WFMJ TV-21 online - Television live

WFMJ TV-21 Live Stream

WFMJ 21 is Youngstown's NBC affiliate - and something increasingly rare in American television: a locally owned station. Owned by the Maag family since its 1953 sign-on, it serves the Mahoning Valley of northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania from studios on West Boardman Street in downtown Youngstown, and its newscasts also stream live online.

In an industry of conglomerates, WFMJ is one of the few locally owned and operated stations left in the United States - and one of only two in Ohio, alongside Cincinnati's WCPO. For the Valley, that is not a detail; it is the station's identity.

The Valley's Own Station

The Maag family's relationship with Youngstown goes back to the newspaper business: William F. Maag, Jr., publisher of The Vindicator, founded the station, and the paper's printing company owned it from inception until 2019 - when the family sold the newspaper but kept the television station. That decision left WFMJ locally owned while The Vindicator continues as an edition of the Warren Tribune Chronicle: the paper left the family, but channel 21 stayed home. Since WKBN's sale in 1997, WFMJ has been the market's only locally owned station, and the connection shows up everywhere - in the newsroom's institutional memory, in the community events the station covers, and in a broadcast identity that has never belonged to anyone but Youngstown.

From Channel 73 to Channel 21

WFMJ-TV went on the air 8 March 1953 on channel 73 - a UHF frequency the station occupied for barely eighteen months before the Maags bought the construction permit for channel 21 and moved there in August 1954. The station has been an NBC affiliate from its first day, inheriting the network relationship of WFMJ radio, and its early years carried a regional role that outlasted the market's map: until Pittsburgh gained its own NBC affiliate in 1957, channel 21 served the far northern Pittsburgh area, and its signal could reach the eastern Cleveland suburbs with a good antenna. The market it has served ever since - extreme northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania - is the classic Rust Belt broadcast territory, and WFMJ has covered its steel mills, its reinvention and its politics for seven decades.

News, Weather and the Covelli Centre

21 News anchors the schedule with newscasts through the day, severe-weather coverage that goes live when the Valley's storms roll through, and event broadcasting that treats the region's big moments as big moments - from presidential rallies at Youngstown's Covelli Centre to high school football and the civic calendar of the Mahoning Valley. The CW rides on the subchannel for a second network, and the station's live stream and video archive carry the whole operation to screens far beyond the transmitter's reach - a locally owned station, still doing what locally owned stations were built to do.

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