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'WGBH' is an established public television and public radio broadcast service located in Boston, Massachusetts. It operates over ten stations -- primarily WGBH 2 and WGBX 44 (television), and WGBH 89.7 FM (radio). WGBH is a member of PBS in regard to its television broadcasts, and both a member of NPR and an affiliate of PRI for its radio broadcasts. The license-holder is the WGBH Educational Foundation.
WGBH produces many shows for the above organizations, including nearly a third of PBS's national prime-time TV. Programs produced for PBS include ''NOVA'', ''Frontline'', ''American Experience'', ''The Victory Garden'' and ''This Old House''.
Recognized for its contributions to non-commercial educational television programming, WGBH is also a leader in services for people who are deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind, or visually impaired. WGBH invented television closed captioning and the Descriptive Video Service (DVS); they provide these access services to commercial and public TV producers, and to home video, Web sites, and movie theaters nationwide.
History
''For more of a history of the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council see the article on John Lowell, Jr.''
WGBH Educational Foundation received its first broadcasting license (for radio) in 1951 under the auspices of the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, a consortium of local universities and cultural institutions, whose collaboration stems from an 1836 bequest by textile manufacturer John Lowell, Jr. calling for free public lectures for the citizens of Boston.
WGBH Radio Boston signed on at 89.7 MHz FM on October 6, 1951, with a live broadcast of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The original construction permit for Channel 2 in Boston went to Raytheon, an electronics company based in neighboring Waltham, Massachusetts, who would have launched a commercial television station under the call letters WRTB-TV (for Raytheon Television Broadcasting). WRTB never made it on the air, opening the way for the FCC to allocate Channel 2 for noncommercial purposes and for WGBH to receive a license to operate on that channel.
WGBH-TV Channel 2 went on the air on May 2, 1955, at 5:20 p.m. with studios located at 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. When a fire destroyed the studios in the early morning hours of October 14, 1961, WGBH-TV Channel 2 and WGBH 89.7 FM signed-on from the studios of other broadcasting stations until they were able to build their new studios located at 125 Western Avenue in Allston, and sign on there on August 29, 1963. WGBH moved to a new studio complex on Market Street in Brighton in June, 2007.
WGBH was New England's first non-commercial television station and a pioneer in what is now known as Public Television. Many programs seen on National Educational Television and later, the Public Broadcasting Service, originated at the facilities of WGBH or were otherwise produced by the station.
Transmission facilities
"GBH" stands for Great Blue Hill, the location of WGBH's FM transmitter, as well as the original location of WGBH-TV's transmitter. Great Blue Hill in Milton, Massachusetts, has an elevation of 635 feet (193 m) and is the highest point in the Boston area. Today, WGBH-TV's and WGBX-TV's transmitters are located at the CBS digital television facility in Needham, Massachusetts, where channel 44 originally signed on September 25, 1967; channel 2 moved there on June 18, 1966. WGBX-TV's digital service on channel 43 shares the master antenna at the very top of the tower with the commercial stations. Analog channel 44 has a separate antenna lower down that is shared with WGBH-DT on channel 19.
WGBH operates a Shaw Broadcast Services satellite uplink facility which provides Boston broadcast television stations to Canadian cable and satellite TV distributors. As a Canadian company, Shaw is not legally entitled to operate an uplink facility in the United States. Hence, it pays WGBH to perform this service on its behalf. This facility is also located at the CBS (WBZ-TV) tower in Needham.
WGBH also owns three stations in the Cape Cod and Islands area, licensed to Woods Hole (WCAI), Nantucket (WNAN), and Brewster (WZAI). All simulcast National Public Radio programming but are programmed separately from WGBH. A fourth station, WNCK, is owned by Nantucket Public Radio, but simulcasts WGBH-FM programming.
All of WGBH's radio signals are available as Internet radio, and WGBH-FM and WGBH-HD2 were added to the iTunes online radio channel lineup in August 2006.
Studios
WGBH's original studios were located at 84 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts (presently Stratton Student Center) on the campus of MIT until the building burned down in a 1961 fire. Three years later, after being based in temporary offices and using the studios of Boston's commercial television stations to produce local programming, the station moved to 125 Western Avenue in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. The ZIP code of the station and its post-office box—PO Box 350, Boston, Mass 02134—was made famous in a recurring jingle on its 1970s and late 1990s children's program, ''ZOOM''.
As WGBH's operations in grew, the 125 Western Avenue building proved inadequate; some administrative operations were moved across the street to 114 Western Avenue, with an overhead pedestrian bridge connecting the two buildings. By 2005, WGBH had facilities in more than a dozen buildings in the Allston area. The station's need for more studio space dovetailed with Harvard Business School's desire to expand its adjacent campus; Harvard already owned the land on which the WGBH studios were located. WGBH built a new studio complex in nearby Brighton, spanning the block of Market Street from Guest Street to North Beacon Street, with radio studios facing pedestrian traffic on Market Street. The postal address and lobby entrance of the new studio building is 1 Guest Street; it was inaugurated in June, 2007. Television shows and radio programs continue to shoot at the Western Avenue studios; migration to the new facility is expected to reach completion by September 2007. The old Western Avenue studios will be demolished when WGBH has finished moving out.
Callsign history
WGBH's original transmitter was located on Great Blue Hill in Milton, Massachusetts (thus the choice of WGBH as a callsign) and the FM radio transmitter is still there. As a result, all of WGBH's TV stations have the WGB
★ form; channel 44 in Boston has WGBX (supposedly for 'G'reat 'B'lue E'x'perimental), while channel 57 in Springfield, Massachusetts has WGBY for 'G'reat 'B'lue 'Y'onder. There was to be a WGBW in Adams, Massachusetts at one point that would have operated on channel 35; its W was to stand for 'W'est. The callsign has since been reassigned to a Christian radio station in Florida.
The original Cape Cod and Islands stations are WCAI for 'CA'pe and 'I'slands and WNAN for 'NAN'tucket; WZAI seems to be derived from the 'CAI callsign.
WNCK is derived from a shortening of NantuCKet as well.
WGBH's callsign is occasionally jokingly expanded as "God Bless Harvard", although the station's connections with the university are at best indirect. (Harvard was one of several Boston-area universities which took part in the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, and provided land on Western Avenue in Allston for the station's studios.)
Identification and sounder
WGBH's distinctive audio sounder has been aired for more than 30 years, accompanied by different graphics. The first such logo appeared in 1974 and can be found on the first episode of ''ZOOM''. The seven-second jingle begins with a bluish green background, with the letters "WGBH" in a yellow Helvetica font zooming away from the viewer. Then, the word "Boston" zooms forward (similar to the V symbol in Viacom's 1976 to 1986 identification), engulfing the whole screen and creating a yellow background, after which the word "Presents" slowly zooms forward in bluish green. This ident is generally believed to be extinct, but it has surfaced on tapes of old WGBH programming (such as the 1970s version of ''ZOOM'', ''The French Chef'', and pre-1978 ''NOVA'' episodes) and in video clips.
The same music is also used in the current ID. The "circle outline" ident began in late 1978 at the beginning of WGBH's national shows and is among the most famous idents such as WNET's "Radar" signature. Sometime in the mid-1980s, this ident was shortened to just the latter half and moved to the end of shows in 1993, when the sound effect was changed to conform to PBS's desire for shorter station ID's. It is also edited out on some shows with a program's closing credits music playing over the 'WGBH Boston' production card.
The full seven-second music appears in the "neon" station IDs on WGBH itself, along with different animation for the outline logo.
Channels and digital services
WGBH Radio
★ WGBH 89.7 Boston — "Boston's NPR, Arts and Culture Station", broadcasting a mixed-format of classical, jazz, folk, blues, Celtic music, NPR News programs and PRI's The World. The WGBH Radio programming is also broadcast:
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★ in Nantucket heard on WNCK 89.5
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★ in East Cambridge heard on W242AA 96.3
★ WGBH-HD2 — classical music stream on HD Radio and available over the Web
★ Cape and Islands NPR www.cainan.org — broadcasting news, information, light entertainment. Heard on:
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★ WCAI 90.1 Woods Hole
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★ WNAN 91.1 Nantucket
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★ WZAI 94.3 Brewster
WGBH-TV
This is the main television service of WGBH, as it is the television station first licenced by the Foundation.
WGBX-TV
Similar to WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, WGBH operates a secondary station, WGBX-TV. The current tagline for this station is "independent, original, 'GBH 44". It functions as a secondary station to WGBH-TV, and focuses more promenently on program genres not covered by WGBH-TV. Reruns of the previous night's programming either from WGBH-TV or from WGBX-TV itself makes up a part of this station's programming.
★ WGBX-TV 44/DT 43 Boston (also on Comcast cable channel 16)
Other TV services
WGBH is one of six local Boston TV stations seen in Canada on the Bell ExpressVu satellite provider.
At one point, WGBH operated a Hyannis translator on channel 8 that had the W08CH call sign, which later ceased operations. It was deleted by the FCC in 2004.[1]
WGBH Online
The internet is WGBH's "third platform" - All radio and television programs have web components that are available at wgbh.org. There are also "web-only" productions:
★ WGBH Forum Network — Live and archived webcasts of free public lectures in partnership with Boston's leading cultural and educational organizations - wgbh.org/forum
★ WGBH Podcasts - wgbh.org/podcasts
Major WGBH productions
Television
★ ''All About You''
★ ''American Experience''
★ ''Andre's Mother''
★ ''Antiques Roadshow''
★
★ ''Antiques Roadshow FYI''
★ ''Arthur''
★ ''Basic Black'' (formerly ''Say Brother'')
★ ''Between the Lions''
★ ''Curious George''
★ ''Design Squad''
★ ''Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish''
★ ''Discovering Psychology''
★ ''Don't Look Now!'' (1983, a short-lived spinoff clone of the Canadian TV show You Can't Do That On Television)
★ ''Evening at Pops''
★ ''FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman''
★ ''French in Action''
★ ''The French Chef''
★ ''Frontline''
★
★ ''Frontline/World''
★ ''The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship''
★ ''Greater Boston''
★ ''La Plaza''
★ ''Masterpiece Theatre''
★ ''Mystery!''
★ ''NOVA''
★
★ ''NOVA scienceNOW''
★ ''Peep and the Big Wide World''
★ ''People's Century''
★ ''Postcards from Buster''
★ ''Rebop''
★ ''Simply Ming''
★ ''This Old House''
★
★ ''The New Yankee Workshop''
★ ''Time Warp Trio''(the only WGBH-produced show that does not air on PBS)
★ ''The Victory Garden''
★ ''War and Peace in the Nuclear Age''
★ ''The Western Tradition''
★ ''Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego'' (in partnership with WQED in Pittsburgh)
★ ''ZOOM''
Radio
★ ''Open Source''
★ ''A Celtic Sojourn''
★ ''Says You!''
★ ''Sound & Spirit''
★ ''The World'' (co-produced with the BBC)
★ ''The Changing World''
★ ''From the Top''
★ ''Arts and Ideas''
Online
★ ''FFFBI''
★ ''Teachers' Domain''
★ ''The WGBH Forum Network''
Podcasting
★ ''Morning Stories'' Public radio's first podcast directed and produced by Tony Kahn for WGBH 89.7 and WGBH.org.
Notable people who have appeared regularly in WGBH productions
★ Julia Child, "The French Chef"
★ James Underwood Crockett, "The Victory Garden"
★ Bob Vila, "This Old House"
★ Alistair Cooke, "Masterpiece Theatre"
★ Russell Baker, "Masterpiece Theatre"
★ Will Lyman, "Frontline"
★ Gene Shalit, "Mystery!"
★ Vincent Price, "Mystery!"
★ Diana Rigg, "Mystery!"
★ Robert Krulwich, "NOVA ScienceNOW"
★ Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, "NOVA ScienceNOW"
★ Christopher Lydon, "The Ten O'Clock News"
★ Michael Kolowich, "The Ten O'Clock News"
★ Steve Curwood, "The Ten O'Clock News"
Footnote
1. Call Sign History
Forum Network
External links
★ Morning Stories videos on YouTube
★ WGBH 1974 logo on YouTube
★ Screen capture of the Flash of Doom at retrojunk.com
★ WGBH Educational Foundation
★ WGBH Alumni
★ Cape and Islands NPR (covers WCAI, WNAN, and WZAI)
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