With roughly half of the state sitting in the New York television market and the other half being in the Philadelphia market, New Jersey has few local television stations of its own. One of the only stations licensed to serve the Garden State has long been WWOR-TV Channel 9, the Fox Television Stations-owned network known on-air as My9. However, the station, which is officially licensed to Secaucus, appears to no longer own its longtime facility near the Hackensack River in the Hudson County town.
Data from NJ Parcels shows that WWOR-TV, which is registered out of Fox’s studios in Los Angeles, sold the 9 Broadcast Plaza facility at 43 Meadowlands Parkway in September for $4.05 million. The two-story building is now reportedly owned by 43 Meadowland Parkway, LLC, which is registered out of the same Secaucus address as Hartz Mountain Industries.
My9’s main newscast, which was simply branded as The Ten O’Clock News, used to be filmed in the Secaucus studios. However, the show was replaced in 2013 with an alternative news program called Chasing New Jersey that was pre-taped each weekday out of a facility on Lamberton Road in Trenton. Now known as Chasing News with Bill Spadea, the newscast also airs on My9’s sister stations, WNYW-TV FOX 5 in New York and WTXF-TV FOX 29 in Philadelphia.
My9 has faced criticism by some officials in recent years over how it serves the Garden State. Over the summer, both of the state’s U.S. senators contacted the Government Accountability Office with questions over how WWOR-TV’s license was renewed, while similar calls were made several years ago.
Overall, New Jersey’s small television industry has seen no shortage of changes in the 21st century. In 2006, MSNBC announced that it would close its facility in Secaucus while New Jersey Network was shuttered and replaced with WNET’s NJTV in 2011. Then, a year later, Trenton’s WZBN-TV Channel 25, an independent station that aired a local newscast for Mercer County, closed its doors. In addition, at the end of 2014, WMGM-TV Channel 40, an NBC affiliate based in Atlantic County, went off the air after losing its affiliation with the Comcast-owned television network.
