2 Thursday, Decemuei b, iaob The Times-Picay'jne/The States-ltem D-19 TELEVISION After almost two years of try- :^ to survive in the marketplace too little money and too ^Zimich competition, WNOL gen eral manager Hal Protter is put ting his station on the block. IK “We need,” he says, “to be a t- part of something.” He wants to merge with a T larger group of independent sta tions with enough capital to see r’NOL through some hard eco- Z-nomic times and the kind of pur- I-qbasing power to make the sta tion more competitive in the local - programming wars. ' To hear Protter explain it, the station isn’t up for sale so much ; as .it’s up for adoption. Though ; he admits that Channel 38 would ; be “bought out” for all practical ; purposes, Protter plans to con- * tinue running the station, but ' under the supervision of a parent I company. ; Protter declined to disclose the 38 is up for ‘adoption’ by parent company On the air Mark Lorando .. name of the company with which he’s currently negotiating. How ever, Broadcasting Magazine, a reputable trade publication, links Channel 38 to the TVX Broad cast Group, a Virginia-based company that owns four stations on the Atlantic Coast. According to Protter, potential buyers are standing in line, and Channel 38 will belong to one of them within six months. “If we had started out with $20 million in capital in the beginning, things would be a lit tle different,” he says. “But it doesn’t do any good to say a lot of ‘what-ifs.’ ” The truth is Protter didn’t have even half of $20 million. From 127 investors he was able to garner $8 million, $1 million of which, he says, went to the Wall Street firm that rounded it up. Of the remainder, another $1 million was lost when the sta tion’s broadcast tower in Chal- mette was felled by a storm in December ’83, just three months prior to the targeted sign-on date. That was a minor catastrophe compared with Protter’s revenue projections. “When we first started looking at this market in the early ’80s, advertising revenue was growing by 16 percent year after year after year,” he says. “In 1984 (WNOL’s first year of operation), it grew 5 percent. “The local economy is in a depressed state. And if people aren’t buying cars and refrigera tors and towels, then advertisers aren’t buying commercials.” Protter believes that WNOL got caught on the tail end of a constantly changing economic cycle, and as a fledgling station, it doesn’t have the resources to weather it. A buy-out by a broad cast group would boost the finan cially troubled W r NOL, he pre dicts, until the growth rate picks up and the operation starts turn ing a profit. Theoretically, the support of sister stations also would make WNOL more competitive with WGNO, which became one of five Tribune Broadcasting stations in 1983. The alliance gave ’GNO more than economic stability; it created programming leverage. When syndicators begin market ing rnnvip nfu'Vnges r»nd syndi cated series, group buyers such as Tribune generally get first crack. With stations in New York, Chicago and a new one in Los Angeles, Tribune is in an espe cially comfy situation, and WGNO has been a direct benefi ciary. For example, Protter says he was unable to compete with Channel 26 for major first-run movie packages from Viacom and MCA Studios; WNOL didn’t even have an opportunity to bid, he says. The same has gone for the cartoon series “G.I. Joe,” “MASK,” “Thundercats,” “The Jetsons,” two “Honeymooners” specials and a “Ghostbusters” animated series in development. Says Protter, “It’s nice to be big.” WNOL is anything but, and it seems to be shrinking. Though Protter denies that ratings have had any impact on the merger plans, it’s hard to ignore the fact that WNOL’s numbers have dropped steadily over the last three books. After equaling WGNO’s sign- on to sign-off rating and share in February of ’85 — a fact that Channel 38 all but trumpeted from the rooftops — the station slipped behind in May of this year, and then in October recorded the worst audience figures in its history. Needless to say, the chest-beating died down considerably. For Protter, who just one year ago was dreaming aloud of soon owning a group of stations him self, the “adoption” plans are hard to face. “I have mixed feelings,” he says. “As far as those aspirations go. it’s a setback. But as far as putting together a better, stronger station, I’m very excited.”