hit by lightning strike. The uncertainty of when to return to the air prompted the station to purchase airtime on then-Independent station WDRB (now a Fox affiliate in order to broadcast their local newscasts, as well as the final two episodes of the long-awaited miniseries Roots: The Next Generations through ABC. In the spring of 1983, Gannett sold WLKY and WPTA in Fort Wayne, Indiana (the two smallest stations by market size in Gannett's television station portfolio at the time) to Pulitzer Publishing, after it purchased WLVI-TV in Boston (now owned by Sunbeam Television) from Field Communications and WTCN-TV (now KARE) in Minneapolis–Saint Paul from Metromedia. This was because the WLVI-TV and WTCN purchases put Gannett with two stations over the Federal Communications Commission's seven-station ownership limit for television stations that was in effect at the time. Pulitzer kept WLKY but sold WPTA to the Granite Broadcasting Corporation in 1989. From 1977 to 1986, WLKY was branded on-air as "32 Alive." At the time it was implemented, Combined Communications used the "Alive" moniker on four of its stations—WLKY, WPTA, KOCO-TV in Oklahoma City and WXIA-TV in Atlanta. WXIA-TV still uses the "Alive" moniker under Gannett ownership, as did WPTA until 2016, although that station is no longer owned by the former Gannett corporation (now known as Tegna). Switch to CBS On September 8, 1990, WLKY swapped network affiliations with WHAS-TV (by then, owned by the Providence Journal Company; it is now owned by Gannett's broadcasting spin-off Tegna Media), with channel 32 taking the CBS affiliation and WHAS becoming the market's ABC affiliate—much to that station's chagrin. This came after ABC (which placed second in the national ratings at the time) became dissatisfied with the lackluster ratings at some of its affiliates (while CBS was at a distant third during the midway point of the network's stewardship under president Laurence Tisch), and ABC wanted a stronger affiliate in the market. WLKY had long been one of ABC's weaker affiliates, while WHAS-TV had been the dominant station in Louisville for almost 20 years at the time. By this time, however, cable television had gained significant penetration in the Louisville area. Indeed, to this day, cable and satellite are all but essential for acceptable television in much of the Kentuckiana region. Combined with a low universal cable channel number (channel 5 on both Comcast and Spectrum), WLKY's former disadvantage of being a UHF