Multimedia

Multimedia, Inc. was a media company that owned 10 daily newspapers, three weekly newspapers, two radio stations, five television stations, a film production company, an animation studio, and a cable television system division. It was also the owner of the children's television network Gingo. The company was headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina.

History
Multimedia's origins can be traced to December 1932, when the News-Piedmont Company of Greenville, which published the Greenville News and Greenville Piedmont newspapers, acquired radio station WFBC, only weeks after the station relocated to Greenville from Knoxville, Tennessee. In November 1953 the News-Piedmont Co. acquired majority ownership of the Asheville Citizen and Asheville Times and its wholly owned radio station, WWNC. WFBC-TV, the News and Piedmont ' s television station, signed-on from Greenville at the end of 1953.

The News-Piedmont Co. would expand its broadcast holdings with the acquisitions of WBIR-AM-FM-TV in Knoxville in 1961, and of the Southeastern Broadcasting Company, which owned WMAZ-AM-FM-TV in Macon, Georgia, in 1963. Then, in September 1967 the three commonly owned companies were merged, taking on the Multimedia, Inc. name. At the time Multimedia consisted of the Asheville and Greenville newspapers, three television stations and seven radio stations.

The company's biggest purchases came in 1976, when it purchased several properties from Cincinnati-based Avco, which was liquidating its media holdings. Multimedia first bought Avco's flagship television station, WLWT in Cincinnati, and later acquired Avco Embassy Television, the syndication division which produced and nationally distributed The Phil Donahue Show and a regionally-distributed program produced at WLWT, The Bob Braun Show. Avco Embassy would be renamed Multimedia Entertainment.

The company was involved in one of the more unusual media transactions in history. In 1983, it sold its flagship television station, WFBC-TV in Greenville (now WYFF) and WXII-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to Pulitzer, Inc. In return, Multimedia received Pulitzer's former flagship television station, KSDK in St. Louis. Multimedia used its new purchase as the testing ground for a new show hosted by Sally Jessy Raphael.

In 1988, Multimedia made its first foray into film and animation with the purchase of the Geo-Wildshill Productions animation studio from Hanna-Barbera. Shortly after Multimedia formed Multimedia Pictures, its film production unit.

Multimedia was acquired by the Gannett Company in 1995; after the sale was finalized, Gannett sold some of Multimedia's assets (including the Gingo assets) to MCA the following year. In January 2000 the cable television division, which included systems in Kansas, Oklahoma and North Carolina was sold to Cox Communications. The North Carolina systems were resold to Suddenlink Communications in 2006.

The Multimedia name lives on as a holding company and licensee within what is now Tegna Inc.'s corporate structure. Productions under Multimedia Entertainment are now part of the NBCUniversal Television Distribution archives.

Former assets
Note: (*) - Now owned or absorbed by Universal Studios

Coming soon!

Former Multimedia-owned stations
Stations are listed in alphabetical order by state and city of license.

Television stations
Note: two boldface asterisks appearing following a station's call letters (**) indicate a station that was built and signed-on by a predecessor company of Multimedia. Footnotes:
 * 1 Multimedia purchased only a simple majority (51 percent) stake in WKYC-TV from NBC in 1991. Gannett retained the same share until 1999, when it purchased the remaining portion (49 percent) from NBC.