at the time was an afternoon urban air personality and program director at WTLC-FM in Indianapolis. Harrison steered the nighttime format into a blend of soul and rock, in an attempt to target an entire new generation of young night-time listeners throughout the country. However, WLAC struggled for most of the 1970s to obtain Arbitron ratings improvements from local listeners, despite frequent promotional events staged throughout the Nashville area. Only Hoss Allen kept his program, which he converted to an urban gospel format, by moving it to the overnight/early morning hours. In 1964, WLAC added an FM adjunct by purchasing WFMB on 105.9 MHz, changing its call sign to WLAC-FM. A decade earlier, in 1954, it had started Nashville’s third television station, WLAC-TV (Channel 5); owing to WLAC's affiliation with the CBS Radio Network, WLAC-TV took the CBS TV affiliation from WSIX-TV (channel 8, now WKRN-TV on channel 2). WLAC-TV was sold to the Hobby Family of Houston in 1975, changing the call sign to WTVF, and is now owned by the E. W. Scripps Company. Talk radio era On February 7, 1979, the station, under the direction of Jim Ward, station manager, and Robert H. Ruark, veteran talk show host and newly-appointed program manager, pulled the plug on its unsuccessful run as a Top 40 outlet and changed formats to news and talk in daytime hours, making it one of the first stations in the Southern U.S. to adopt that format for at least a preponderance of its programming lineup. The new schedule, (as reported in The Nashville Tennessean newspaper's "Sunday Showcase") included news coverage weekdays from 6 to 9:30 a.m., Noon to 1 p.m., and 4:30 to 7 p.m., when the regular nighttime "ethnic music" programming began. The mid-morning and mid-afternoon talk show programming featured debate-type discussions with local or national figures via telephone and listeners calling in to ask questions or join in the discussions. Weekends followed the same basic format, and on Saturday mornings, a guest host was featured. Roger Frazier and J. Paul Robinson debuted the new programming as featured newscasters and talk show hosts. Despite the new programming, Hoss Allen was able to keep his early-morning gospel music program and continued with it until his 1993 retirement from the station. Eventually, it became the only music featured on WLAC by the early 1980s. In 1986, WLAC pioneered sports talk in Middle Tennessee, when it