WANF
WANF is an independent television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It is the flagship property of locally based Gray Media and is co-owned with CW affiliate WPCH-TV and low-power, Class A Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD. WANF and WPCH-TV share studios on 14th Street Northwest in Atlanta's Home Park neighborhood, while WANF's transmitter is located in the city's Woodland Hills section.
The station was built in 1971 as WHAE-TV, owned by the Christian Broadcasting Network. Originally a nonprofit operation airing religious programs, the station gradually became a more commercially oriented independent station and broadened its programming to include older movies and family-friendly classic TV shows. CBN sold the station to Tribune Broadcasting in 1983, and the call sign was changed to WGNX in 1984. Tribune substantially built up the station, upgrading programming and turning it into Atlanta's top-rated independent local station; it also started a local newscast for the station in January 1989.
After a major switch of television affiliations in Atlanta in 1994, WGNX became Atlanta's new CBS affiliate and the only such station owned by Tribune. However, news was not seriously expanded until after Meredith Corporation acquired the station in 1999 as part of a purchase-and-trade with Tribune. The WGCL-TV call sign was adopted in 2000 as part of a major, but short-lived, rebrand of the station to "Clear TV" and its newscasts to Clear News. Meredith also assumed operating control of WPCH-TV in 2011, purchasing the station outright in 2017. Over the course of its tenure with CBS, the station was generally a revolving door of management and presenting talent with little ratings success, frequently drawing the lowest ratings of Atlanta's news-producing stations.
The acquisition of the Meredith Local Media division by Gray Media in 2021 has resulted in an increased infusion of resources into the station's newsroom as well as other investments by Gray in Atlanta-area media. As part of a wide-scale rebrand of its news service to Atlanta News First, WGCL-TV changed its call sign to WANF on October 3, 2022. The station disaffiliated from CBS on August 16, 2025, when CBS programming moved to the owned-and-operated WUPA.
History
Early years (1971–1994)
Construction and CBN ownership
On January 23, 1968, the Christian Broadcasting Network, owned by evangelist Pat Robertson, filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for authority to build a new television station on channel 46 in Atlanta. The application was granted on May 5, 1968, but after several changes in the proposed studio location, the station began broadcasting on June 6, 1971, as WHAE-TV from leased studio facilities in the Protestant Radio and TV Center on Clifton Road. Originally, it operated for six hours a day on weekdays and twelve on Sundays. It was largely an unprofitable operation with, as John Carman writing for The Atlanta Constitution put it, "no particular interest in profits". On September 3, 1977, WHAE-TV changed its call sign to WANX-TV, with a station spokesman stating it wanted "a new identity" and a "fresh start".Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, WHAE-TV/WANX-TV, like other CBN independent stations, eventually adopted a program schedule consisting of older, "family-friendly" classic shows as well as some religious programming, such as CBN's The 700 Club. Movies, a common staple of independents, had been completely absent from the station's lineup until 1974, when the outlet moved into studios on Briarcliff Road that had been vacated by WATL, which had been temporarily shuttered in 1971, and thereafter owned by Production 70s, a video production house that declared bankruptcy. This facility had been built around a 1916 red clapboard house. It also began to operate on a more commercial basis in 1980, following a restructuring of the CBN media operation into the commercially authorized Continental Broadcasting Network, turning its first-ever profit in 1982. By 1983, it had tied WTBS, Ted Turner's independent-turned-superstation, in the local ratings, and The 700 Club was the only religious program on its weekday lineup.
Tribune ownership
In July 1983, Tribune Broadcasting of Chicago announced it would spend $32 million to purchase WANX-TV from CBN. It was the company's fifth station, purchased as CBN was seeking to raise money for other operations and retire some of its debts. On March 15, 1984, the call sign was changed to WGNX, stated to be a mixture of the call signs of Tribune stations WGN-TV in Chicago and WPIX in New York City.WGNX emerged as the number-one local independent in Atlanta under Tribune's ownership. A reported $40 million in program expenditures lifted costs market-wide for syndicated shows and gave channel 46 a stronger lineup. With $19 million in revenue for 1985, WGNX more than doubled the billing of its primary competitor, WATL. WATL, which engineered its own rise to viability in the late 1980s, and WGNX gave Atlanta its first serious local independent stations. Atlanta Hawks basketball moved from WVEU to WGNX in the 1986–87 season.
In November 1993, Tribune committed to the new WB Television Network, to be launched by Warner Bros. Television in January 1995. Tribune would hold an ownership stake, and six of the company's seven independent stations, including WGNX, were initially to join at launch.
As a CBS station (1994–2025)
A last-minute big switch
On May 23, 1994, New World Communications signed a long-term agreement to affiliate its nine CBS-, ABC- or NBC-affiliated television stations with Fox, which had just acquired the television rights to the National Football Conference of the National Football League. New World had a uniquely suited portfolio for Fox. Many of its stations were CBS affiliates in NFC markets—including Atlanta, where it owned WAGA-TV ; Fox would sell WATL, which it had purchased and where a news department had been partially set up.Rumors began to circulate wildly in the local industry following the announcement of the New World/Fox deal. General manager Herman Ramsey wrote a memo to his staff: "Have you ever heard so many rumors in a week and a half?... I believe that the likelihood of WGNX affiliating with any network other than Warner Brothers in January '95 is small." Behind the scenes, however, Ramsey was lobbying Tribune to pursue the CBS affiliation for WGNX. CBS considered buying WGNX outright but was reluctant to pay Tribune's asking price.
By September, CBS had not found a replacement affiliate in Atlanta even though WAGA was due to join Fox at the end of the year. More or less out of desperation, CBS purchased WVEU for $22 million. However, CBS only took cursory steps toward closing the purchase in hopes of finding a higher-profile outlet in Atlanta, even if it was only an affiliate. It continued to negotiate with Fox and Tribune. By mid-November, with only a month to go before WAGA was due to switch to Fox, CBS had not filed paperwork to purchase channel 69 at the FCC and refused to confirm that it was still moving forward with the deal.
On November 16, CBS announced that it would not be moving to WVEU but instead to WGNX. CBS preferred to have its programming on a station that already aired local news, and WGNX was the only independent station in the market with a functioning news department. Had CBS moved its programming to WVEU, it would have faced the prospect of a sharp drop in local ratings for the CBS Evening News until it could build a local news department for channel 69. Setting up a news department would have been a part of an unprecedented campaign to promote WVEU and build its facilities to a level commensurate with its new status as a CBS owned and operated station. One consultant interviewed by The Atlanta Journal and Constitution estimated CBS would have had to spend close to $100 million to build out WVEU.
According to a postmortem by Phil Kloer in The Journal and Constitution, CBS had only bought WVEU as a "safety net" in the event it was unable to partner with a higher-profile replacement for WAGA-TV. In spite of having found one, CBS went through with its purchase of WVEU and immediately put it back on the market. Additionally, WATL was sold to Qwest Broadcasting in a two-station, $167-million deal, affiliating with The WB.
WGNX became Atlanta's new CBS affiliate on December 11, 1994. Unlike WAGA-TV, which preempted some CBS programs and delayed others, WGNX carried all CBS programs at their scheduled times. Coinciding with the swap, the Hawks immediately moved to WATL.
One problem CBS would have faced with its planned move to WVEU remained unchanged with the move to WGNX: the loss of viewership in northeastern Georgia. WGNX's UHF signal did not penetrate nearly as far into this area as WAGA-TV's VHF signal. For most of 1995, this left 72,000 viewers unable to watch CBS programming over-the-air. This shortfall was resolved in October 1995, when the network affiliated with WNEG-TV in Toccoa. While licensed to a city in the Greenville–Spartanburg, South Carolina–Asheville, North Carolina, market, WNEG-TV reached an area underserved by the network.
Meredith ownership
On August 23, 1998, Tribune Broadcasting announced it would sell WGNX to the Meredith Corporation for $370 million, as a three-way exchange deal in which Tribune would concurrently acquire Fox affiliate KCPQ in Tacoma, Washington, from Kelly Broadcasting. The trade made sense for Tribune and Meredith. Tribune's portfolio of stations at this point consisted entirely of Fox and WB affiliates outside of WGNX, while Meredith already owned several CBS stations. WGNX represented a rare opportunity to acquire a major station in a top-10 media market; the purchase made WGNX Meredith's largest station.Meredith began to make aggressive changes in an attempt to turn around the laggard WGNX, a station described by Mediaweek magazine as "somewhat untended". Having long since outgrown its studio in Briarcliff, channel 46 began construction of new studios in Midtown as part of a plan to increase news output from 90 minutes a day to five hours.
On July 4, 2000, to reflect these changes, WGNX changed its station branding from "CBS Atlanta"—adopted the year prior in a recognition that the station was not channel 46 on cable—to "Clear TV" and adopted the call sign WGCL-TV. The station began broadcasting its newscasts from the Midtown studio on March 25, 2001.
After the resignation of Allen Shaklan, WGNX/WGCL-TV's first general manager under Meredith, in 2002, the station dropped the "Clear News" format and hired Sue Schwartz, who had last run KTVK in Phoenix. Kevin O'Brien, president of Meredith's television station group, identified turning WGCL-TV around as the company's number one priority.
Beginning in 2009, Meredith began to hub master control operations for its two other southeastern stations—WHNS in Greenville, South Carolina, and WSMV-TV in Nashville—at WGCL-TV. By 2011, the hub was handling eight of Meredith's twelve stations.
On January 18, 2011, Meredith Corporation entered into a local marketing agreement with the Turner Broadcasting System, owner of WPCH-TV, to assume operational control of the station and move its operations to the WGCL-TV studios. Production of the station's 45 Atlanta Braves broadcasts was also transferred from Turner Sports to Fox Sports South as a result. Meredith purchased the station outright from Turner's corporate parent, Time Warner, in 2017; as the only broadcast license held by the company, its divestiture was intended to remove a potential hurdle to the acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T. From 2011 to 2013, WGCL-TV was the preseason television home of the Atlanta Falcons, with games moving to WUPA in 2014.