WPTA (channel 21) is a television station in Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, affiliated with ABC, NBC, and MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Gray Media alongside CW+ affiliate WISE-TV (channel 33) and Fox affiliate WFFT-TV (channel 55). WPTA and WISE-TV share studios and transmitter facilities on Butler Road in Northwest Fort Wayne.
WPTA is popularly known within the Fort Wayne metropolitan area by its longtime on-air brand, 21 Alive, which the station has used from 1978 to 2016 and since 2022.
History The station first signed on the air on September 28, 1957. It was founded by Sarkes Tarzian, an Indianapolis engineer whose company owned Bloomington's WTTV and several other stations in Indiana. The WPTA call letters come from the long tradition of other Tarzian stations that base the call letters upon the initials of family members of company management—in this case, Tarzian's children, Patricia and Thomas. Upon its launch, channel 21 took all ABC programming from NBC affiliate WKJG-TV (channel 33, now WISE-TV) and CBS affiliate WANE-TV (channel 15).
Under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules at that time, the Fort Wayne market was deemed too small to support three full-power stations, so Tarzian's application listed WPTA's city of license as the small town of Roanoke, located just across the Allen–Huntington county line approximately to the southwest of its studios and transmitter in Fort Wayne. This was possible because the FCC had by this time allowed a station to have its main studio in a different location from its city of license. WPTA identified itself as "Roanoke–Fort Wayne" on-air until the license was officially transferred to Fort Wayne sometime in the 1970s. For this reason, when Tarzian signed on an FM radio sister station to channel 21, it took the calls WPTH; at the time, the FCC did not allow co-owned television and radio stations to share the same base call sign if they were licensed in different cities.
In addition to ABC programming, it also originally aired seven-and-a-half hours of live local programming each week. In 1957, the station aired a spin-off of American Bandstand called Teen Dance and the afternoon kids show Popeye and the Rascals. In 1964, a addition to its studios was added to accommodate an expanding sales staff. On April 4, 1973, Tarzian sold the station to Combined Communications for $3.6 million. Under new management, WPTA purchased new cameras and a more modern switcher. On June 7, 1979, Combined merged with the Gannett Company.
On May 12, 1983, Gannett sold WPTA (along with WLKY in Louisville, Kentucky) to Pulitzer Publishing for an undisclosed amount after it purchased WLVI in Boston from Field Communications and WTCN-TV (now KARE) in Minneapolis from Metromedia. This was because the WLVI and WTCN purchases put Gannett with two stations over the Federal Communications Commission's seven-station ownership limit for television stations that was in effect at the time. The station was sold again to Granite Broadcasting on September 25, 1989, for $22.15 million. In late-1998 alongside the launch of The WB 100+ and its cable-only affiliates, WPTA began managing and providing promotional services for WBFW, which used that callsign in a fictional manner since it was a cable-exclusive service.
When WSJV in South Bend (which signed on three years before WPTA) switched to Fox in 1995, WPTA became the longest-tenured ABC affiliate in Indiana. At one time (according to Granite Broadcasting's website), WPTA was among the ten strongest ABC affiliates in the country, ranking with WISN-TV in Milwaukee, KMBC-TV in Kansas City, and KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City.
On March 9, 2005, after Granite bought NBC affiliate WISE-TV, it sold WPTA to the Malara Broadcast Group for $45.3 million. A local marketing agreement (LMA) was established whereby Granite would provide operational services to WPTA and Malara's other new station KDLH in Duluth, Minnesota. Although WISE-TV was nominally the senior partner in this LMA, the combined operation was based at WPTA's studios and the bulk of the news staff were holdovers from WPTA (see below). Malara jointly filed its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports with Granite, which led to allegations that Granite used Malara as a shell corporation to evade FCC duopoly rules. The FCC does not allow common ownership of two of the four highest-rated stations in a single market. Additionally, Fort Wayne has only six full-power stations (only four of which are licensed as commercial outlets), which at the time were too few to legally allow duopolies in any case. (As of 2018, WPTA and WISE-TV are now jointly owned, as the latter was shown to be the fifth rated full-power station.) After emerging from bankruptcy in the summer of 2007, Granite stock was taken over by the privately owned hedge fund Silver Point Capital of Greenwich, Connecticut. Silver Point Capital now controls Granite according to a Buffalo, New York, news article printed September 16, 2007. According to the same article, Granite planned to sell its properties to other parties and many of its stations laid off employees or cut salaries up to 20 percent.
In March 2006, The CW (a new network being formed as a merger of The WB and UPN) announced that cable-only WB 100+ affiliate "WBFW" would become the network's Fort Wayne affiliate as part of The CW Plus (a similar small-market master feed to The WB 100+). WPTA decided to create a new second digital subchannel to simulcast "WBFW" and offer access to CW programming for over-the-air viewers. On September 18, The CW launched on WPTA-DT2. This move—along with WISE-DT2's switch to MyNetworkTV on September 5—resulted in the deactivation of WANE-TV's second digital subchannel. It had been affiliated with UPN prior to the network's shutdown (that subchannel remained dark until 2010, when it affiliated with TheCoolTV).
On September 28, 2007, WPTA unveiled a 3D version of its "21 Alive" logo to commemorate the station's 50th anniversary, in conjunction with ABC's new image campaign but did not fully switch to it until August 4, 2008. On January 10, 2009, WPTA brought a new digital master control center online which services the station, WISE-TV and Granite's other stations in the Midwest.
On February 11, 2014, Quincy Media agreed to purchase WPTA from the Malara Broadcast Group as part of a deal to purchase Granite Broadcasting's stations in four markets (the other stations were KBJR-TV in Superior, Wisconsin, and its satellite KRII in Chisholm, Minnesota, WEEK-TV in Peoria, Illinois, and WBNG-TV in Binghamton, New York). Quincy opted to purchase WPTA's license instead of WISE's license because WPTA has been the higher-rated of the two stations in the local viewership ratings. In addition to acquiring WPTA outright (which would make it the senior partner in the Fort Wayne duopoly), Quincy Newspapers would operate WISE-TV (whose license would be acquired by SagamoreHill Broadcasting) through a shared services agreement. In November 2014, the deal was reworked to remove SagamoreHill from the transaction, with Quincy acquiring WISE, and WPTA remaining with Malara.
In July 2015, the deal was reworked yet again; it reverted to its previous structure, with Quincy and SagamoreHill acquiring WPTA and WISE respectively. However, it also called for the SSA to be wound down within nine months of the acquisition's closure. On September 15, 2015, the FCC approved the deal,Letter, CDBS Public Access, Federal Communications Commission, Retrieved September 15, 2015 which was completed on November 2. On August 1, 2016, as a result of the end of the SSA, NBC and MyNetworkTV programming previously seen on WISE moved to subchannels of WPTA, and The CW moved to WISE, which became independently operated by SagamoreHill Broadcasting without entering into any further operational agreements with Quincy. However, Quincy reacquired WISE outright in 2018, which reunited the two stations under common ownership.
In a YouTube post on October 19, 2016, WPTA announced it would re-brand as "ABC21" on November 7. With the rebranding under Quincy Media ownership, WPTA retired the "Alive" brand after 38 years. During the "21Alive" era, local newscasts on WPTA were titled 21Alive Newsroom, 21Alive News, and Indiana's NewsCenter. In 2021, Gray Media purchased all of Quincy's television properties, including WPTA and WISE-TV. On October 17, 2022, the station returned to the "21Alive" brand ahead of a planned reconsolidation of its news product across all of its subchannels under Gray ownership presumably as the "21Alive" brand was so well established in Fort Wayne that viewer outcry from 2016 to 2022 allowed Gray ownership to revive the brand; even so, the "21 Alive" brand was not fully restored until 2022, when the 21 Alive News title was restored for its newscasts (which were retitled ABC 21 News with the removal of the "21 Alive" brand) yet by April 2023, retained the "ABC 21" brand that is used in promos as seen somewhat as a compromise.
Since 2023, WPTA's third subchannel has served as the local broadcast home of the Fort Wayne TinCaps, the High-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres.
WPTA and WISE-TV gained a new sister station in the market when Gray acquired WFFT-TV on May 1, 2026; as part of the deal, Gray committed to divest WISE-TV within two years.
News operation Main channel (21Alive – ABC) WPTA presently broadcasts 29 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with five hours each weekday and two hours each on Saturdays and Sundays); in addition, the station also produces the sports highlight program The Score, which airs Friday nights. While WPTA has a weather radar dating back to the late 1990s on its premises, it has used NEXRAD data exclusively since 2007, first with Baron Systems' VIPIR processing under the name Pinpoint VIPIR HD, then from 2016 onwards with The Weather Company's Max Radar as a result of the station's acquisition by Quincy.
Under Combined Communications ownership, WPTA significantly invested in its news department. During that time, Wes Sims and Harry Gallagher served as co-anchors with meteorologist Bill Eisenhood and sports anchor Tom Campbell. In July 1978, WPTA replaced the Eyewitness News format for its newscasts with the "Alive" (as "21 Alive") format, originating from a studio doubling as the station's newsroom; WXIA-TV in Atlanta is another former Combined station that currently uses the "Alive" brand, though it abandoned the open newsroom concept in the early 1980s. In the summer of 1984, the station received its first live truck to assist in news production.
After being taken over by Granite, WISE-TV's news department was promptly folded and combined with WPTA. The company fired most of WISE-TV's news staff, with the exception of lead anchor Linda Jackson, who became part of the WPTA operation and would eventually become morning co-anchor on WPTA. That station began airing a weeknight newscast at 7 p.m. which was the first and only one in the state of Indiana at the time. On September 11, 2006, this was replaced due to low ratings with an additional episode of Dr. Phil. In November 2005, after several months of using the "Alive" news brand on both stations, WPTA debuted a new set in its second studio formerly used to tape public-affairs programs such as Impact. With it came a new branding for the newscasts, Indiana's NewsCenter.