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"We're the little station that could," WNOL-Channel 38 President Hal Protter is fond of saying. As of late last week it appeared the shiny-new independent station had chugged into fiscal exhaustion and was taking on badly needed financial coal.
Protter -- who likes to place himself in the company of Ted Turner among living broadcast pioneers and grouses that he's not got his publicity due -- acknowledged to New Orleans Business and Jefferson Business that a letter of intent had been signed to turn over control of the station to an outside group that he would not name.
His wife, station General Manager Gail Brekke, whom Protter broke into broadcasting as a weather girl in Cincinnati after she left a buyer's position at a Minneapolis department store -- would say only, "We're a week away from something formal."
In-house memoranda identify the group as TVX Inc. of Virginia Beach, Va., operators of other indies in four Southern cities -- with two more set to go on the air in 1986 and construction permits on two additional stations. Protter owns an interest in one of those construction permits, in Buffalo, N.Y.
TVX President Tim McDonald, a longtime independent-TV programmer who helped put the group's first station on the air in Norfolk, confirmed that negotiations were wrapping up with Channel 38, that he saw "no reason why it wouldn't go through," and that he'd be in New Orleans -- where he lived for a time as an infant -- this week for the closing.
Although no one involved would discuss price -- it's "somewhere between $10 million and $20 million," according to Program Director Rod Cartier -- Protter says the move was made because of TVX's "deeper pockets." McDonald indicates the chain will buy out existing limited partners, give WNOL stock and much-needed cash, keep the present general partners and on-site management in place -- in return for control.
"It's disappointing to see it end this way," says Cartier, who is leaving at the end of this week to take a job with a TV distribution company. "We've lost our independence, which is what a lot of us came here for. We wanted to be the independent independent, but given the economy and climate, it just...