WGWW (channel 40) is a television station licensed to Anniston, Alabama, United States, serving the eastern portion of the Birmingham market as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Heroes & Icons. The station is owned by Howard Stirk Holdings, a partner company of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. WGWW's transmitter is located at Bald Rock Mountain (off of Kelly Creek Road), near Moody in unincorporated southern St. Clair County.
WGWW operates as a full-time satellite of Tuscaloosa-licensed WSES (channel 33), whose advertising sales office is located on Golden Crest Drive in Birmingham. WGWW covers areas of northeastern Alabama that receive a marginal to non-existent over-the-air signal from WSES, although there is significant overlap between the two stations' contours otherwise, including in Birmingham proper. WGWW is a straight simulcast of WSES; on-air references to WGWW are limited to Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-mandated hourly station identifications during programming. Aside from the transmitter, WGWW does not maintain any physical presence locally in Anniston.
Through a time-brokerage agreement (TBA) with Sinclair, WGWW's second digital subchannel serves as a repeater of ABC affiliate WBMA-LD (channel 58, branded as ABC 33/40), of which WGWW had served as a full-time satellite station on its main feed from September 1996 to September 2014.
History
Beginnings in Anniston The station first signed on the air on October 26, 1969, as WHMA-TV.FCC History Cards for WHMA-TV (WGWW). Federal Communications Commission. Originally operating as a primary CBS and secondary NBC affiliate, the station was initially owned by the Anniston Broadcasting Company, which was run by members of the family of Harry M. Ayers, who also owned the Anniston Star newspaper and local radio station WHMA (1390 AM and 100.5 FM, the FM station is now Atlanta-based WNNX-FM). It originally operated from studio facilities located on Noble Street in downtown Anniston.
Harry Mabry—who served as WHMA-TV's original general manager—came to Anniston from Birmingham, where he had served as news director at WBRC-TV (channel 6) for several years. Mabry already was familiar with Anniston, though, having worked as a staff announcer for WHMA-AM more than fifteen years prior to WHMA-TV's sign-on. Another former Birmingham personality who was part of the station's original staff was "Cousin Cliff" Holman, who left WAPI-TV (channel 13, now WVTM-TV) in 1969 after that station moved his cartoon showcase series, The Popeye Show, from weekday mornings to Saturday and Sunday mornings (due to declining ratings resulting from the show's move to a weekday morning slot and its switch from a mostly live broadcast to being pre-recorded the day before air several months beforehand) the previous year. Holman, who was also hired as its publicity director, resumed his program on WHMA-TV in the afternoons as The Cousin Cliff Show. However, the show was hampered by changes in the television industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s decision in the early 1970s to prohibit children's hosts from promoting products directly on-air, forcing channel 40 to cancel the program by the summer of 1972. In later years, in addition to making public appearances at various children's gatherings (among other jobs), Holman would revive his program on a cable access channel in Birmingham in 1985, before moving to WBRC, which hired him to host the Saturday morning children's program Cousin Cliff's Clubhouse from 1990 to 1992.
WHMA-TV ultimately reached approximately 100,000 households across east-central Alabama, and management fought almost constantly to ensure that Arbitron maintained the distinction of Anniston as a separate television market from those encompassing the larger metropolitan areas of Birmingham and Atlanta. This was a maneuver that was critical to the station's survival; despite being the only television station located within the Anniston–Gadsden market (other than Alabama Public Television satellite station WCIQ (channel 7) in Mount Cheaha), WHMA faced immense competition from stations in the two larger nearby markets that provided "spill-in" (Grade B) signal coverage within eastern Alabama. The station's ratings victories in this part of the state garnered it access to numerous national advertisers, a rarity for a small-market television station of that time.
As an exclusive CBS affiliate On May 31, 1970, when WAPI-TV formally removed CBS programming and became the exclusive NBC affiliate for the Birmingham market, WHMA-TV likewise dropped NBC programming and became a CBS affiliate full-time. It effectively became one of three central Alabama stations that were exclusively affiliated with CBS, accompanied by WBMG (channel 42, now WIAT) in Birmingham, which had been affiliated on a part-time basis with the network since it started in October 1965 (in a similar split arrangement with NBC) and WCFT-TV (channel 33) in Tuscaloosa, which joined CBS on the date that WBMG and WHMA became full-time affiliates of the network.
As was the case with WCFT, CBS opted to retain its affiliation with WHMA—despite the fact that Anniston is to the northeast of Birmingham—because, at the time, WBMG suffered from a weak broadcast signal that did not provide adequate coverage throughout most of the central third of Alabama. Even after WBMG increased its transmitter power to 1.2 million watts in 1969, channel 42 still had a very marginal to non-existent signal in much of east-central Alabama, which lies within the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, which like other areas of rugged terrain, often experienced impaired over-the-air reception of UHF television stations. Many cable providers in the eastern part of the Birmingham market opted to carry channel 40 as the provider of CBS programming for that area of the state, instead of WBMG.
In 1984, the FCC—which protected the combination of WHMA-AM-FM-TV and the Anniston Star under a grandfather clause from forced divestiture, when the agency prohibited common ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market in 1967—forced the Ayers family to break up its media empire. Later, in a 1985 deal that concerned avoidance of paying high tax rates more than profit, the Ayers sold the station to Jacksonville State University; the new owners changed the television station's call letters to WJSU-TV (for the university), but continued to operate it as a commercial station (unlike most TV/radio stations owned by colleges or universities, which operate as non-profit public broadcasters), retaining its CBS affiliation. In 1989, Jacksonville State University sold the station to the Osborne Communications Corporation.
As a satellite of WBMA-LP/-LD On May 5, 1994, Great American Communications (which would be renamed Citicasters following the completion of its debt restructuring later that year) agreed to sell WBRC and three of its sister stations—fellow ABC affiliate WGHP in High Point, North Carolina, NBC affiliate WDAF-TV in Kansas City and CBS affiliate KSAZ-TV in Phoenix—to New World Communications for $350 million in cash and $10 million in share warrants. As part of a broader deal between New World and the Fox Broadcasting Company signed on May 23 of that year, New World agreed to affiliate five of its eight existing television stations and the four it had acquired from Great American with Fox, in a series of affiliation transactions that would take two years to complete due to the varying conclusion dates of their ongoing contracts with either ABC, NBC or CBS. Three weeks later, New World agreed to buy WVTM-TV and three other stations—CBS affiliates KDFW in Dallas–Fort Worth and KTBC in Austin, and ABC affiliate KTVI in St. Louis—from Argyle Television Holdings, in a purchase option-structured deal worth $717 million. Due to conflicts with FCC ownership rules of the time period, New World subsequently decided to establish and transfer the licenses of WBRC and WGHP into a trust company, with the intent to sell them to the Fox network's broadcasting subsidiary, Fox Television Stations (in the case of Birmingham, New World could not keep WBRC and WVTM since the FCC then forbade a single company from owning two television stations in the same market; the concurrent Argyle and Citicasters acquisitions also put New World three stations over the FCC's twelve-station ownership limit).
Although the sales of WBRC and WGHP were finalized on July 24, 1995, Fox Television Stations could not switch WBRC's network affiliation in the short term, as the station's contract with ABC would not expire until August 31, 1996. While this forced Fox to operate WBRC as an ABC affiliate for thirteen months after the sale's closure, it gave the latter network enough time to find a new central Alabama affiliate. ABC first approached WTTO (channel 21, now a CW affiliate)—which, along with semi-satellites WDBB (channel 17) in Tuscaloosa and WNAL-TV (channel 44, now Ion Television affiliate WPXH-TV) in Gadsden, was set to lose its Fox affiliation to channel 6—for a deal to replace WBRC as its Birmingham outlet. However, the owner of WTTO, Sinclair Broadcast Group, only expressed interest in carrying ABC's prime time and news programming. It also refused to launch a news department for WTTO, as the group did not factor local news production into its corporate budget at the time (this was despite the fact that sister station WDBB had maintained a standalone news operation at the time ABC started negotiations with WTTO, which was eventually shut down when the former switched to a full-time WTTO simulcast in December 1995).
In November 1995, Allbritton Communications purchased CBS affiliate WCFT-TV (channel 33) in Tuscaloosa from Federal Broadcasting for $20 million; it concurrently signed a deal with Fant Broadcasting to assume operational responsibilities for WNAL-TV under a local marketing agreement. Then in January 1996, after it terminated the WNAL deal, Allbritton acquired the non-license assets of CBS affiliate WJSU-TV (channel 40) in Anniston from Osborne Communications Corporation for $12 million (through an LMA arrangement which included an option to eventually purchase the station outright). Allbritton wanted to relocate WJSU's transmitter facilities closer to Birmingham to provide a stronger signal within that metropolitan area and nearby Tuscaloosa; however, the relocation was prohibited under FCC regulations that required a station's transmitter site be located no more than from its city of license (Anniston is north-of-due-east of Birmingham), which would have required an application to change the city of license closer to Birmingham in order to legally allow the move.
Shortly after the WJSU purchase took place, ABC reached a unique deal with Allbritton, in which WCFT and WJSU would become the new ABC affiliates for Central Alabama, with WCFT acting as the main station. ABC had a very strong relationship with Allbritton, particularly as Allbritton's flagship station, WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., had long been one of ABC's highest-rated affiliates. In April 1996, a few months after the Birmingham deal was struck, Allbritton's ties to ABC were sealed wholesale when Allbritton reached a ten-year affiliation agreement with ABC that renewed contracts with the group's four existing ABC affiliates (WJLA-TV, KATV in Little Rock, Arkansas, KTUL in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and WHTM in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the latter of which was being acquired by Allbritton at the time) and resulted in two of its other stations switching to the network (NBC affiliate WCIV [now Heroes & Icons affiliate WGWG] in Charleston, South Carolina and WB affiliate WBSG-TV [now Ion Television owned-and-operated station WPXC-TV] in Brunswick, Georgia), the latter of which would become a satellite of WJXX in nearby Jacksonville, Florida, when Allbritton signed that station on in February 1997.