WAGM-TV (channel 8) is a television station in Presque Isle, Maine, United States, affiliated with CBS, Fox, and The CW Plus. It is owned by Gray Television alongside Fort Kent–licensed low-power NBC affiliate WWPI-LD (channel 16). The two stations share studios on Brewer Road in Presque Isle; WAGM-TV's transmitter is located on the northern section of Mars Hill Mountain among the wind turbines.
WAGM-TV has been the only full-power commercial television station transmitting in Northeast Maine since the station was founded in 1956.
History
Early years
WAGM-TV signed on October 13, 1956, on VHF channel 8. It was a CBS affiliate owned by Harold Glidden and the Aroostook Broadcasting Corporation along with WAGM radio (then at 1450 AM; later at 950 AM). The transmitter was behind the station's Brewer Road studios, providing a coverage area limited to the immediate area including Presque Isle and Caribou. In 1957, Glidden sold Aroostook Broadcasting to Community Broadcasting System, a company controlled by former Governor Horace Hildreth, who also owned WABI-AM-TV in Bangor.
Soon afterward, the station changed its primary affiliation to NBC, matching WABI-TV; however, WAGM-TV maintained secondary affiliations with CBS and ABC. It returned to being a primary CBS affiliate, again following WABI's lead, in 1959. However, in practice, as an affiliate of all the big three networks, WAGM cherry-picked the most popular programs for its prime time lineup.
Community Broadcasting Service merged with Journal Publications in 1971 to form Diversified Communications. WAGM radio was sold in 1981 and renamed WKZX; it went silent by 1991. The radio station's building remained abandoned for years. As of 2023, it no longer exists. Meanwhile, the three transmitter towers nearby were dismantled sometime in the early 1990s. In 1984, Diversified Communications sold WAGM-TV to NEP Communications, then-owner of WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania. NEP sold WNEP to The New York Times Company a year later, but retained WAGM under the licensee name NEPSK, Inc. At one point co-owned by Tom Shelburne, Peter Kozloski, and Norman Johnston, Kozloski assumed full ownership of the station in 1991, retaining the NEPSK name.
Changes
Around the same time as the sale to NEP, WAGM began phasing out its secondary affiliations with ABC and NBC. Given increasing availability of cable and satellite television in rural Aroostook County, the necessity to carry programming from multiple networks decreased. Many stations over the Canadian border in New Brunswick also serve Aroostook County. By 1990, WAGM carried the entire CBS prime time lineup, with other network programs airing nightly between 7 and 8. The station dropped ABC completely in 1998, while the last NBC show seen on the station, Days of Our Lives, disappeared from the schedule in September 2005. The end of the ABC and NBC affiliations left KXGN-TV in Glendive, Montana, as the last television station in the United States affiliated with more than one big three network on a single feed (that station, formerly a dual CBS/NBC affiliate, moved NBC to a digital subchannel in September 2009). Today, WVII-TV from Bangor serves as the de facto ABC affiliate on Charter Spectrum's Presque Isle system; until the launch of WWPI-LD in 2020, WLBZ served the same function for NBC.
When Fox gained broadcasting rights to games from the NFL's National Football Conference in 1994, WAGM aired them since Fox did not have an affiliate in Presque Isle; this made it the only station in the United States to air programs from all four major networks at the same time. The arrangement ended when CBS obtained the American Football Conference contract in 1998; as a result, Fox programming was provided to the Presque Isle area via Foxnet, and it remained that way until September 2006. WAGM also aired some UPN programming during late nights and weekends from 1995 until 2006 when that network closed and merged with The WB to form The CW.