| WBMA: Birmingham, Alabama WCFT: Birmingham/Tuscaloosa/Mount Cheaha, Alabama WJSU: Anniston/Oxford/Gadsden, Alabama |
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| Branding | Alabama's ABC 33/40 (general; official) ABC 33/40 (general; colloquial) ABC 33/40 News (newscasts) |
| Slogan | Alabama's News Leader |
| Channels | Digital: See table below |
| Subchannels | See table below |
| Affiliations | ABC |
| Owner | Allbritton Communications Company (TV Alabama, Inc.) |
| First air date | September 1, 1996 |
| Call letters' meaning | See table below |
| Former callsigns | WBMA: W58CK (1996-1997) WBMA-LP (1997-2011) WJSU: WHMA-TV (1969-1984) |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: WBMA: 58 (1996-2011) WCFT: 33 (1965-2009) WJSU: 40 (1969-2009) Digital: WCFT: 5 |
| Former affiliations | WCFT: Independent (1965-1970) CBS (1970-1996) WJSU: CBS (1969-1996) NBC (secondary, 1969-1970) |
| Transmitter power | See table below |
| Height | See table below |
| Facility ID | See table below |
| Transmitter coordinates | See table below |
| Website | www.abc3340.com |
WBMA-LD, channel 58, is the ABC television affiliate for Birmingham and central Alabama. Its transmitter is located in Birmingham, while its studio is in Hoover, a suburb of Birmingham.
The station's brand name, "ABC 33/40", comes from its two full-power remote transmitters: WCFT-TV (channel 33, based in Tuscaloosa) in Birmingham, Tuscaloosa & Mount Cheaha and WJSU-TV (channel 40, based in Anniston) in Anniston, Oxford & Gadsden. Although this makes it appear that WCFT is the main station, low-powered WBMA is officially Birmingham's ABC affiliate. WBMA's signal does not extend outside of the immediate Birmingham area. Most Birmingham viewers and cable providers obtain the signal from the higher-power WCFT and WJSU stations. Their combined power carries the ABC 33/40 signal to all of central Alabama from the Alabama-Georgia state line westward to Columbus, Mississippi.
The station is owned by Allbritton Communications through its subsidiary, TV Alabama, Inc. WJSU was formerly owned by Flagship Broadcasting and operated by Allbritton under a local marketing agreement until Allbritton bought it outright in 2008. WBMA/WCFT/WJSU operates bureaus in Tuscaloosa and Anniston at the locations of the former independent stations.
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The digital signals of WBMA-LD, WCFT-TV and WJSU-TV are multiplexed.
Digital channels
| Channels | Video | Aspect | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|
| 33.1/40.1/58.1 | 720p | 16:9 | Main WCFT/WJSU/WBMA programming / ABC |
| 33.2/40.2/58.2 | 480i | 4:3 | Weather |
WCFT and WJSU shut down all analog transmissions June 12, 2009[1] for the digital television transition. WCFT moved its digital broadcasts back to its previous analog channel number 33,[2] while WJSU remained on its pre-transition channel 9.[2] However, through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display WJSU's virtual channel as 40.
Even though WBMA-LP was not obligated to shut off its analog signal, as the law exempted low-powered stations from the switchover, the FCC encouraged low-power stations to vacate from their out-of-core allotments (channels 52 to 69). On December 3, 2010, the FCC granted WBMA-LP a construction permit to flash-cut their analog signal on channel 58 to digital channel 40 (formerly occupied by the analog signal of WJSU).[3] WBMA-LP had a permit to operate on channel 11,[4] but due to possible interference with WTVM & WTOK-TV, the station decided to move to channel 40.[5] In Late May 2011, WBMA-LP signed on its low-power digital signal on channel 40 as WBMA-LD.
| Station | City of license | Physical Channel | VC1 | First air date | Call letters’ meaning |
ERP | HAAT | Facility ID | Transmitter Coordinates |
| WBMA-LD2 | Birmingham | 40 (UHF) | 58 | September 1, 1996 | AlaBaM A[6] | 15 kW | 255 m | 60214 | |
| WCFT-TV3 | Tuscaloosa | 33 (UHF) | 33 | October 19654 | Chapman Family Television |
300 kW | 657 m | 21258 | |
| WJSU-TV5 | Anniston | 9 (VHF) | 40 | October 26, 1969 | Jacksonville State University |
15.6 kW | 359 m | 56642 |
Notes:
WCFT started operating as western Alabama's first-ever television station in October 1965, broadcasting on UHF channel 33. The original licensee, Chapman Family Television, was a consortium of eight Tuscaloosa businessmen who saw the benefits of a television station, in both business and community service. WCFT began as an independent station, but because it did not return a profit suitable to the original owners, they sold the station to Hattiesburg, Mississippi-based Service Broadcasters in 1967.
The new owners rejuvenated the station by pumping money into it, purchasing new equipment, and improving the station's image. Like WBMG-TV in Birmingham, WCFT picked up in its first few years CBS and NBC programming not cleared by WAPI-TV (channel 13, now WVTM-TV). In 1970, WCFT became an official CBS affiliate, as did WBMG (and WHMA below, for eastern Alabama). Even though Tuscaloosa is less than an hour west of Birmingham, CBS opted to retain affiliation with WCFT because channel 42's signal was painfully weak at the time. As such, many cable systems in the western part of the market opted to carry WCFT instead. WCFT regularly trounced WBMG in that portion of the market.
In 1977, Arbitron made Tuscaloosa its own television market, ranking below number 170. For a time in the mid-1990s, WCFT served as the default ABC affiliate for the Columbus/Tupelo market. Service Broadcasters sold WCFT to Allbritton in 1995. At about the same time, WBMG had boosted its signal to full power, making a solid foundation for the lone CBS affiliate that it would be. WCFT's transmitter is located near Windham Springs, Alabama, in rural Tuscaloosa County.
On October 26, 1969, WHMA-TV began broadcasting on channel 40 as a primary CBS affiliate with a secondary NBC affiliation. The station was operated by the Anniston Broadcasting Company, which was owned by members of the family of Harry M. Ayers (the station's namesake). The Ayers family also owned the Anniston Star newspaper and WHMA radio (1390 AM and 100.5 FM, now WNNX-FM in Atlanta). The station's inaugural general manager, Harry Mabry, came to Anniston from Birmingham, where he had been news director of WBRC in Birmingham for several years. Mabry already was familiar with Anniston, though, having been an announcer on WHMA-AM over fifteen years earlier.
WHMA-TV ultimately served approximately 100,000 households in east central Alabama, and management fought almost constantly to maintain its own Arbitron market between Birmingham and Atlanta. This was a maneuver critical to the station's survival. Despite being the only station located within the Anniston/East Alabama market (other than Alabama Public Television translator WCIQ), WHMA faced immense competition from the "spill-in" (grade B signal) coverage from larger stations in the nearby larger markets. Its ratings victories garnered it access to numerous national advertisers, a rarity for small-market stations of that time. In 1970, WHMA, along with WBMG and WCFT (above), dropped NBC programming in favor of full-time CBS coverage after WAPI became the sole NBC affiliate for all of central Alabama that year. As was the case with WCFT, CBS opted to retain affiliation with WHMA because of WBMG's weak signal at the time. In fact, channel 42 was all but unviewable in much of east central Alabama, which is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains; UHF stations don't get good reception in rugged terrain. Many cable systems in the eastern part of the Birmingham market opted to carry channel 40 as the local CBS affiliate.
In 1984, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) forced the Ayers family to break up its media empire. Later, in a mid-1980s deal that concerned tax avoidance more than profit, the Ayers sold the station to Jacksonville State University, who changed the call letters to WJSU-TV. The station was ultimately sold in the 1990s to Flagship Broadcasting.
In 1995, Birmingham's longtime ABC affiliate, WBRC, was sold to Fox. However, WBRC's contract with ABC did not expire until September 1996, giving ABC a year to find a new affiliate in Birmingham. ABC reached a unique deal with Allbritton. Both WCFT and WJSU would become ABC affiliates; however there was a snag. Under Nielsen rules, neither station would likely appear in the Birmingham ratings books because they were both considered to be out of market stations. Allbritton's solution was to purchase W58CK, a low-powered station in Birmingham that began operations on November 18, 1994. W58CK would serve as the primary station for ratings purposes. While the channel 58 purchase was not a condition of the deal between ABC and Allbritton, it did pave the way for Anniston and Tuscaloosa to be merged back into the Birmingham market. (That move benefitted all of the major Birmingham stations, because it expanded the television market, thus making the Birmingham stations gain viewers in the Tuscaloosa and Anniston areas.) WJSU and WCFT would end separate operations and combine to act as full-powered satellites of W58CK. Both stations also ceded exclusive CBS rights in all of central Alabama to WBMG, which had recently boosted its signal to full power. Under this arrangement, Allbritton assumed control of WJSU's operations under a local marketing agreement. This lasted until Allbritton bought WJSU outright in 2008.
The new station debuted on September 1, 1996 from studios in the Riverchase office complex in Hoover. Its first slogan was "We're Building Our Station Around You," which was also used on WKYC-TV in Cleveland for some years. Unlike most advertising catchwords, the phrase was quite accurate because the station's programming consultants surveyed numerous numbers of people across central Alabama to literally built a new station from the ground up.
W58CK officially changed its call letters to WBMA-LP on September 23, 1997; it had been unofficially using the WBMA calls since it began operations.
In September 2006, WBMA/WCFT/WJSU moved the popular soap opera All My Children from 10 a.m. to 12 Noon. WBRC had aired All My Children on one-day tape delay since its days as an ABC affiliate, and this practice continued when WBMA/WCFT/WJSU picked up the affiliation. This was the first time since the ABC daytime drama began in 1970 that it had aired in pattern in the Birmingham market. Its replacement, The Chew, also airs at 12 Noon.
In 1997, WBMA/WCFT/WJSU refused to air the famous "The Puppy Episode" of Ellen DeGeneres' sitcom, Ellen. The station cited a need to respect the family values of the largely conservative evangelical community in the region as the basis of its decision. Some gay rights and civil libertarian activists decried the decision as a blatant example of censorship; indeed, in response, ABC sent a special satellite feed of the show to a community center in Birmingham and about 1,000 people, mainly local gays, lesbians, and their supporters, watched as DeGeneres came out of the closet. Some cable providers also ran the feed from other out-of-state ABC affiliates including WSB-TV (channel 2) in Atlanta. However, when the same episode ran as a rerun on the network that same season, WBMA/WCFT/WJSU aired the program.
Currently, WBMA/WCFT/WJSU produces a total of 22 hours of local newscasts each week (with four hours on weekdays and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays).
The station achieved early success with their newscasts after their switch to ABC, due in part to hiring many well-known Birmingham television personalities, including news anchors Brenda Ladun and Linda Mays, sports anchor Mike Raita and meteorologists James Spann and Mark Prater, all of whom had worked at rival WBRC. Later, Pam Huff and Tracy Haynes, former news personalities on WVTM-TV, were hired to anchor the station's early morning newscasts. The station's slogans were modified to "Where News Comes First" and then back to the original "We're Building Our Station Around You" (with the word "always" being inserted on graphics before "building"). The station is now called "Alabama's News Leader."
WBMA/WCFT/WJSU has had a long-standing tradition in that when any county in its DMA is under a tornado warning, the station pre-empts regular programming for live, non-stop and commercial-free coverage.
WBMA/WCFT/WJSU operates a number of SkyCams throughout the state which send a live shot and weather information from that site. Local insurance company Alfa Insurance sponsors the network. There are SkyCams in Downtown Birmingham, Inverness, Gadsden, Demopolis, Hamilton, Jasper, Mount Cheaha, Tuscaloosa, Cullman, Clanton and Gulf Shores, as well as many other cities in Alabama and also a few in Mississippi. WBMA/WCFT/WJSU also operates TowerLink cameras on former and current transmission towers of all three channels that make up the station. The Tuscaloosa TowerLink camera, located on the old Channel 33 broadcast tower, caught footage of an F4 tornado that hit Tuscaloosa in December 2000[7], as well as a tornado spawned from Hurricane Rita in September 2005[8]. The Birmingham TowerLink camera, located on WBMA-LD's current tower, was used during the April 1998 Birmingham tornado, and caught a major power outage in western Birmingham, which indicated that powerful winds and very possibly a tornado was occurring. It turned out to be truly a tornado, an F5 tornado. This was WBMA/WCFT/WJSU's first major weather coverage, and gained the station some prominence after it had started up less than a year and a half ago. The SkyCam in Tuscaloosa (atop the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse) also captured live an extremely destructive tornado that struck Tuscaloosa during the Super Outbreak on April 27, 2011[9]. A little while later, when that same tornado struck northern Birmingham, the Birmingham SkyCam caught more footage of it. The Cullman SkyCam also caught footage of a multiple-vortex tornado during the latter outbreak of the same day, just hours before the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado struck. TowerLink cameras are also located on WJSU's tower in Anniston.
WBMA/WCFT/WJSU offers Spanish-language webcasts online. The brief news updates are anchored on a rotating basis by Vivian Mora and Hernan Prado, two Hispanic business owners in the Birmingham community.
WBMA/WCFT/WJSU relies heavily on social media, especially for weather updates and alerts. The station has both a Facebook fan-base[10], and a Twitter feed[11], which are both used to keep viewers updated on local news, weather, and sports, as well as to get feedback from viewers on news stories. Additionally, several news anchors and reporters have Facebook profiles which are used for the same thing. WBMA/WCFT/WJSU chief meteorologist James Spann has said that social media has made it so much easier to alert people during severe weather[12]; one extremely good example of this was during the station's coverage of the April 27 Alabama tornados. During this tornado outbreak, Spann and the rest of the weather team used Facebook and Twitter, as well as a weather app available in iTunes that is produced and managed by the station, to warn people of possible tornados or thunderstorms. Facebook and Twitter were also used in the weeks following the tornados to report damage, suffering family members, missing persons, etc.[13] WBMA/WCFT/WJSU also uses Flickr to post photos of any kind of weather, or, in the April 27 instance, damage, that are sent in by viewers.
Between 26 May 2008 and 23 March 2009, Nielsen Media Research shortchanged the WBMA/WCFT/WJSU system. For ratings purposes, the entire system is rated as WBMA+, but tuning to digital WBMA/WCFT/WJSU or anything that carried it (cable or satellite) was ignored, reducing the recorded ratings tremendously; ratings in Nielsen books were less than half of what station management expected.[14] It later came out that Nielsen had undercounted and overcounted at various times between February 2008 and November 2009, including a time in January 2010 that primetime ratings had been shortchanged (including occasional zero shares). The confusion stemmed from the station's unique physical setup.[15]
Anchors
Storm Alert Weather
Sports team
Reporters
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