doctors.

WCIU is the flagship of a small, three-market station group, Weigel Broadcasting.

In Chicago, the group also includes a low-power companion for WCIU, WWME-CA.

While WCIU’s schedule is filled with recent off-net sitcom and court shows, WWME-CA—Me-TV—features older shows like All in the Family, Cosby and Cheers.

In Milwaukee, Weigel operates the CBS affiliate, WDJT, along with a low-power independent and a low-power Telemundo outlet. It also has been granted FCC permission to buy WJJA, but has not closed on the deal.

It’s third market is South Bend, Ind., where it runs a low-power triopoly—ABC, CW and My Network Television.

The group is owned by Norman and Howard Shapiro (father and son), but it’s run on a day-to-day basis by Neal Sabin, who joined WCIU 15 years ago from rival WPWR and transformed the station from a part-time Univision affiliate into the competitive independent it is today. He has also pushed the group into Milwaukee and South Bend.

In this interview with TVNEWSDAY Editor Harry A. Jessell, Sabin says that not only despite the declining economy and tightening programming supply, independent TV is alive and growing in Chicago.

An edited transcript follows:

Some say we're in a recession; others, in a period of slower growth. In any case, it isn’t good. How is it affecting your business?

So far, our businesses have been good this quarter, but we’re aware of the economic situation and we’ve always operated somewhat mean and lean. We’re just looking for new ways to get new clients on the air and to make it more affordable to use TV.

What we all should be doing is convincing people that the first thing to cut in your budget is not your advertising because things will get better and, if there is a recession, you don’t want to lose market share. That’s a battle that’s gone on for years.

Can you parse that a little bit? Tell me what sectors or what categories are doing well and which ones aren’t?

Well it’s interesting. A lot of bankruptcy attorneys increased their budgets. That happened right at the first of the year.

That’s not a good sign.

No, it’s not.

What about other categories?

Almost every major advertiser uses the station. I just used that as an example of someone who we have more of than last year, but we are loaded with blue chip advertisers. It may be that we don’t get the shares that we think we deserve because we don’t have prime and news, but we’re on just about every buy that comes into the market.

How is auto doing?

We’re not relying on auto as much because there’s not as much money coming in there. We’ve all gone through these changes before. Ten years ago, the kids business went away. It was, “Oh, my god, how are we going to survive this?” Well, we did. You come with new categories and you help different kinds of categories become television advertisers or increase their television budgets.

You're not likely to get much political money in Chicago because you don’t have any news, right?

Not so. We do get political money because we’ve done extensive research and shown that our audience, particularly in our court programs and some other things, votes at levels well above the average.

We also have a minority base on the station. Candidates who are trying to reach African-Americans and Hispanics have bought the our court block, George Lopez and some other things.

We’ve had to work hard at it, but we’ve convinced some of the local and national buyers to go beyond their buying nothing but news, news, news. With us, you also don’t get stuck in a break with three other politicians.

There are a lot of people who do not watch local news or network news who are voting. While we didn’t get the top shares in our markets, we did pretty well with political last time around. The question is, how much political money is there going to be in Illinois until the general election? We have no gubernatorial or senate races, just a few local races.

So, at the end of the year, where do you think you are going to end up in Chicago?

We’re running ahead of last year right now.

So you think you can up your revenues this year?

Yes. WCIU and Me-TV are still in the growth mode because we’re newer and our ratings are still growing and our programming continues to improve.

When I started here 15 years ago, people said you’ll never get any programming, they’ll sell the station the first chance they have, good luck. Well, they haven’t sold the station and we have more programming options than ever before.

We have The Insider on our station. We are going to be doing The Doctors, which is the highest profile launch this year.

How did you end up with The Doctors?

They wanted our 5 o’clock time period because they looked at what we do in women 25-54 at 4 o’clock and we’re usually No. 2.

Have you picked up anything else for the fall of '08 in Chicago?

In 2008, the launches are Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, which is a big deal. That and The Doctors are the two major launches for '08. In 2009, in Chicago, we will have Everybody Hates Chris, the second cycle of My Wife and Kids and the second cycle of Scrubs. We’ve also just picked up Judge Karen, Sony’s new court show.

What kind of numbers do you get in Chicago for Svengoolie and Stooge-a-Palooza?

We do fine for Saturday nights. It’s a 1.0 in the demo, which on an indie on Saturday night is not that far off of what everyone else is doing at this point in time, anyway.

Do you do any other local programming?

Yes, we do several things. We have a show called Green Screen Adventures. We’re probably the only local station I know of that does a daily, FCC-friendly kids show in cooperation with the Chicago public schools. It’s based on reading for third and fourth graders. We run it on WCIU on Saturday and on WWME Monday through Friday.

How about local sports?

We have an agreement with WGN and we have Cubs, Sox and Bulls games on the station when they’re not on WGN or their cable network. We do about 40 total games.

What’s the deal? Does Tribune just buy the time from you?

We have an agreement with them. I can’t really get into that, but it’s worked out well for Tribune and for us.

We also do a package of about 20 city of Chicago and suburban high school football and basketball games. We do produce those.

That works for you?

Yes, it works on a community level. Is it a huge profit center? No. It’s getting better and most of those games run on Me-TV.

But you can turn a buck on them, right?

We’re getting close to being profitable.

You know what, we’re not doing an amateur production. It’s very expensive because we want to do it right and it’s one of the commitments we have to local broadcasting in our local community.

If this place were not owned by the people it is, you might not see a Svengoolie, you wouldn’t see the high school sports, we wouldn’t be doing Green Screen Adventures because none of those things are big profit centers. They’re just the right thing to do

I have not been put under a lot of pressure to make sure that every one of those has the kinds of margins that running an episode of Fresh Prince has.

I believe we’re the poster child for what the FCC would like to see with local ownership and local programming because we figured out how to do it without a giant newsroom in Chicago.

How is WWME going so far?

It’s going extremely well. It’s an LP, but it’s the most powerful LP in the country. It’s on top of the Sears Tower and it’s carried on cable and satellite. It cumes over a million households a week and we have a very passionate fan base for it.

Sounds like a business.

Yes. It allows us to handle some advertisers who, quite frankly, can’t afford WCIU anymore. It’s multiplatform, to use a big new word.

Speaking of which, I noticed that you’re simulcasting WWME on one of the WCIU’s digital channels. Is this your digital play or are you considering other options?

Both. It’s a digital play and we’re considering other options as well.

So, on WCIU, you would have the main channel, WWME and then a third?

Yes, potentially. We’re looking at that.

What do you think of this RTN, the digital network of classic TV programming?

We’re talking to them. Obviously, we believe in classic TV. It’s easy for a lot of stations. It’s easier than what we’re doing with Me-TV.

Let’s talk about Milwaukee, where you have the CBS affiliate and a low-power indy modeled on WCIU

Believe me, we’re doing well there. We have a lot of local sports up there on both WDJT and WMLW, which is our indie up there. We just started a half-hour news at 9 o’clock on WMLW.

What kind of sports?

We’ve got the WIAA, the Big East basketball and Wisconsin hockey. We also have some local high school sports there as well.

Why news?

Fox [WITI] has a 9-10 p.m. news. Sinclair tried it with their national-local hybrid and abandoned it, so we figured that there was room in the market for a second 9 o’clock news, which we started on the nights when Fox is not in news because of sports overruns or whatever. We’ve done 2 rating points out of the box with that and we’re doing about a 1 rating now.

How much news does the CBS affiliate do?

Five and 10 and 5 to 7 a.m.

We built that station from nothing. That station was a 1 share indie with lousy power 15 years ago. When the whole New World buy with Fox came down, CBS lost its affiliate there and we picked it up. We went through an arduous process. We built the tallest tower in southeast Wisconsin at the time to move the station there and built the news operation. Over the years we’ve picked up Wheel, Jeopardy, Ellen, Rachael Ray as the core syndication for that station.

That’s solid programming.

They will also have The Doctors this fall.

Now you’ve purchased WJJA, a full-power home shopping channel in Milwaukee.

Well, we have FCC approval, but the deal hasn’t quite closed just yet.

What’s the hang up?

Just details, I would say.

But that’s going to happen?

Well, we sure hope so anyway.

And what’s the plan for it?

It’s a full-power station in the Milwaukee market licensed to Racine. We’ve got a couple of different scenarios for using it, but what it does is it gives us another full-power signal in Milwaukee.

So you may move over the programming from WMLW?

That’s one of the scenarios.

You also have a low-power Telemundo there. Is that an option?

Yes, that’s on an LP, too.

It’s branded as Telemundo Wisconsin because we have the license for the state of Wisconsin and have our signal on cable up as far as Green Bay and out west of Madison and areas in between. Our news department in Milwaukee produces a half-hour Spanish newscast for it every day.

Let’s drop all the way down to market 87 and talk about South Bend. You have three LPs there—an ABC, a CW and a My Network Television.

Yes, we built the tallest tower in that market again to maximize the low-power status. All three of them have digital replacement channels and we’re on in HD for the CW and ABC.

But you have no news on the ABC?

We are doing a newscast on ABC. We are doing an 11-minute newscast at 11 o’clock in a unique way. We have people on the ground in South Bend who are reporting and shooting video. It is sent up to Milwaukee where we have meteorologists and news producers who package it up, anchor it and then send it back via fiber to Chicago, which is the hub for South Bend.

So, your master control for the South Bend stations is in Chicago.

About 15 years ago, we started doing this. It’s almost the first virtual TV station. In South Bend, you will find a sales and marketing staff and a transmitter.

Is the 11 minutes that you do on WBND the beginning of something bigger?

We hope. We’ve always walked before we’ve run so that we don’t fall down.

Right now, we feel we can do a concise newscast where weather is the first thing we do and compete and provide the basics—what people really need to know right at 11 o’clock. Then, we run The Insider and then go back to Nightline and ABC programming after that. So it’s an alternative. It’s a creative way to be in the news business within the economic limitations of South Bend.

Your group relies heavily on low-power stations. Has it been a problem getting cable carriage for them?

It’s not must carry, but it hasn’t been a problem because we’ve presented compelling quality programming that people really want.

So what’s the strategy going forward there? Are you looking for a move into additional markets or to acquire stations elsewhere?

Our strategy has been to maximize what we have in the markets we have so far.

So that’s pretty much it for right now?

We’re embracing and working on our Web presence and what other things we can do with our digital space in the markets that we’re in right now.

What’s the future of independent television?

The big issue is consolidation and the duopolies have really choked down the number of distributors that can get their programming on the air. If there were a couple more WCIUs around the country in strategically placed markets, this would be a totally different business.

But it sounds like you’re having a better year than Tribune.

Well, we’re in a different kind of business then they are. I’ll tell you one thing I know, we’re still having fun. We don’t win that often, but when we do win the victories are really kind of sweet.