WSFL-TV

WSFL-TV, channel 39, is a The CW Television Network-affiliated television station located in Miami. Owned by the Tribune Company, the station shares studios with co-owned newspaper the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, and has its transmitter based in Miramar, Florida.

It is a television station in the South Florida metropolitan area (also known as the Miami metropolitan area) market in the three counties: Miami-Dade County, Broward County, and Palm Beach County.

History

Channel 39 signed on as WDZL on October 16, 1982. It was owned by Channel 39 Broadcasting Ltd. As an independent station, it aired a general entertainment format consisting of cartoons, off-network dramas, old movies, a few old off-network sitcoms, and religious shows. Odyssey Partners, a firm which would later become Renaissance Broadcasting (and who owned WTXX (now WCCT-TV) in Waterbury, Connecticut) owned an interest in WDZL.

In 1984, WBFS-TV (owned by Grant Broadcasting System II) signed on with a stronger general entertainment lineup and surpassed WDZL in the ratings immediately. Still, WDZL was profitable especially with the huge amount of barter cartoons available to the station. It was still running shows other stations passed up until the wave of affiliation switches in 1989. When WCIX (now WFOR-TV) was sold to CBS and dropped most of its syndicated shows, Fox programming moved to WSVN. The rest of the programming dropped from WCIX moved to WDZL. By the early-1990s, WDZL had become a far stronger independent station. It acquired Fox Kids programming from WSVN in 1993.

WDZL became a charter WB affiliate on January 11, 1995. In 1997, the Tribune Company acquired the six television station group that was owned by Renaissance Communications.^[1] Kids' WB programming on WDZL expanded to three hours on weekdays and the station dropped Fox Kids (which moved to Home Shopping Network station WYHS (now WAMI-TV). WDZL changed its call letters to WBZL in 1998 to emphasize its affiliation with The WB.^[2] Throughout this affiliation, the station was known on-air as "WB 39". By then, the station began airing more first-run talk and reality shows during the day along with children programming and off-network sitcoms in the evenings. By 2005, it was the only remaining station to run children shows weekday afternoons with Kids' WB (a practice which ended on January 6, 2006). On January 24, The WB and UPN announced they would end broadcasting and merge. The newly combined network would be called The CW. The letters would represent the first initial of its soon-to-be corporate parents: CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner.

Tribune announced that most of its WB affiliates, including WBZL, would become affiliated with The CW. This was a result of Tribune signing a ten year affiliation agreement with the new network. It would not have been an upset had WBFS been chosen, however. The CW officials were on record as preferring the "strongest" WB and UPN stations for their new network and South Florida was one of the few markets where The WB and UPN stations were both relatively strong. Also, WBFS is owned by CBS who would own a 50 percent stake in The CW. Throughout the summer, WBZL started using their CW logo for local television ads and also began referring to itself as "CW South Florida". On September 17, WBZL changed its call letters to the current WSFL-TV to remove the reference to the no-longer-existent WB in its calls and generalize them to its geographic location. The next day, The CW debuted on WSFL. Starting in 2006, the station aired The Tube, a 24-hour music video channel, on its second digital subchannel and Comcast digital cable channel 224. It was dropped on October 1, 2007 when that network went off the air due to a multitude of factors.

On September 1, 2008, in a corporate move by Tribune to de-emphasize the references of "The CW" branding for their CW affiliates, channel 39 was rebranded as "SFL" and it debuted a logo featuring the capital "S" in the Sun-Sentinel nameplate. Around the same time, WSFL moved its operations into the Fort Lauderdale offices of the Sun-Sentinel.^[3]

Digital television

On June 12, 2009, WSFL-TV left channel 39 and continued broadcasting on channel 19 to complete its analog to digital conversion. ^[5] However, through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WSFL-TV's virtual channel as "39".

Newscasts

In 1997, NBC affiliate WTVJ and the Sun-Sentinel began to co-produce a nightly 10 o'clock newscast on WDZL known as WB 39 News at 10.^[6] When the station became a CW affiliate, the news title changed to CW News at 10. On March 5, 2008, WSFL began broadcasting the 10 o'clock newscast in high definition when WTVJ made the upgrade. For the duration of the 2008 Summer Olympics, WSFL's newscast featured two anchors and closely mirrored news programs that air on WTVJ. The 10 p.m. news was broadcast from the same set WTVJ uses at Peacock Plaza in Miramar. Only that the set's duratrans were changed nightly to reflect the 10 p.m. newscast. The WTVJ news on WSFL was a similar operation to Tribune-outsourced newscasts that air on sister stations WPHL-TV and KRCW-TV.

On August 26, 2008, WTVJ and WSFL agreed to end the 10 o'clock newscast, most likely due to WTVJ's now-aborted acquisition by Post-Newsweek Stations who owns ABC affiliate WPLG, with the final broadcast airing on August 31. A weekday morning show began airing on April 13, 2009. It was broadcast out of the newspaper's former auditorium on the first floor of the Sun-Sentinel building on Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, and aired from 5 to 9 a.m. The Morning Show was canceled on August 4, 2010 due to low ratings.^[7] The station continues to produce the public affairs program South Florida Voices, on Sunday mornings at 6 a.m., that is hosted by Deborah Ally; this program was relaunched with a new host and under a new title in September 2010.^[7] WSFL also launched five nightly news updates in mid-August 2010.^[7]

References

External links

• Official website
• This TV Miami Website
• Query the FCC's TV station database for WSFL-TV