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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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| Barrington Broadcasting Group, LLC | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Private |
| Industry | Mass media |
| Genre | Television broadcasting |
| Founded | May 2003 |
| Founders |
|
| Defunct | November 25, 2013 |
| Fate | Acquired by Sinclair |
| Successor | Sinclair Broadcast Group |
| Headquarters | , USA |
Number of locations | Fifteen ranked television markets (U.S.) |
| Key people |
|
| Services | Broadcasting |
| Parent | Pilot Group |
Barrington Broadcasting Group, LLC was an American mass media and broadcasting company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It owned television stations primarily in middle and small-sized media markets. Barrington owned or operated via duopoly twenty-four television stations, with the potential to reach about 3.4 percent of households in the U.S.[1] It was owned by Pilot Group, a private equity firm.
Barrington Broadcasting was established in May 2003 by a team of former executives from Benedek Broadcasting. Following Benedek's bankruptcy and subsequent divestiture of all television assets in 2002, K. James Yager, the former President, along with Senior Vice-Presidents Chris Cornelius, Keith Bland, and Mary Flodin, formed a company for medium and small market broadcasting.[2]
The company began operations in January 2004 with its purchases of former Benedek stations WHOI-TV (Peoria, Illinois) and KHQA-TV (Hannibal, Missouri/Quincy, Illinois) along with WEYI-TV in Vienna Township, Michigan. Barrington grew slowly at first, adding five more stations between 2004 and early 2006. A major expansion took place on March 27, 2006, when Raycom Media agreed to sell twelve of its network-affiliated TV stations to Barrington for $262 million.[3] The sale was completed on August 11.[4] In recent years, Barrington had been at the forefront of integrating social media and the internet into their on-air content.[2]
In late 2012, it was announced that Pilot Group had put Barrington up for sale and that both Nexstar Broadcasting Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group were in final talks to acquire the full regiment of stations.[5] On February 28, 2013, Barrington announced that it would sell its stations to Sinclair.[6] The sale was granted FCC approval on November 18.[7] The transaction was formally consummated on November 25.[8]
| Media market | State | Station | Purchased | Sold | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado Springs–Pueblo | Colorado | KXRM-TV | 2006 | 2013 | |
| KXTU-LD | 2006 | 2013 | |||
| Albany | Georgia | WFXL | 2006 | 2013 | |
| Peoria–Bloomington | Illinois | WHOI | 2004 | 2013 | |
| Quincy | KHQA-TV | 2004 | 2013 | ||
| Marquette | Michigan | WLUC-TV | 2006 | 2013 | |
| Saginaw–Bay City–Flint | WEYI-TV | 2004 | 2013 | ||
| WBSF | 2004 | 2013 | |||
| Sault Ste. Marie, MI | WGTQ | 2009 | 2013 | [A][a] | |
| WTOM-TV | 2006 | 2013 | [B] | ||
| Traverse City | WGTU | 2009 | 2013 | [a] | |
| WPBN-TV | 2006 | 2013 | |||
| Columbia–Jefferson City | Missouri | KRCG | 2005 | 2013 | |
| Kirksville | KTVO | 2006 | 2013 | ||
| Clovis | New Mexico | KVIH-TV | 2005 | 2013 | [C] |
| Syracuse | New York | WSTM-TV | 2006 | 2013 | |
| WTVH | 2009 | 2013 | [a] | ||
| WSTQ-LP | 2006 | 2013 | |||
| Toledo | Ohio | WNWO-TV | 2006 | 2013 | |
| Columbia | South Carolina | WACH | 2006 | 2013 | |
| Florence–Myrtle Beach | WPDE-TV | 2005 | 2013 | ||
| WWMB | 2005 | 2013 | [a] | ||
| Amarillo | Texas | KVII-TV | 2005 | 2013 | |
| Harlingen–McAllen–Brownsville | KGBT-TV | 2006 | 2013 |
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Barrington Broadcasting Group, LLC was an American mass media and broadcasting company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It owned television stations primarily in middle and small-sized media markets. Barrington owned or operated via duopoly twenty-four television stations, with the potential to reach about 3.4 percent of households in the U.S. It was owned by Pilot Group, a private equity firm.
Benedek Broadcasting was a television broadcasting company that owned and operated 22 network-affiliated television stations throughout the United States, all affiliated with major television networks, serving mainly small and medium-size markets. The company was founded in the late 1970s by A. Richard Benedek but grew in the 1990s with buyouts of Brisette Broadcasting and Stauffer Communications. The company was based in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Throughout its existence, namesake Benedek served as chairman and chief executive officer. Benedek also owned U.S. Virgin Islands station WBNB-TV starting in 1986, but was knocked off the air by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Its facilities were so badly damaged that Benedek, with no financial resources to rebuild, essentially chose to abandon the station, and its license was deleted in 1995. Benedek Broadcasting filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002, and sold off its 22 stations to different owners, many of them to Gray Television with the balance (all small or struggling stations) going to Chelsey Broadcasting. Gray had intended to purchase the Benedek stations in 2002, but spin-off some of them to Chelsey, leaving Gray with the larger stations. Barrington Broadcasting which began operations in 2004 with former Benedek president and COO K. James Yager as CEO, occupied what had been Benedek's headquarters and purchased two of the former Benedek stations which had been purchased by Chelsey, until it was acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2013. Benedek Broadcasting had also operated Benedek Interactive Media, an 'Internet newsroom' that extended web-only coverage and editorial capabilities to its stations.
WSMH (channel 66) is a television station licensed to Flint, Michigan, United States, serving east central Michigan as an affiliate of Fox and NBC. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside WEYI-TV (channel 25) and CW affiliate WBSF (channel 46). The three stations share studios on West Pierson Road in Mount Morris Township; WSMH's transmitter is located on Amman Road northeast of Chesaning. WSMH went on the air on January 13, 1985, as an independent station. Its first months on air were marked by a dispute over tower construction and a fire that kept the fledgling station off the air for more than a month. WSMH was sold in 1986 to Cincinnati businessman Gerald J. Robinson and affiliated with the new Fox network that year. Sinclair acquired it in 1996. In 2002, the station debuted its first local newscast, which was also the first to use Sinclair's partially centralized News Central format in which national segments and weather originated from a facility in Maryland. When News Central was wound down in 2006, WSMH instead began airing a 10 p.m. newscast from local CBS affiliate WNEM-TV. Sinclair acquired Barrington Broadcasting in 2013 and assumed operational control, but not the licenses, of WEYI and WBSF. WEYI's newsroom assumed production responsibility for the 10 p.m. newscast two years later. On December 10, 2025, the NBC subchannel of WEYI moved to WSMH.
WNWO-TV (channel 24) is a television station in Toledo, Ohio, United States, affiliated with NBC. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains a transmitter facility on Cousino Road in Jerusalem Township. Its studios are located on South Byrne Road in Toledo. Channel 24 was the only television station built by entrepreneur Daniel H. Overmyer. It signed on May 2, 1966, as WDHO-TV, Toledo's third local station. It had no primary network affiliation until 1969, when it became the area's ABC outlet, though it aired shows from the major networks not already seen in the market and was the local affiliate for the short-lived United Network, which Overmyer helped start, in 1967. For most of its first 20 years in operation, the station was burdened by Overmyer's other troubled businesses. The sale of his other TV station permits led to a congressional investigation, and Overmyer's heavily indebted warehouse interests experienced financial reverses en route to a bankruptcy reorganization filing in 1973. WDHO-TV was involved in two lengthy bankruptcy cases, during which Overmyer committed bankruptcy fraud and the building housing the news department was repossessed by the First National Bank of Boston, which held station stock as collateral. Drained of resources, channel 24 never adequately competed in the area of news, becoming a distant third to the established stations, WTOL and WTVG. The station was acquired by Toledo Television Investors in 1986 and immediately renamed WNWO-TV. The new owners tried to improve the station's news department, but met by viewer indifference and continued low ratings, the station cut back to one newscast a day in 1990. In October 1995, the station switched affiliations from ABC to NBC after WTVG, previously the NBC affiliate in Toledo, was purchased by Capital Cities/ABC. The affiliation switch did not immediately serve as an impetus to revitalize the news operation. That changed after Malrite Communications Group acquired WNWO-TV in 1996 and launched a comprehensive effort including building expansion and expanded newscasts. With the exception of a brief time under Raycom Media ownership, the newscasts failed to attract significant ratings. After Raycom Media acquired WTOL in 2006 and sold WNWO-TV to Barrington Broadcasting, the news department withstood a round of layoffs and gradual decreases in headcount, remaining the laggard in local TV news in spite of a relaunch effort in 2011. Barrington's stations were purchased by Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2013; shortly after the purchase, Sinclair entered into a seven-month-long retransmission consent dispute with Buckeye CableSystem that saw most Toledo-area cable viewers lose access to WNWO. After the dispute ended, Sinclair attempted another revamp of the news department, to no avail in raising the station's flagging ratings fortunes. In March 2017, presentation of its newscasts was outsourced to South Bend, Indiana, and local news was discontinued altogether in May 2023.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
