WPTZ

The station signed on the air on December 8, 1954, as WIRI, originally licensed to the hamlet of North Pole, New York. It was owned by the Great Northern Broadcasting Company along with Plattsburgh's WIRY radio (1340 AM). The station's first studio facilities were located on Cornelia Street/Route 3 in Plattsburgh; the transmitter was located on Terry Mountain in Peru, New York. The station would have had the call letters WIRY-TV to match its radio sister, but at the time Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations did not allow two stations to share the same base call letters if they were licensed to different cities.

The station has been a primary NBC affiliate since its inception; it carried secondary affiliations with ABC until 1968 when WVNY (channel 22) signed on, and with DuMont until that network ceased operations in 1956.

Rollins Telecasting purchased channel 5 in 1956. The new owners changed the station's call letters to the present WPTZ (for Plattsburgh); the WPTZ call had recently been dropped by the channel 3 facility in Philadelphia (which is now CBS-owned KYW-TV) following its controversial trade by Westinghouse Broadcasting to NBC earlier in that year. Until September 1965, WPTZ was the only station in its market to broadcast network color programs. WPTZ's first studio color cameras were acquired in 1971.[2] In 1979, the station relocated its studios to a new building located on Old Moffitt Road in Plattsburgh. Rollins merged with Heritage Broadcasting in 1987 to form Heritage Media. In 1990, Heritage Media purchased Hartford, Vermont-based WNNE, which had been a separate station with its own news department. With Heritage's purchase, WNNE was made into a semi-satellite of WPTZ, significantly improving WPTZ's coverage in the southeastern part of the market. During the analog era, WPTZ was the only station in the market that did not operate any translators. WNNE's master control was transferred to WPTZ in 2000.

Heritage sold all of its broadcasting properties to the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1997 prior to its merger with News Corporation. The sale protected new Fox affiliate WFFF-TV, which was initially operated by WPTZ under a local marketing agreement (LMA) and shared the analog transmitter on Terry Mountain. Otherwise WPTZ/WNNE, along with then-sister stations in Pensacola, Florida and Charleston, West Virginia would have been forced to switch to Fox. Sinclair, in turn, sold WPTZ/WNNE along with the WFFF LMA to Sunrise Television in 1998. Sunrise then decided to swap WPTZ/WNNE, along with Smith Broadcasting-owned KSBW in Salinas, California to what was then known as Hearst-Argyle Television in return for WNAC-TV in Providence, Rhode Island and WDTN in Dayton, Ohio; both of those stations were forced to be divested by Hearst-Argyle due to significant signal overlap with WCVB-TV in Boston and WLWT in Cincinnati (the FCC did not allow common ownership of two stations with overlapping coverage areas until 2000). The swap became official on July 2, 1998. WFFF began operating as an independently-owned and controlled station around the same time Hearst took over WPTZ/WNNE when the LMA with WPTZ was terminated.

WPTZ logo used from 2000 to 2016. An earlier variation of this logo was used between 1995 and 2000.

On June 23, 1999, WPTZ petitioned the FCC to change its community of license (COL) from North Pole to Plattsburgh. The station cited the area's declining population as the reason for the change. The 2000 United States Census did not even count North Pole as a separate community, instead folding it into Lake Placid. The community-of-license change was approved by the FCC on January 5, 2011.[3] For some time before then, the station had dropped North Pole from its legal station identifications.

On July 9, 2012, WPTZ's parent company Hearst Television was involved in a dispute with Time Warner Cable, leading to WPTZ being pulled from Time Warner Cable and temporarily replaced with Nexstar Broadcasting Group station WBRE-TV of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania;[4][5] Time Warner opted for such a distant signal like WBRE, as they do not have the rights to carry any NBC affiliate closest to them.[6] The substitution of WBRE in place of WPTZ lasted until July 19, 2012, when the deal was reached between Hearst and Time Warner.[7]

On August 2, 2016, just before the Summer Olympics in Rio, WPTZ changed its logo and on-air branding from "NewsChannel 5" to "NBC 5", a rarity for Hearst, which prefers to brand their stations by call letters and channel numbers rather than their network affiliation.

On June 12, 2018, WPTZ announced it was moving to a brand new broadcast facility in South Burlington, Vermont, in a building that contains both a data center for Keurig Green Mountain and the main offices of Ben & Jerry's.[8][9] The move took place in July 2019, when WPTZ began broadcasting newscasts in high definition. WPTZ continued to maintain the Television Drive facility for several months in Plattsburgh as a secondary studio, while closing a now-duplicative and smaller bureau in Colchester, Vermont.[10] WPTZ later relocated the bureau to a new location at 308 Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh, taking over the former Glens Falls National Bank branch and renovating the building to become its new secondary studio in the summer of 2020.

On November 19, 2019, WPTZ, WNNE and CBS affiliate WCAX-TV (channel 3) were knocked off the air by a fire at their combined antenna at the transmitter facility. The cause of the fire was unknown. The outage affected over-the-air and satellite viewers; cable subscribers continued to receive the three stations via direct fiber feeds,[11][12] while Vidéotron in Quebec temporarily replaced WPTZ with Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV-TV.[13]

In the 1980s, WPTZ preempted select NBC shows, including NBC News Overnight (due to the station signing off overnight), GO!, Hot Potato, The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, Santa Barbara, Trialwatch, the 1990 version of Let's Make a Deal, and the Bob Goen version of Wheel of Fortune. NBC was far less tolerant of program preemptions during the entire timeframe where WPTZ preempted programming from that network, but was incredibly unlikely to remove the affiliation from a VHF station that otherwise was highly-rated (and for the most part, most of the programs other than Santa Barbara didn't air for more than a season).

For most of its history, WPTZ's newscasts have been a distant second in the ratings behind long-dominant WCAX-TV. Traditionally, it focused more on the North Country and New York State, while WCAX and WVNY/WFFF tend to cover more from Vermont. In order to cover that state, from the mid-1990s to July 2019,[10] WPTZ operated secondary facilities known as the Vermont Bureau on Roosevelt Highway (US 2/US 7) in Colchester. At one point, there had been more general assignment reporters based at the main studios in Plattsburgh. However in more recent times, additional reporters based at the Vermont Bureau have been hired.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, WNNE operated its own news department and aired local newscasts. This was progressively cut back after being bought by Heritage, eventually resulting in the elimination of a full news operation in 2007. Later, the only visual difference between the stations were different channel bugs during newscasts. Occasionally when WNNE had technical problems, WPTZ's logo peeked through.

In addition to the Upper Valley and Vermont bureaus, WPTZ airs national news from Hearst Television's Washington, D.C. bureau. It employs several reporters who give live reports to the various Hearst affiliates.

Although WPTZ and WNNE do not own or operate weather radars of their own, they use live NOAA National Weather Service radar data from several regional sites. It is presented on-screen in a forecasting system known as "First Alert Storm Tracker" (powered by the Super Doppler Network). With the departure of Thom Hallock (whose contract was not renewed by station) on November 23, 2007, WPTZ was left with an all-woman weeknight anchor team. That changed with the arrival of Gus Rosendale. He left WPTZ in 2005 to report at sister station WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh. George Mallet was hired to take his place shortly thereafter.

In August 2009, the station introduced a new format and title to its weeknight newscast at 11. The re-formatted show called NewsChannel 5 Nightcast features more fast-paced and edgier news. Despite its logo which includes "HD", the newscasts were aired in pillar-boxed 4:3 standard definition and it was the only station in the market to not have upgraded local news to high definition. WPTZ was one of six remaining stations owned by Hearst that has yet to make the upgrade to 16:9 enhanced definition widescreen or full HD, until on April 26, 2011, when WPTZ started airing newscasts in widescreen. However, unlike the newscasts on WCAX-TV and WFFF-TV/WVNY, the WPTZ newscasts at the time were not in true HD—just SD widescreen. In August 2013, WPTZ started airing the area's very first weekend morning news. NewsChannel 5 Today airs on Saturdays from 5:00–7:00 and on Sundays from 6:00–8:00 a.m. This beats WCAX-TV, which had previously announced that they would add weekend morning news.

In April 2014, the station announced they were going to revamp their set. After a few weeks of broadcasting from a temporary set put together in the newsroom, the new set debuted. The old set was completely removed and a new set was constructed by FX Group. The set was a major departure from their prior set, which debuted in 2006. One major change made was the elimination of the newsroom as the backdrop for the anchor desk. Also on September 29, 2014, WPTZ debuted a nightly 10:00 p.m. newscast which airs on both WNNE and WPTZ-DT3 simultaneously.[23]

On June 20, 2016, WPTZ debuted a half-hour midday 12:00 p.m. newscast, became the second television station in the Champlain Valley complete with a 10-minute newscast on WCAX-TV, coinciding with the cancellation of FABLife.[24] On August 2, 2016, following the station rebrand itself as "NBC 5", the newscast branding was now named as NBC 5 News.

In August 2018, WPTZ's Upper Valley bureau moved from White River Junction to a new space on Mechanic Street in Lebanon, New Hampshire.[25] On July 27, 2019, WPTZ's Vermont facilities moved from Colchester to South Burlington; the station's newscasts were concurrently relocated to the new facility from the Plattsburgh studio.[10] To coincide with the aforementioned relocation to the new South Burlington facilities, WPTZ became the last station in the market to broadcast newscasts in high definition.

• Jeanne Moos — became WPTZ's first female correspondent in 1976 (now reporter for CNN)
• Chris Ortloff (early-1980s; served in the New York State Assembly from 1986 until 2007; Ortloff pled guilty to felony charge of online enticement of minors on December 24, 2008, and was sentenced on April 23, 2009)

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

WPTZ shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 5, on February 17, 2009, the original date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 14.[27] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 5. It was one of the first stations owned by Hearst to cease analog broadcasting (then-Hearst sister station KITV in Honolulu, Hawaii was the other).