Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
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
| |
| City | Gary, Indiana |
|---|---|
| Channels | |
| Branding | Lakeshore PBS |
| Programming | |
| Affiliations | |
| Ownership | |
| Owner | Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, Inc. |
| WLPR-FM | |
| History | |
First air date | November 15, 1987 |
Former channel number |
|
Call sign meaning | "We're Your Indiana Neighbor"[citation needed] |
| Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| 49803 | |
| ERP | 1,000 kW |
| HAAT | 290 m (951 ft) |
Transmitter coordinates | 41°20′56″N 87°24′2″W / 41.34889°N 87.40056°W |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | www |
WYIN (channel 56), branded as Lakeshore PBS, is a secondary PBS member television station licensed to Gary, Indiana, United States, serving the Chicago area. It is owned by Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, Inc., as a sister station to NPR member WLPR-FM (89.1). The two stations share studios on Indiana Place (Mississippi Street) in Merrillville; WYIN's transmitter is located near Lake Dalecarlia (due south of Cedar Lake). WYIN is one of two PBS member stations in the Chicago television market, alongside WTTW (channel 11).

The first television station in northwest Indiana was WCAE, a noncommercial station owned by the Lake Central School Corporation in St. John, which broadcast on UHF channel 50 from September 26, 1967, to March 31, 1983. The station was closed when financial troubles prompted the school board to pull its subsidy, ceasing channel 50's operations.
Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, a group that consisted of former WCAE advisory board members who had split from the school board in 1978, bought the WCAE license in late 1983 and set out to reactivate it. In a convoluted transaction that had as its purpose the construction of a new TV station in Chicago, Metrowest Corporation (owned by Fred Eychaner) paid NIPB $684,000 to join its plan to switch the noncommercial and commercial statuses of Gary's two TV channel allocations, channels 50 and 56. Metrowest had bought a majority stake in the permitholder of WDAI, a commercial station on channel 56; however, channel 56 could not be built from the Sears Tower, while channel 50 could. The payment allowed NIPB to access matching federal grants to construct its own facilities. Metrowest eventually took channel 50 to air as commercial station WPWR-TV (now a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station). The WCAE non-commercial license that was now reassigned to channel 56 was reconstructed by NIPB who signed the station on the air as WYIN on November 15, 1987.
For many years, WYIN fought to try to replace its aging transmitter and build a new tower atop either the Sears Tower or the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago. Its plans, and any floated by WYCC, were bitterly opposed by Window to the World Communications, which used their position as a national programming provider for PBS to turn back any attempts at competition from the two stations all being on an equal platform and transmitter position and power. WYIN pays a lower license fee for its carriage of PBS programs. WTTW station management claimed that if WYIN was allowed to transmit from Sears or the Hancock, it would retain that lower cost for PBS programming, leaving WTTW at a disadvantage as well as taking valuable pledge donations from the station.
In the face of continued objections from WTTW, WYIN opted instead to build a new transmitter tower in Cedar Lake, Indiana. In November 2003, the station erected a 950-foot (290 m) transmission tower at its existing transmitter site, which increased the station's power to 1.35 million watts.
The station began producing a weeknight prime time newscast focusing on local issues in northwest Indiana on September 4, 1990, as the Indiana Nightly Report.[2] This newscast (which was also rebroadcast at midnight each weeknight) originally competed with the hour-long 9 p.m. newscasts that air on WGN-TV (channel 9) and Fox owned-and-operated station WFLD (channel 32).
Production of the program (later renamed 56 Nightly News) was suspended in December 1999, due to the lack of equipment to present a program at a viable technical quality and the issue of production costs for the newscast taking assets away from WYIN's other programming. The station entered into a news share agreement with AT&T Broadband to simulcast the local news program it produced for the provider's local origination channel; on February 5, 2001, WYIN resumed production of the program, now retitled 56 News (later to be renamed Lakeshore News Tonight in 2006).[3] On May 6, 2013, the station expanded its newscasts into two separate broadcasts, with an early evening edition added at 6 p.m. while the late evening broadcast was moved to 10 p.m.[4]
On January 29, 2014, WYIN announced that it would discontinue Lakeshore News Tonight as a daily news program after the January 31 broadcast due to a reduction in the station's funding; WYIN management announced plans to possibly bring back the program in the spring in a retooled format as a weekly program. Members of WYIN's news staff were reassigned to WLPR-FM, Lakeshore Public Media's website, and to work on other projects for WYIN as well as for the revamped newscast. In the interim, news programming on WYIN would be reduced to daily live weather updates which would debut on February 3.[5] In May 2014, the show was relaunched as Lakeshore Report, a half-hour-long review of the week, airing on Friday evenings. Additionally, the station also produces the weekly news and public affairs program Lakeshore Focus also on Friday evenings.
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
| Subchannel | Res. | Short name | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| 56.1 | 1080i | WYIN-HD | PBS |
| 56.2 | NHK | NHK World |
In September 2010, digital subchannel 56.2 began simulcasting WYIN's main channel (digital subchannel 56.4 also simulcast digital channel 56.1 anamorphic widescreen standard definition, before that subchannel was deleted in 2012). On March 30, 2015, Lakeshore Public Media collaborated with NHK to broadcast its English language network NHK World on digital subchannel 56.2; the subchannel relaunched as an NHK World affiliate on April 1, and was also initially made available on Comcast digital channel 377.[7]
WYIN previously carried "Lakeshore Kids" on digital subchannel 56.3, featuring children's programs primarily supplied by PBS Kids (some of them were distributed by American Public Television); the subchannel, which launched in 2010, was broadcast in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen standard definition. "Lakeshore Kids" signed off on January 16, 2017, after the launch of the national PBS Kids channel, deferring to WTTW-DT4, which carries the network across the market.
WYIN began transmitting a digital signal on UHF channel 17 in February 2004, following the securement of a $2 million grant from the Indiana General Assembly; the digital transmission antenna was placed on its then-recently completed transmitter facility near Crown Point.
WYIN shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 56, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 17, using virtual channel 56.[8]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
WYIN (channel 56), branded as Lakeshore PBS, is a secondary PBS member television station licensed to Gary, Indiana, United States, serving the Chicago area. It is owned by Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, Inc., as a sister station to NPR member WLPR-FM (89.1). The two stations share studios on Indiana Place (Mississippi Street) in Merrillville; WYIN's transmitter is located near Lake Dalecarlia (due south of Cedar Lake). WYIN is one of two PBS member stations in the Chicago television market, alongside WTTW (channel 11).
WTTW (channel 11) is a PBS member television station in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Owned by not-for-profit broadcaster Window to the World Communications, Inc., it is sister to commercial classical music radio station WFMT (98.7 FM). The two stations share studios in the Renée Crown Public Media Center, located at 5400 North Saint Louis Avenue (adjacent to the main campus of Northeastern Illinois University) in the city's North Park neighborhood; its transmitter facility is atop the Willis Tower on South Wacker Drive in the Chicago Loop. WTTW also owns and operates The Chicago Production Center, a video production and editing facility that is operated alongside the two stations. WTTW is one of two PBS member stations serving the Chicago market, alongside Gary, Indiana–licensed WYIN (channel 56). WTTW, along with PBS Wisconsin flagship station WHA-TV in Madison, Wisconsin, serve as default PBS member stations for Rockford as that market does not have a PBS station of its own; both stations are available in that market on local cable and satellite providers.
WLPR-FM is an FM noncommercial, public radio station broadcasting on 89.1 MHz in Lowell, Indiana and serving Northwest Indiana. The station is owned and operated by Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, Inc. (also known as Lakeshore Public Media), which also owns PBS member station WYIN (channel 56), serving as an alternative to Chicago's WBEZ in the Chicago market's eastern reaches. WLPR broadcasts from the WZVN tower on SR-55, just north of SR-2.
WCAE (channel 50) was a PBS member television station in St. John, Indiana, United States, owned by the Lake Central School Corporation. It was the first television station to serve Northwest Indiana and the Calumet Region. The station began experiencing financial and personnel turmoil in the late 1970s; when the early 1980s recession hit the region hard, public support fell, and the school board closed the station in 1983. The license was reactivated in 1987, after more than four years of silence, as WYIN on channel 56.
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 →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.