Lisa G. Churchville, president and general manager of WJAR-TV NBC 10, has seen many dramatic changes in television, both as a form of entertainment and as a business responding to the ever-shifting demands of the market and its audience.

“This is a legacy station,” she said with pride of WJAR-TV, which went on the air in 1949 as the first television station located in Rhode Island. Since then, the station has generally been the leader in the Providence-New Bedford market, in terms of ratings and influence, a predominant position made even more significant by the latest economic turmoil and advances in technology.

“Television today is going through a technological revolution in the media, and it is being driven by the customers,” Churchville said. ‘Their access to information has changed so profoundly, [as has] their control over that access.”

People like herself who hold leadership positions in the local television industry “need to listen a lot more carefully to what [customers] want, the way they want it, when and how they want it,” Churchville said, “and that’s going to disrupt our business models. But that is our problem, not theirs. What we’re all struggling with is the question: What is the right business model?”

When it comes to local news, more people say they get that news from television stations than any other source, according to a national survey conducted in early March by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a nonpartisan public opinion research organization based in Washington, D.C.

Churchville, 55, can remember a time when television was not such an integral part of most people’s lives. Her father grew up just over the Rhode Island line in Newton, Mass., and later owned a textile factory in Alabama, where Churchville lived as a child. Rural Alabama had just two local television stations back in the 1950s, and everyone had a black-and-white set as a virtual fixture that never left the living room.

“Television basically was something you did in your own home,” Churchville recalled. “Now, you see TV sets all over the place, and you even can get television on any computer screen, and pretty soon it will be mobile, too.”

Gone are the days when acquiring videotape for newscasts was a labor-intensive experience, with heavy cameras, huge lights and painstaking editing. The switch to digital, resulting in lighter cameras, no film and easier transfer capability, is just the latest of a “ton of technical changes” that have seen WJAR-TV go through 17 different video formats in recent years, Churchville said.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in ancient history from Barnard College in Manhattan in 1975 and an MBA from Harvard University in 1979, Churchville wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, but television intrigued her. “As a baby boomer, I grew up on TV, it’s almost our medium,” she said. She worked briefly as a stringer for Fortune Magazine while at Harvard, but she couldn’t forget about television. “I could see it was a big source of news and information,” she said. “I felt television was the future tense.”

So, when WABC in New York City offered her a job in sales, “I decided to go ahead and take it.” It was 1979, “an exciting time in TV,” Churchville recalled, as the cable television industry was just beginning to hit its stride and the premium channel HBO was two years away from running programs 24/7.

Television was poised to grow, and Churchville was going to grow with it. After working at ABC- and NBC-affiliate stations in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia, with increased job responsibilities at every stop, Churchville left WCAU-TV in Philadelphia, where she was vice president of sales, and came to WJAR-TV in 1997, moving with her husband, Alex “Skip” Carlin, and their two sons to Rhode Island.

She took over the helm of a well-established station. Today, as Churchville escorts visitors from her office to the studio and newsroom, the history of WJAR-TV is told in old photographs, newspaper clippings and storyboards framed along corridor walls at the Cranston headquarters. The Outlet Company, the former Providence department store that originally owned the station, is a key part of that history, of course.

Outlet Communications began WJAR radio in 1922 and WJAR-TV followed 27 years later, in 1949. WJAR-TV was purchased by NBC in February 1996, one of 14 stations owned and operated by the network for 10 years. Virginia-based Media General Inc., a publicly held major player in the industry with 19 television stations and 24 daily newspapers mostly in the Southeast, acquired the station in June of 2006.

Stability has been a hallmark of WJAR-TV NBC 10 over the years, and remains integral to its operation today. “The people who work here have worked here a long time. They know the market, they are very familiar with it, and they are very well-acquainted with a lot of the area’s newsmakers,” Churchville said. “A lot of news sources, a lot of people, feel comfortable coming here.”

Changing times, however, have taken a toll. Ten WJAR-TV employees were laid off in March due to the recession, and another seven jobs eliminated the year before, leaving the station with a current work force of “just under 100,” Churchville said. Only 20 of those staffers work outside the news department.

“News is what we do,” she said. “And weather is a big investment for us, because weather is a major reason people will tune us in.”

With more people relying on television for local news, Churchville is particularly thankful to have the Web. She noted that WJAR-TV can provide viewers with source documentation and other background material on an in-depth basis on its Web site. In the past, a brief television news report would send viewers to the newspaper for more information, but today “you can go to our Web site to get that depth,” Churchville said. “That, to me, completes the information cycle.” •