WANF

WANF (channel 46), branded as Atlanta News First, 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 (channel 17) and low-power, Class A Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD (channel 47). 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 (later WANX-TV), owned by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). 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 local independent 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.…

WANF (channel 46), branded as Atlanta News First, 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 (channel 17) and low-power, Class A Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD (channel 47). 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 (later WANX-TV), owned by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). 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 local independent 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 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 (channel 69). ==News operation== prior to Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta|alt=Three people wearing headsets and seated around a table, facing a camera, at a convention]] ===Launch=== Even after Tribune—with its independent news operations in Chicago, New York, and Denver—acquired channel 46, launching a news department was not immediately on the station's radar due to its expense. However, ratings began to rise, and after must-carry rules for TV stations on cable systems were removed in 1987, management felt that WGNX needed to differentiate itself from cable channels to retain carriage. At one meeting, Tribune Broadcasting president Jim Dowdle asked general manager Ramsey while standing in the station parking lot, "Don't get excited, not now, but if we were to put a newsroom in that building, where would it go?" After research showed enthusiasm for a possible newscast, the station prepared a cost-analysis to present to Tribune. In July 1988, Tribune approved WGNX to start a 30-minute local newscast to air at 10 p.m. seven days a week. After an investment of several million dollars, Georgia's News at Ten began broadcasting on January 15, 1989; prior to its launch, Atlanta had been the largest market in the United States without an independent prime time newscast. The newscast, which focused on longer reports, won awards from journalists' organizations and increased its ratings; in June 1990, it expanded to an hour when USA Tonight, a nationally syndicated news program produced by Tribune, was discontinued. ===Changes with CBS and Clear News=== When WGNX became a CBS affiliate, the 10 p.m. newscast moved to 11 p.m., and a briefly aired 7:30 p.m. newscast was dropped. Over the course of the next several years, the station slowly expanded its news output, with noon and 7 p.m. local newscasts in 1995; the latter moved to 6 p.m. in 1996. In 1997, one series of billboards for the station featured news anchors Karyn Greer and John McKnight next to the words "NAME 'EM", daring viewers to take an interest in the relative unknowns on channel 46; the station's newscasts were being outrated by other stations' presentations of syndicated programs including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, and M*A*S*H. By 1999, when Meredith took over, the 6 p.m. local news ranked seventh out of all seven major commercial stations in Atlanta in that time slot, and Allen Shaklan, the new general manager, noted that his station existed "below people's horizon of visibility". The station was producing just 90 minutes of news a day in three half-hour newscasts. In 2000, as part of the image overhaul, with the new WGCL-TV call sign came a new moniker, Clear News, and a format focused on more substantive stories with fewer murders, fires, and accidents. The station also began airing a two-hour morning newscast and a 5 p.m. news hour as it was able to expand ahead of its move to Midtown. With the move, the station adopted a new green and gold set and theme music that was an orchestration of I Can See Clearly Now. However, Clear News was dismantled after the 2002 resignation of Allen Shaklan, and Sue Schwartz rebranded the station as "CBS 46, Atlanta's News Channel", with some limited initial success. By 2005, the station had canceled its 5 p.m. newscast to focus on the less crowded 4 p.m. market and cut back its morning news presence to bolster its evening newscasts, which had the benefit of lead-ins from CBS prime time ratings. It then returned a 5 p.m. newscast in 2010, by which time it had expanded its morning newscast to hours. The station usually came in fourth place in Atlanta's news ratings behind WSB, WAGA and WXIA. Shortly before Gray closed on its purchase of WGCL-TV, Rodney Ho of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described the station as "a bit of a revolving door news operation", noting that it was about to have its ninth news director since 2007. ===Gray news expansions=== After purchasing WGCL-TV–WPCH, Gray announced expansions in the news staff and offerings of the WGCL-TV newsroom, which was staffed by 50 to 60 people at the time Meredith sold it. In March 2022, Gray declared its intent to add 40 more news employees as well as 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. local newscasts; the staffing expansion ultimately materialized as an increase of 50. Two months later, WGCL-TV added a 7 p.m. newscast and began producing a 7–9 a.m. morning newscast for air on WPCH-TV, bringing the total weekday news output across the two stations to 11 hours a day. According to Schrader, Gray intended for channel 46 to be a "community-focused local news service" that emphasized breaking news, investigative journalism, and weather coverage. Both station and corporate executives said these moves were natural given Gray's longstanding emphasis on local news; news director Kim Saxon pointed out that Gray CEO Hilton Howell regularly watched channel 46's newscasts. The changes culminated in the implementation of the new Atlanta News First brand. A two-hour prime time news block also aired at 9 p.m. on WPCH-TV. In its first spring sweeps as Atlanta News First, WANF finished fourth at 6 p.m. with only 34,000 viewers, barely half the viewership commanded by market-leading WSB-TV but within 4,000 viewers of third-place WXIA. Its 11 p.m. newscast was a distant fourth with 6,400 viewers, not even half of third-place WXIA's total. With the disaffiliation from CBS, by December 2025, the station's news output was hours a day on weekdays and hours a day on weekends for a total of hours. ==Technical information== ===Subchannels=== WANF broadcasts from a tower in northeastern Atlanta, near North Druid Hills. Its signal is multiplexed: Cozi TV and Grit were added as subchannels in 2015. WPCH-TV is Atlanta's ATSC 3.0 (Next Gen TV) station, transmitting its own ATSC 3.0 signal as well as those of WSB, WAGA, WXIA and WANF. WANF in turn transmits WPCH's primary subchannel. ===Analog-to-digital conversion=== As WGCL-TV, this station ended regular programming over UHF channel 46 on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television; it retained its digital signal on UHF channel 19, using virtual channel 46. The analog signal continued to operate for another two weeks, until June 26, to broadcast information regarding the transition to digital television under the SAFER Act. ==Notes== ==References== ==External links==

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