History
The station's call letters—SFA—are an acronym for "South's Finest Airport". They can be traced back to 1930, when Gordon Persons (years before becoming Governor of Alabama) opened a radio station at the Montgomery Regional Airport (now Gunter Annex of Maxwell Air Force Base). The new station was the state's fourth station[3] but the city's first.[4] WSFA radio quickly became a landmark in Montgomery and was most famous in its early days for launching the career of country music legend Hank Williams, a native of nearby Georgiana, in the 1940s.
By the mid-1950s, the new medium of television was sweeping the nation and Persons won the construction permit for Montgomery's second television station on VHF channel 12. This allocation was supposed to be occupied by Montgomery's first television station, CBS affiliate WCOV-TV (it is now a Fox affiliate). However, due to a delay in getting a transmitter for channel 12, WCOV was forced to move to UHF channel 20. Persons built a state-of-the-art facility on Delano Avenue to house both the television and radio stations in 1954,[3] and WSFA-TV aired its first broadcast on December 25, 1954—a Christmas present to Alabama. Owing to WSFA radio's long affiliation with NBC, channel 12 has been Montgomery's NBC affiliate for its entire existence.
Only two months later, in February 1955, Persons sold WSFA-AM-TV to the Gaylord family's Oklahoma Publishing Company, earning a handsome return on his original investment of a quarter-century earlier. At that time, WSFA-AM-TV was operated by a staff of 35. In 1956, the radio station was sold and moved to downtown Montgomery under a new set of call letters, WHHY[3] (and then later still, WLWI).
The television station was sold again, in 1959, to the Broadcasting Company of the South of Columbia, South Carolina. A subsidiary of the Liberty Life Insurance Company, the company renamed itself Cosmos Broadcasting Corporation in 1965. Later in the decade, Liberty reorganized itself as Liberty Corporation with Cosmos and Liberty Life as its subsidiaries.
WSFA was the area's only VHF station until 1985, when Selma-based WAKA (channel 8) built a new transmitter that was halfway between Selma and Montgomery, thus giving it good coverage in Montgomery proper (but is still licensed to Selma to this day) and replaced WCOV as the area's CBS affiliate. In 1986, it dropped the "-TV" suffix, though as mentioned above channel 12 and its radio sister had gone their separate ways three decades earlier. Liberty exited the insurance business in 2002, bringing the station directly under the Liberty banner. The company merged with Raycom Media in 2006. Since Raycom was headquartered in Montgomery, WSFA became the corporation's flagship station. However, with Raycom's 2008 purchase of Lincoln Financial Media's television stations, WSFA shared flagship status with Charlotte's WBTV.
On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement to merge with Raycom Media in $3.6 billion transaction.[5][6][7][8] The sale was approved on December 20, 2018,[9] and was completed on January 2, 2019.[10]
On September 17, 2024, Gray and the New Orleans Pelicans announced a broader deal to form the Gulf Coast Sports & Entertainment Network, which will broadcast nearly all 2024–25 Pelicans games on Gray's stations in the Gulf South, including WSFA.[11]
