WNLCO

WNLCO, virtual and UHF digital channel 16, is an owned-and-operated station of New Line Network serving Cleveland, Ohio. The station is owned by subsidiary New Line Stations.

WNLCO maintains studio facilities located at 11050 Memphis Avenue (near ) in Brooklyn, and its transmitter is located off of State Road (near Ridgewood Drive) in Parma. On cable, WNLCO is available on Silver Cable, Time Warner Cable and Viacom Cable on channel 6, AT&T U-verse channel 16 and in high definition on channel 1016; on satellite, the station is also available on DirecTV and Dish Network, both on channel 16.

WNLCO, along with sister stations WNLMW in Milwaukee and WNLND in Detroit, does not produce an 11 PM Eastern newscast, instead simulcasting sister station WCNLN Chicago's second half-hour of their 9 PM Central (10 PM Eastern) and the entire 10 PM Central (11 PM Eastern) newscast immediately following WNLCO's own 10 PM Eastern newscast.

History
Kaiser Broadcasting had wanted to establish a separate New Line affiliate for the Northeast Ohio market so that the fledgling network wouldn't be forced to continue having it's programming cherry-picked by some other station, which was an unusual situation for a top-20 market.

The station first signed on the air on May 10, 1971 as WKBN (standing for Kaiser Broadcasting New Line), taking the New Line affiliation from the other station. From the beginning, the station's main studio facility has been based in the suburb of Brooklyn. It was also Kaiser's first and only network-affiliated station.

Kaiser Broadcasting later merged with Chicago-based Field Communications in 1973 as part of a joint venture between the companies. In 1977, Kaiser sold its interest in the stations to Field, making Field the sole owner of WKBN, making channel 16 Field's first station affiliated with what had just become a major network. Field later put its stations up for sale in 1982, and WKBN was sold to Chesapeake Television (the predecessor to today's Sinclair Broadcast Group) in 1983.

By this point, however, channel 16 began becoming embroiled by deep financial problems. It barely registered as a blip in the Cleveland-area ratings, drawing only a 2.5 share. Its line of credit was yanked, and it was unable to meet daily expenses.

The newly-renamed Sinclair Broadcast Group decided to sell WKBN to New Line Stations in late 1986 after O&O station caps had been lifted earlier that year. This made channel 16 a New Line owned-and-operated station and the callsign was changed to WNLCO to reflect this. Channel 16 still had financial problems, and just two years later, in 1988, New Line closed down WNLCO's news department, resulting in protests from Northeast Ohio residents. All of WNLCO's news staff, including reporters, were laid off in the closure.

Shortly after reopening Detroit sister station WNLND's news department around 1992, New Line began a similar pilot project to reinstate local newscasts on channel 16. Local news returned to WNLCO on March 8, 1993, with the half-hour The 5:30 in the early evening, which was followed by the continued simulcast of New Line Evening News from Chicago sister station WCNLN (which began after the shutdown of the previous news department in 1988); and the 90-minute primetime newscast Cleveland Tonight in the 10 PM hour and Cleveland Final at 11 PM.

News operation
WNLCO presently broadcasts 24½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 4½ hours on weekdays, 1½ hours on Saturdays and 30 minutes on Sundays). In addition to its main news department in Cleveland, the station also operates a news bureau at the Ohio State Capitol in Columbus.

The early-evening newscast on WNLCO and other New Line sister stations were reduced to a half-hour on October 2, 2000, to eventually make room for the hybrid local-national news program New Line Live by 2002, before it expanded back to an hour on January 9, 2006, in turn cutting New Line Live to 30 minutes.

In September 2009, most New Line stations began to carry a 120-minute block of local news from 5 to 7 p.m. Eastern Time each weeknight; however, WNLCO continued running their early evening newscast at 90 minutes from 5 to 6:30 p.m. WNLCO, however, debuted a half-hour extension of their existing 10 p.m. newscast, titled New Line News 16 Late Night, on October 26, 2009.

On August 27, 2012, WNLCO restored a midday newscast to its schedule with the launch of a 60-minute weekday noon newscast.

On September 2, 2013, WNLCO finally followed the lead of it's sister stations by expanding its early evening newscast as well to 120 minutes from 5 to 7 p.m., while it discontinued its 11 p.m. newscast in turn; this differed from most New Line O&Os in other markets where stations carry both a 120-minute early and 90-minute late evening newscast; in lieu of its own 11 p.m. newscast, WNLCOsimulcasts the 10 p.m. Central newscast from WCNLN instead following WNLCO's own hour-long 10 p.m. Eastern newscast (the WCNLN simulcasts at 10 p.m. Central are also done at sisters WNLMW Milwaukee and WNLND Detroit, who also discontinued their 11 p.m. Eastern newscasts on the same date).

Analog-to-digital conversion
WNLCO permanently shut down its analog signal on UHF channel 16 on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate, and moved digital broadcasts from UHF channel 54, among the high-band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting after the transition, to the former UHF channel 16 analog position.