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WSFL-TV, virtual channel 39 (UHF digital channel 19), is a CW-affiliated television station located in Miami, Florida, United States. The station is owned by the Tribune Broadcasting subsidiary of Tribune Media Company. WSFL-TV maintains studio facilities, which are shared with the Sun-Sentinel newspaper, located on East Las Olas Boulevard and Southeast 2nd Street in Fort Lauderdale; its transmitter is located between Northwest 210th and 207th Streets in Andover. On cable, the station is carried on Comcast Xfinity's system in West Palm Beach (despite the presence of in-market CW affiliate WTVX). Comcat channel 11

History

As an independent station

The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1982 as WDZL. It was originally owned by Channel 39 Broadcasting Ltd. Operating as an independent station, the station maintained a general entertainment format consisting of cartoons, off-network dramas, classic movies, a few older off-network sitcoms, and religious programs. Odyssey Partners, which would later evolve into Renaissance Broadcasting (and which had owned WTXX, now WCCT-TV, in Waterbury, Connecticut), owned an interest in WDZL.

In December 1984, Grant Broadcasting System signed on competing independent WBFS-TV (channel 33) with a stronger general entertainment lineup, and surpassed WDZL in the ratings immediately. Still, WDZL was profitable, especially with the large amount of barter cartoons that was available to the station. It was still running programs that other area stations passed on until the wave of affiliation switches in January 1989. When WCIX (channel 6, now WFOR-TV on Channel 4) was sold to CBS and dropped most of its syndicated programs, Fox programming moved to WSVN (channel 7), which lost its NBC affiliation to WTVJ (channel 4, now on channel 6), which became an NBC-owned station at that time. A couple of the cartoons that WCIX held rights to were acquired by WSVN to air on weekend mornings. Most of WCIX's movie packages also were purchased by WSVN. A couple of syndicated programs also remained on WCIX. But the rest of the programs that were dropped from WCIX, mostly cartoons and sitcoms, were acquired by WDZL. This helped WDZL to become a far stronger independent station by the early 1990s. The station acquired the rights to Fox Kids after WSVN dropped the programming block in 1993.

As a WB affiliate

WDZL became a charter WB affiliate when the network debuted on January 11, 1995. In 1997, the Tribune Company acquired Renaissance Communications' six television stations.[1] As Kids' WB (formerly The Fun Zone) programming expanded to three hours on weekdays, the station dropped Fox Kids (which moved to Home Shopping Network station WYHS (channel 69, now WAMI-TV). Channel 39 altered its call letters to WBZL (simply replacing the "D" with a "B") in 1998 to emphasize its affiliation with The WB.[2] Throughout its affiliation with the network, the station was branded on-air as "WB 39". By that point, WBZL began airing more first-run talk and reality shows during the daytime hours, along with children's programming, and off-network sitcoms in the evenings. By 2005, it was the only remaining station in South Florida that still ran children's programs on weekday afternoons due to the presence of Kids' WB (which would discontinue its weekday afternoon block nationwide on December 30, 2005, leaving only a five-hour lineup on Saturday mornings).

File:Wsfl tv 2008.png
WSFL's CW logo used from September 17, 2006 to September 1, 2008.
WSFL's logo as "SFL", used from September 1, 2008 to February 2012.

As a CW affiliate

On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down The WB and UPN and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW.[3][4] On the day of the announcement, Tribune Broadcasting signed a ten-year agreement to affiliate 16 of its WB affiliates, including WBZL, with The CW. However, it would not have been an upset had WBFS (which is owned by CBS Corporation subsidiary CBS Television Stations) been chosen as Miami's CW station. Representatives for the network were on record as preferring the "strongest" WB and UPN stations to become The CW's charter affiliates, and Miami-Fort Lauderdale was one of the few markets where the WB and UPN stations both had relatively strong viewership. Throughout the summer, WBZL started using the CW logo in station promotions and also began referring to itself as "CW South Florida". On September 17, the station changed its call letters to WSFL-TV, to reference to its geographic location. WSFL became a charter CW affiliate with the network debuted the next day on September 18.

On September 1, 2008, in a corporate move by Tribune to de-emphasize references to The CW in the branding of its CW-affiliated stations, channel 39 was rebranded as "SFL" and it debuted a logo featuring the stylistic capital "S" in the Sun-Sentinel nameplate logo. Around the same time, WSFL moved its operations into the Fort Lauderdale offices of the Sun-Sentinel newspaper.[5] By February 2012, the station rebranded as "SFL-TV" to de-emphasize its connection to the Sun-Sentinel, as WSFL no longer offers full-scale local newscasts.[6]

On July 10, 2013, Tribune announced plans to spin off its publishing division into a separate company. The split was finalized in 2014, and WSFL-TV remain with the Tribune Company (which retain all non-publishing assets, including the broadcasting, digital media and Media Services units), while its newspapers (including the Sun-Sentinel) became part of the similarly named Tribune Publishing Company.[7]

Digital television

Digital channels

Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming[8]
39.1 1080i 16:9 WSFL-DT Main WSFL-TV programming / The CW
39.2 480i 4:3 Justice Justice Network
39.3 Ant TV Antenna TV
39.4 this-TV This TV[9]

In 2006, the station began carrying The Tube, a 24-hour music video network, on its digital subchannel 39.2 and Comcast digital cable channel 224. The network was dropped on October 1, 2007 when that network ceased operations due to a multitude of factors including issues with other station groups regarding carriage of E/I programming and financial issues.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WSFL-TV terminated its analog signal, on UHF channel 39, on June 12, 2009, as part of federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[10] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 19. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WSFL-TV's virtual channel as 39.

Newscasts

In 1997, NBC owned-and-operated station WTVJ and the Sun-Sentinel entered into a partnership to co-produce a nightly 10:00 p.m. newscast on WDZL, titled WB 39 News at 10.[11] When the station became a CW affiliate, the newscast's title was changed accordingly to CW News at 10. On March 5, 2008, WTVJ began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition; the 10:00 p.m. broadcast on WSFL was included in the upgrade. For the duration of the 2008 Summer Olympics, WSFL's newscast utilized a two-anchor format and closely mirrored the format of the newscasts airing on WTVJ. The 10:00 p.m. newscast during this time was broadcast from WTVJ's primary news set at Peacock Plaza in Miramar, with the only alterations being differences in the set's duratrans for the WSFL newscast. The WTVJ-produced newscast on WSFL was one of a handful of newscasts that were produced through news share agreements with Tribune-owned stations, including newscasts airing sister stations WPHL-TV in Philadelphia (whose 10:00 p.m. newscast was originally produced by NBC-owned WCAU, and has since transferred production to ABC-owned WPVI-TV) and KRCW-TV in Portland, Oregon (whose primetime newscast is produced by NBC affiliate KGW).

On August 26, 2008, WTVJ and WSFL agreed to terminate their news share agreement, most likely due to WTVJ's planned acquisition by Post-Newsweek Stations (owner of ABC affiliate WPLG, channel 10), which was later aborted due to financial issues and lack of FCC approval; the final broadcast of the 10:00 p.m. newscast aired on August 31. WSFL later began to produce a weekday morning news program, which aired for four hours from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m., on April 13, 2009; the program was broadcast out of the Sun-Sentinel's former auditorium on the first floor of the Sun-Sentinel Building on Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale. The Morning Show was canceled on August 4, 2010 due to low ratings.[12] The station continues to produce the public affairs program South Florida Voices, on Sunday mornings at 6 a.m., which is hosted by Deborah Ally; this program was relaunched with a new host and under a new title in September 2010.[12] WSFL also began producing nightly news updates in mid-August 2010, which air five times a day.[12] WSFL also produces local news inserts that appear during its broadcast of EyeOpener (which is produced by Dallas sister station KDAF) on weekday mornings.[6]

On September 28, 2015, WSFL-TV became the third station to launch the Tribune-developed news format, NewsFix, launching a half-hour prime time newscast, NewsFix SFL at 10:00. The format de-emphasizes the traditional use of anchors and reporters, in favor of using footage featuring those involved and continuity provided by a narrator to help illustrate the story.[13][14]

References

  1. ^ Tribune Closes TV Purchases, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, March 26, 1997.
  2. ^ Channel 39 Changes Its Call Letters, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, April 27, 1998.
  3. ^ 'Gilmore Girls' meet 'Smackdown'; CW Network to combine WB, UPN in CBS-Warner venture beginning in September, CNNMoney.com, January 24, 2006.
  4. ^ UPN and WB to Combine, Forming New TV Network, The New York Times, January 24, 2006.
  5. ^ TV station, paper to share offices, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, March 20, 2008.
  6. ^ a b Malone, Michael (February 10, 2012). "Tribune's WSFL Rebrands in Miami". Broadcasting & Cable. Retrieved February 10, 2012.
  7. ^ "Tribune Co. to Split in Two". New York Times. Retrieved July 10, 2013.
  8. ^ RabbitEars TV Query for WSFL
  9. ^ http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/tvlistings/ZCSGrid.do?stnNum=68675&channel=39.3
  10. ^ List of Digital Full-Power Stations[permanent dead link‍]
  11. ^ Ch. 39 Adds Ch. 6 Newscast At 10, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, December 13, 1996.
  12. ^ a b c Carey, Bridget (August 4, 2010). "WSFL-Channel 39 cancels morning show". The Miami Herald. Retrieved August 4, 2010.
  13. ^ "News Fix Starting Monday 10p". WSFL-TV. September 22, 2015. Retrieved November 18, 2015.
  14. ^ Roly Ortega (September 29, 2015). "The "NewsFix" format expands to South Florida on WSFL, their first local newscast in 5 years". The Changing Newscasts Blog. WordPress. Retrieved November 18, 2015.
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