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WOI-TV Channel 5, long the No. 3 station in the Des Moines television market, will add a half-hour newscast at 6 p.m., beginning Sept. 12. Al Sandubrae, vice president for news of WOI parent Citadel Broadcasting Corp., admitted WOI is "swimming upstream" in the battle for audience share, but after five years of turnaround efforts, is "in this game 100 percent," he said.
The station, Central Iowa's oldest, is fighting "perceptions and misconceptions based on some not-so-recent history," he said. For one thing, work still remains to educate local television viewers that tile station is no longer owned by Iowa State University, which operated WOI from its 1949 licensure by the Federal Communications Commission until the Iowa Board of Regents sold it in 1991. For another, Sandubrae believes WOI has been unfairly pilloried by other media engaging in "Channel 5 bashing," a "sport" he anticipates will cease after the station's debut in the 6 o'clock time slot next month.
"We know from swimming up that stream of history, it's going to take a while," he said. "We also know the quality of our product is phenomenal."
When it moved its offices to Des Moines from Ames in 1991, WOI also moved its 6 p.m. newscast to 5 p.m., a tactic that in retrospect not only took WOI off the radar screen of 6 o'clock news viewers, but also may have weakened its 10 p.m. audience share, as viewers tend to watch the same station at 6 and 10. The historic gate-closer in the Nielsen Media Research ratings race, WOI had serious problems "we needed to fix" five years ago when Sandubrae joined Citadel, the parent company...