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In many people's eyes, WOI-TV will always be seen as college kids playing television, said Allen Sandubrae, vice president of news for Citadel Communications Co., the station's parent company.
"We're swimming upstream in the river of old perceptions," he said. "Our product has consistently gotten better in production values and content, but many people won't give us a chance." That bad reputation, which Sandubrae said isn't entirely underserved, forced the station to say goodbye to its old image and rebrand itself as ABC 5.
"This is our company's flagship station," he said. "We wanted to figure out a way to turn it around."
And if the station's ratings are any indication, their work is cut out for them. In the May ratings period, called by some the Super Bowl of ratings battles because it is the last important indicator of viewership until after the holiday season, WOI finished a distant third, in every news time slot, with the 10 p.m. newscast faring the worst with a 5 share compared with a 39 share for KCCI and a 25 share for WHO. A share is the percentage of the TV households watching television at a given time tuned to a particular program. Those numbers were virtually the same for the station in the same ratings period last year.
But Sept. 11, the station...