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As they build the talent in preparation for a 6 o'clock evening newscast at a yet-to-be-announced date in the future. WOI-TV executives are hopeful the station can finally escape its past.
Longtime operations director Randy Shelton mused that when Iowa State University sold WOI in 1994. the new owners plan to boost the statin's audience share might have gathered more steam if Channel 5 had abandoned its call letters. The WOI brand is the oldest in Iowa television, but Shelton says it may have been a missed opportunity not to burst into the market with a new name to go along with an updated face. "Some people think it's nice to keep old call letters," he said, "but from our perspective, it's not always a benefit."
WOI has had, in some respects, a glorious past. Licensed by the Federal Communications Commission in 1950, it was the first university-owned television station in the country. ISU became a pioneer in using television for educational purposes, broadcasting college-level courses and providing broadcast journalism students with real-life breaking-news experience.
Proponents of the station's public ownership, led by ISU journalism professor John D. Shelley and professor of economics and agriculture Neil Harl, nearly succeeded in their attempt to block the sale, but a 1993 Iowa Supreme Court decision reversed their lower-court victory. Four months later, the Iowa Board of Regents sold WOI to Capital Communications Inc., a subsidiary of Citadel Communications Co.
But there's little value in call letters in a multichannel, remotecontrol, cable-television world. Almost a decade after the sale, "a lot of the public still thinks we are owned by the university," Shelton said. "Or they think this is the Ames station, as if to intimate we don't even have a signal in Des Moines," added WOI General Manager Marshall Porter.
WOI is slowly gaining more audience share in some time slots, though the station generally fared poorly in the May Nielsen ratings period. KCCI-TV's morning, noon, 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. newscasts claimed more viewers than WHO-TV and WOI...