WNIN (channel 9) is a PBS member television station in Evansville, Indiana, United States. It is owned by WNIN Tri-State Public Media alongside NPR member station WNIN-FM (88.3 MHz). The two outlets share studios at the WNIN Public Media Center on Two Main Street, near Riverside Drive, in downtown Evansville and transmitter facilities south of Boonville, Indiana, on New Hope Road.
Channel 9 was originally allocated as a commercial channel to the Illinois–Indiana–Kentucky tri-state area in 1953 for Hatfield, Indiana, opposite the Ohio River from Owensboro, Kentucky. It was fought over by two commercial groups, but the proceeding was voided when the Federal Communications Commission reallocated the channel for non-commercial use in Evansville. Educational television programming in Evansville had been broadcast by WTVW beginning in 1958, but the commercial station was anxious to begin full-time commercial service and ceased airing programs for schools in 1967. Delays in funding and equipment meant that Evansville had no educational station of its own until WNIN began broadcasting on March 15, 1970, from studios in the McCutchanville School. It was originally owned by the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation and was nearly immediately a drain on its finances. The school board looked for a new operator for channel 9 in 1972 and spun it out the next year to a new community licensee, Southwest Indiana Public Television, in an effort backed by the University of Evansville. WNIN began broadcasting in color and in the years that followed began local program production. In 1982, the television station spawned WNIN-FM, the tri-state's first public radio station.
After three separate attempts in a seven-year span to acquire and renovate a new location in downtown Evansville failed to materialize, WNIN moved into the historic Willard Carpenter House in 1986; an annex was built to house a production studio for the station. In 2017, the station moved into its present studio building, which was built for broadcasting use by WEVV-TV in 1990. WNIN produces local programming on Tri-State and Southwest Indiana issues.
Channel 9: From Owensboro to Evansville Owensboro on the Air, Inc., owner of the WVJS stations in Owensboro, Kentucky, petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in October 1953 to assign VHF channel 9 to Hatfield, Indiana—across the Ohio River, northwest of Owensboro and east of Evansville, Indiana—for use by a potential WVJS television station. At the time, only UHF channel 14 was allocated to Owensboro, and two groups sought it: WVJS and the Owensboro Publishing Company, publisher of the Messenger and Inquirer newspapers and owner of WOMI. WVJS's application was rejected in October 1952 as too early, and the group refiled it in June 1953, at the earliest opportunity given by the FCC. While the petition was pending, WVJS's channel 14 application was granted on August 20, 1953, after the Publishing Company withdrew. However, both parties instead filed for the new channel 9 when the FCC granted WVJS's petition the next month. After a federal court denied a Logansport, Indiana, group's bid for alternate channel assignments, the way was cleared for the FCC to determine which of Owensboro on the Air or the Owensboro Publishing Company should get the channel. Hearings opened in Washington in December 1954.
The Hatfield channel 9 hearings factored into the larger television picture in Evansville. Evansville had been assigned one VHF channel, 7, but by the time a decision had been made as to who should receive it, two UHF stations were on the air: WFIE and WEHT. The two UHF stations wanted all commercial broadcasting in the Evansville area to be on UHF for parity reasons. The process of petitioning the FCC to add, remove, or reserve for non-commercial use one or more channel allocations in a specific market, such that all commercial allocations ended up on the same band, became known as deintermixture. The three applicants for channel 7 at Evansville and the two applicants for channel 9 at Hatfield jointly petitioned the FCC not to adopt the UHF stations' proposal, which would have eliminated channel 9 from the area; reserved channel 7 as non-commercial educational; and added a third UHF commercial assignment to Evansville as a substitute. The commission denied their petition, and similar deintermixture petitions in other cities, in November 1955, but it reversed course and began moving to implement deintermixture in June 1956, making changes in Evansville but not Hatfield.
The February 11, 1957, edition of Broadcasting•Telecasting magazine reported that a majority of commissioners had voted to deintermix Evansville. It would do so by moving channel 7 to Louisville, Kentucky, and reserving Hatfield's channel 9. Days later, FCC hearing examiner Thomas Donahue finally rendered an initial decision on channel 9. He found both applicants' records "mediocre" but picked Owensboro on the Air because it owned fewer mass media than Owensboro Publishing Company. He also recognized that channel 9 would be reliant on Evansville for personnel and revenue. It was a decision on a channel that was about to go away. The FCC announced its intention to deintermix Evansville on February 27, proposing to move channel 7 (WTVW) to channel 31 and move channel 9 to Evansville for educational use. Both Owensboro firms appealed the FCC's ruling but lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in December 1958. John A. Danaher's majority opinion held that the companies had failed to show specifically how the deintermixture decision injured them. They appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which in June 1959 refused to review the order. The FCC dismissed the applications in February 1960.
History Educational television in Evansville: Prehistory In March 1958, the Evansville school board pledged support for a new organization, the Southwestern Indiana Educational Television Council (SWIETVC), joining regional school systems to provide educational television to classrooms. On September 3, 1958, some 11,000 students began receiving school instruction broadcast over WTVW, which offered morning airtime to the group. With interest from schools beyond the original region including in Kentucky and Illinois, regional educational television served 24,000 students the next year and 35,000 students in 1960–61.
Originally based out of offices in the former Carpenter School, the educational television operation moved into WTVW's studios next door in 1961, when the school was demolished as part of an urban renewal program. In spite of declining funding from the Ford Foundation, which subsidized the program's early years, the service became self-supporting by 1962–63. Classes presented included conversational Spanish, American history, and junior high school science. In 1962, Evansville's school system was consolidated with that of surrounding Vanderburgh County to form the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation (EVSC).
Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation ownership In December 1966, WTVW announced it would donate equipment it was taking out of use to make the activation of educational channel 9 at Evansville possible. The station was building a new tower at Chandler, Indiana, and WTVW was interested in beginning morning commercial telecasting when it went into service. The EVSC was requested to make the application for channel 9 to the FCC, and selected the old McCutchanville School as a studio site, since its former gym was the newest part of the campus and ideal for studio use.
The application was made on June 30, 1967, but educational television in Evansville found itself in a lurch. Under pressure from its network, ABC, WTVW took back its airtime to begin morning commercial telecasting, and the federal government moved slower than expected to award money to finance channel 9's construction, leaving no station on which to broadcast the programs. At the time, Vincennes University was building WVUT (channel 22), an educational TV station, on its campus. To fill the gap, school officials resorted to broadcasting the programming over WRAY-FM in Princeton, Indiana. WVUT sent out its first test pattern in January 1968 after several delays, but reception was not as clear as had been desired or as had been the case with WTVW. A translator was added to rebroadcast the station into the Evansville area on channel 70. In the meantime, the federal money was not coming in: all of the funds allocated by Congress in 1967 were awarded, and a new law restricted the maximum award to a single state per year, forcing the schools to reduce their ask.
In May 1969, Indiana state superintendent of public instruction Richard Wells approved the channel 9 funding request—a step Wells called equivalent to receiving the funds, as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had never gone against any of his recommendations. The FCC awarded the construction permit on June 18, and the school board—having already bid out for equipment—moved to begin construction. After the funding delays, the station lost equipment amid a railroad strike, further delaying the station's start. WNIN began broadcasting on March 15, 1970, with a dedication and programming from National Educational Television (NET). Its call sign came from the word "nine". NET was replaced as the public television network with PBS in October 1970.
WNIN nearly immediately ran into financial trouble. The decision that the EVSC should run the station put channel 9's entire budget under one system instead of distributing costs across the 16 Indiana school systems using its programming. It also dissuaded some smaller systems from taking part in the operation. The Vanderburgh County Tax Adjustment Board slashed $60,000 from the school board's budget for 1971, but the school board was successful in appealing most of that cut, allowing the station to stay on the air for 1971–72 and meet obligations to the other school systems. The proposed station operations for the school year, however, still projected a deficit. At the start of 1972, it changed its evening offerings from a Monday–Friday schedule to a Sunday–Wednesday schedule, not because of money issues but because it received PBS programming from Kentucky Educational Television (KET), which changed its schedule.
By July 1972, the school board was starting to look for another operator to take over WNIN. It only had plans to keep the station on the air through the first week of August 1973. By March, the University of Evansville was leading an effort to form a community licensee to acquire the station and keep it operating. It pledged $100,000 toward the effort, which incorporated in April as Southwest Indiana Public Television, Inc. WNIN ceased night programming on June 6 and left the air entirely on August 3, having broadcast exclusively in black and white in its three years of school board operation. The school corporation retained its radio station, WPSR, which continued to broadcast from the McCutchanville site into the early 1980s.
Public ownership and public radio