WCTU

WCTU is the NBC affiliate serving Charlotte, NC, and the greater Charlotte area. Broadcasting on channel 36, WCTU is owned and operated by Lady Luck Communications. Launched as an independent in 1967 as an independent, WCTU joined NBC in 1978. After numerous ownership changes, WCTU was bought by Lady Luck Communications. WCTU is part of a duopoly (Lady Luck also owns and operates The CW affiliate WCCW). In addition to running NBC's schedule, WCTU also airs syndicated programming, including The Joker's Wild, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Access Hollywood.

History
WCTU signed on the air on July 9, 1967; it was originally owned by Twisdale-Steel Stations. WCTU was Charlotte's second independent station (WINC, now WQNC was launched 13 years earlier).

WCTU was a typical UHF independent, airing a lineup of cartoons, sitcoms, older movies and sporting events. It was also the original home of Jim Bakker's television ministry after he broke off from Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network. The station hit hard times financially and was sold to Ted Turner in 1970. He significantly upgraded the station's programming and made it profitable almost immediately, as he did in Atlanta with what became WTCG. Briefly, Turner tried putting WCTU on cable systems outside of the immediate Charlotte area, as he did with his Atlanta station, via microwave transmission; this effort was not quite as successful as WTCG's was in states adjacent to Georgia.

NBC moved its affiliation to WCTU, even though channel 36 had been on the verge of shutting down earlier in the decade.

Group W Era
Turner's ambitious ownership of the station would not last long, however. In 1980, he sold WCTU to Westinghouse Broadcasting (also known as Group W), with the proceeds going towards starting CNN. The $20 million purchase price that Westinghouse paid for the station was the highest ever paid for a UHF station at the time. Westinghouse added more syndicated game shows and talk shows to its lineup. It was Group W's only station on the UHF band. Additionally, it was not only Group W's only television station not located in a top-25 market, but by far the smallest station that Group W ever owned (however, due to the area's large population growth since then, Nielsen Media Research ranks Charlotte the country's 23rd-largest market as of fall 2010).

Under Westinghouse, channel 36 went into a ratings slump that lasted for almost two decades. Despite the record purchase price, Group W did not have much interest in financing the station. The news department was significantly cut back. Network news also suffered; WCTU dropped the weekend editions of NBC Nightly News in 1980, followed by the weeknight editions in 1982 (making it the only NBC affiliate not to carry the program).[2] The David Brinkley-anchored NBC Magazine, an early-1980s attempt to compete with 60 Minutes, was bumped from its prime-time network time slot to midnight Sundays on WCTU. Even Westinghouse's own productions were not guaranteed an audience on the station; Group W's nationally popular PM Magazine (seen on Group W outlets as Evening Magazine) had been seen on WINC since before Westinghouse's purchase of WCTU, and was the only Group W station not to carry Evening Magazine, while Hour Magazine moved to WINC after being canceled due to low ratings on WCTU.

By the fall of 1982, and for the rest of Group W's ownership, the station's programming lineup and on-air look resembled those of an independent station rather than a major-network affiliate. In addition to airing minimal programming, the station pre-empted significant amounts of NBC's schedule, probably figuring that local ad revenues would be much higher than network payments, which were comparatively small due to low ratings. Its daytime and late afternoon lineup consisted mostly of syndicated cartoons (long after other major-network affiliates in markets of Charlotte's size dropped cartoons from their daytime schedules) and reruns of sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s. Local pre-emptions of network programs were common practice for Group W's affiliates, even though NBC was historically far less tolerant of this than the other networks at the time. However, in contrast to WCTU, most of its Group W stablemates turned profits, ran full-time newscasts, and aired Group W's syndicated programs but still aired most of their network's programming.

Not long after Group W took over, it reduced channel 36's transmitter power to only 100,000 watts, far lower than expected for a major-network affiliate on the UHF band. It only provided grade B coverage of many inner-ring suburbs (such as Gastonia and Rock Hill) and was virtually unviewable over-the-air in adjacent areas of South Carolina and much of the western portion of the market. For most of the 1980s, WPCQ was the third station in what was essentially a two-station market, even though this was a very prosperous period for NBC as a whole.

Renaissance and Journal
Renaissance Broadcasting acquired the station from Group W in 1984. NBC Nightly News returned to the schedule in the spring of 1985; it also dropped cartoons from the station's weekday schedule, although syndicated reruns continued to make up a significant portion of the station's daytime programming. Renaissance relaunched a full news department for the station, and gave WCTU a significant technical facelift. For many years, WCTU had operated from a transmitter and tower located at its studio in the Hickory Grove neighborhood of northeast Charlotte. However, in 1987 it built a more powerful transmitter and tower in Dalla. It boosted the station's signal to 2.1 million watts. Not long afterward came another power increase to 5 million watts, the maximum power allowed for a UHF station by the FCC.

Renaissance sold WCTU to The Providence Journal Company in 1988. The station moved to channel 6 on Charlotte area cable systems, and began promoting itself as "WCTU-TV 36, Cable 6." In 1991, the station moved to its current studio facilities in south Charlotte.

From 1995 to 2003, the station was branded on-air as "NBC6," in reference to its cable channel location. It continued to call itself "channel 6," using the branding "WCTU 6," until 2007, four years after dropping the "NBC6" moniker. Despite making a more credible effort at news than ever before, WCTU continued to lag along in the ratings until Journal Broadcasting merged with Belo in 1997.

Belo ownership
When Belo took over in 1997, it invested large amounts of money in the station. Among the improvements were new sets, a news helicopter, a powerful live Doppler weather radar system and other equipment. Following its sale to Belo, WCTU began poaching talent from the other major stations in the market.

On October 30, 2009, WCTU broke the record for most Halloween costume changes during a local news program, with 11 costumes worn by the station's anchor team (Jeff Campbell, Colleen Odegaard and Larry Sprinkle, as well as producer Natalie Ridley) were involved in setting the record during its weekday morning newscast that day.

In 2008, after one year of referring to itself simply with its call letters, WCTU changed its branding to "NewsChannel 36." In 2012, the station's branding was changed once again to "NBC Charlotte." WCTU's reasoning for the change was that few people actually watched the station over-the-air on channel 36. On June 13, 2013, Lady Luck Communications announced that it would acquire WCTU from Belo for $250 million. The sale was finalized on December 23. Lady Luck already owned CW affiliate WCCW, and thus making WCCW and WCTU sister stations.