WDTV 5 News

WDTV is the CBS affiliate for the Weston/Clarksburg/Fairmont, West Virginia media market.

The station signed on the air as WJPB-TV on March 17, 1954. It was the first television station in the market and operated on UHF channel 35, licensed to Fairmont. It was a primary NBC affiliate with a secondary ABC affiliation. The UHF signal was not nearly strong enough to reach the entire market, which is a very rugged dissected plateau. This, combined with the fact that UHF converters were very expensive, led the station to shut down on February 28, 1955.

On December 30, 1959, WJPB-TV was awarded a construction permit for VHF channel 5 in Weston, and signed on in June 1960 as a sole ABC affiliate. In 1965, the station changed its call letters to the present WDTV. The WDTV callsign had previously been used by what is now KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh from 1949 to 1954 and was reportedly chosen "in honor" of that station, which had been a part of the DuMont Television Network.

In 1967, the station switched its primary affiliation to CBS. However, for many years it aired select sports programming from ABC, since the Clarksburg/Weston market was one of the few in the country without an ABC affiliate. The area's cable companies piped in WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh to bring the full ABC schedule to the area. ABC wouldn't return on a full-time basis to north-central West Virginia until WBOY-TV began airing ABC on its digital subcarrier in 2008.

WDTV's digital subchannel 5.2 broadcasts "Accu-Weather" Forecasts. This subchannel used to broadcast UPN programming until September of 2006.

Since the summer of 2005, WDTV's news department and commercial production went completely digital using ENG cameras with firewire harddisk technology. Using nine Apple Mac G5s, the video is edited directly from the removable HDD units and saved to a central Apple Mac XServe which is used to play the video during live news programs.

WDTV was also the first station in West Virginia (and quite possibly the east coast) to exchange audio and video files using high speed FTP servers, via MPEG2, MP3 and Quicktime compression formats.

In 2007, Withers bought the area's Fox affiliate, WVFX. WVFX is now located in brand new state of the art studios in Bridgeport. WVFX is planning to air a 10 pm newscast on FOX10.