18 Facts About WGNO

WGNO is a television station in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, affiliated with ABC.

WGNO began to be carried on many cable providers in southern Louisiana during the 1970s, before it was replaced by Atlanta-based superstation WTCG.

In 1981, WGNO ran business news programming from the Financial News Network.

From 1982 to 1987, WGNO aired a series of public service announcements featuring a character called "Tom Foote"; Tom was a local entertainer seen in area schools and in the French Quarter.

In 1978, WGNO was purchased by General Media of Rockford, Illinois, who would in turn sell the station to Tribune Broadcasting in 1983.

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Under Tribune, the station continued to grow, and WGNO remained the leading independent station in the market even as other competitors signed on the air—WNOL-TV in March 1984 and later, WCCL in March 1989.

WGNO reportedly turned down an offer by Fox to become a charter affiliate of the network, prior to its October 1986 launch; Fox programming instead went to WNOL, which its then-owners TVX Broadcast Group used as leverage to get Fox to sign a deal to affiliate with the majority of the company's independent stations.

At that time, The WB only offered a few hours of programming each week ; as a result, WGNO continued to run syndicated programming for the remainder of the broadcast day.

WVUE switched its affiliation to Fox on January 1,1996, resulting in a three-way swap that resulted in WGNO becoming the market's new ABC affiliate, while the WB affiliation moved to former Fox affiliate WNOL-TV.

From 1999—when Tribune sold WGNX in Atlanta to the Meredith Corporation—until 2013, WGNO was the only Tribune-owned television station that was affiliated with a "Big Three" network.

WGNO merged with channel 38's then-owner Qwest Broadcasting in 2000, creating the market's first television duopoly with WGNO.

In July 2005, WGNO relocated from its studio facilities at the World Trade Center New Orleans in the city's Central Business District to a facility at New Orleans Centre.

WGNO eventually established temporary facilities from two trailers outside of the Louisiana Superdome, with most of the station's broadcast equipment being purchased from eBay resellers.

In 1993, legendary network executive Brandon Tartikoff, who had engineered a successful turnaround of NBC's programming and viewership during the 1980s as president of the network, created a game show for WGNO called NO It Alls ; the program entered into national syndication in 1996, under the modified title Know It Alls.

From 1993 until 1995, WGNO served as the over-the-air broadcaster of the American Association's New Orleans Zephyrs, carrying games from the minor league baseball franchise.

Until 2021, WGNO carried any Saints Thursday night games which are otherwise exclusive to NFL Network.

Since it launched its news operation in 1996, WGNO's newscasts have typically placed last among the market's four news-producing stations, similar to that of other former independents and Fox stations that joined a Big Three network as a result of the affiliation switches that occurred between 1994 and 1996.

On March 1,2008, WGNO completed construction of its replacement digital transmitter; however, since it operated on the same frequency as its analog signal, the digital transmitter could not become operational until WGNO's analog transmitter was shut down.