WJW (channel 8) is a television station in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, WJW maintains studios on Dick Goddard Way (named for the station's late longtime weatherman—previously known as South Marginal Road) just northeast of downtown Cleveland near the shore of Lake Erie, and its transmitter is located in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio. History As WXEL The television station first signed on the air on December 19, 1949, as WXEL, originally broadcasting on VHF channel 9. It was founded by the Empire Coil Company, a wartime manufacturer of radio coils and transformers. The station was the third to sign on in Cleveland behind WNBK (then-channel 4, now WKYC channel 3), and WEWS-TV (channel 5), all of which signed on in a 13-month timeframe. In its early years, WXEL was a primary DuMont affiliate, and later became a secondary provider of ABC programs, sharing that affiliation with WEWS. WXEL also carried a number of CBS programs that WEWS declined to air. Some of the daytime shows originated at Cinécraft Productions on Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City. WXEL also carried an affiliation with the short-lived Paramount Television Network, and in fact was one of that network's strongest affiliates. The station aired such Paramount Network programs as Hollywood Wrestling, Bandstand Revue, and Time for Beany. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Following the 1952 release of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s Sixth Report and Order, a realignment of VHF channels in the Midwest forced WXEL to move to channel 8 on December 10, 1953. Its former channel 9 allocation was moved to Steubenville and given to a new station, WSTV-TV (now WTOV); the switch took place only two weeks before WSTV-TV went on the air. In 1954, Empire Coil sold two of its television interests—WXEL and KPTV in Portland, Oregon, the United States' first UHF station—to Storer Broadcasting. George B. Storer, the company's founder and president, was a member of the board of directors of CBS, and used his influence to take the CBS television affiliation from WEWS in March 1955. WEWS became an exclusive ABC affiliate (and remains so to this day), while the DuMont network shut down operations in 1955. It took Cleveland under eight years for each station at the time to gain exclusive full-time network affiliations of their own.