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WSFA is the NBC-affiliated television station for Central Alabama's Black Belt region licensed to Montgomery. It broadcasts a high definition digital signal on VHF channel 12 from a transmitter in Grady along the Montgomery/Pike County line. Its studios are located on Delano Avenue in West Montgomery. The station can also be viewed on cable television, with Knology and Charter channel 11. A high definition feed is offered on Charter digital channel 711 and Knology digital channel 903.The station boasts one of the largest coverage areas in Alabama, providing at least secondary coverage from the geographical center of the state to the Florida state line and from the Black Belt region to the Chattahoochee River bordering Georgia.〔 Local programming includes WSFA's major commitment〔 – regional and local news – with shows such as ''Alabama Live'', ''WSFA 12 News First at 4'', ''WSFA 12 News at 6'', and ''WSFA 12 News at 10''. The station also broadcasts national news with ''The Today Show'' and ''NBC Nightly News''. Syndicated programming on WSFA includes ''Entertainment Tonight'', ''Judge Joe Brown'', ''Judge Judy'', and ''The Insider''. WSFA is owned by the locally based Raycom Media, which has headquarters downtown at the RSA Tower. WSFA is one of Raycom's two flagships, alongside CBS affiliate WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina. WSFA was formerly the default NBC affiliate for Dothan and the Wiregrass Region, which had been one of the few areas without an NBC affiliate of its own. That status ended when Gray Television, which owns WTVY in Dothan, launched WRGX-LD as a NBC affiliate on June 1, 2013. ==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 but the city's first. 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. Ironically, this allocation was supposed to be occupied by Montgomery's first television station, CBS affiliate WCOV-TV. 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,〔 and WSFA-TV aired its first broadcast on December 25, 1954--a Christmas present to Alabama. Owing to WSFA radio's 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〔 (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 The 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) moved into Montgomery and replaced WCOV as the area's CBS affiliate. In 1986, it dropped the -TV suffix. 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 is headquartered in Montgomery, WSFA became the corporation's flagship station. However, with Raycom's 2008 purchase of Lincoln Financial Media's television stations, WSFA now shares flagship status with Charlotte's WBTV. Tracing back from its humble beginnings as the upstart television arm of a local radio station, WSFA is still broadcasting from its original West Montgomery location. Several expansions of the Delano Avenue facility now provide room for two large telecasting studios and a staff of more than one hundred. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「WSFA」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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