WSJV (channel 28) is a television station licensed to Elkhart, Indiana, United States, serving the South Bend area as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Heroes & Icons.
The two stations share studios on the University of Notre Dame campus along State Road 933 on South Bend's north side; WSJV's transmitter is co-located within the WSBT-TV (channel 22) site on Ironwood Road in South Bend.
[2] The FCC granted the company a construction permit on June 3, 1953, approving the second station in the South Bend–Elkhart area.
This required a relocation of UHF channel assignments among several localities in Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
[16] Local programs from the station's early years included Kidsville, U.S.A. and two shows featuring puppet DD Donovan.
[21] The sale earned Truth Publishing a tax certificate from the FCC because it broke up cross-ownership of the South Bend cable system, which was founded by the three major commercial stations in the market.
[24] The station began broadcasting at reduced power the next day, but a replacement mast was not put into service until November.
[16] WSJV began airing weekend newscasts for the first time in its history in 1992; the station had previously only aired weeknight newscasts at 6 and 11 p.m., which news director and 20-year employee Larry Ford believed had severely hurt its local image and contributed to its status as a distant third in Michiana television news.
[25] The move came after Don Fuller, a charter station employee who had been general manager for WSJV since 1965, retired that year.
[16] Under Ford's replacement, Jim Parisi, the station added a 5 p.m. newscast featuring an interactive news format soliciting feedback from viewers by telephone and email, the first such newscast in the United States; Parisi, who co-anchored, could read emails live on air from a computer placed on the news set.
[31] In August, Weigel Broadcasting, which had a South Bend translator for its flagship station, WCIU-TV in Chicago, obtained the rights to the ABC affiliation for South Bend[32] and launched a low-power station, "WBND", in time for the switch to take place.
The South Bend Tribune reported the possibility that Quincy was planning to shut down WSJV and consolidate its Fox affiliation onto another station in the market so it could sell WSJV in the FCC's then-forthcoming spectrum incentive auction—which would allow stations to relinquish their broadcast spectrum to the FCC in exchange for a share of the profit from its resale to wireless providers as part of a reallocation process.
[49][50] On February 1, 2021, Gray Television, owner of WNDU-TV, announced its intent to purchase Quincy Media for $925 million in a cash transaction.