WALB (channel 10) is a television station in Albany, Georgia, United States, serving Southwestern Georgia as an affiliate of NBC and ABC. It is owned by Gray Television alongside low-power CW+ affiliate WGCW-LD (channel 36). Both stations share studios on Stuart Avenue in Albany, while WALB's transmitter is located east of Doerun, along the Colquitt–Worth county line.
History
The station signed on the air on April 7, 1954, and was owned by Gray Communications (now Gray Television) along with WALB radio (1590 AM) and The Albany Herald. It is one of only two full-power stations to have been built and signed on by the company, the other being WCAV-TV in Charlottesville, Virginia (which it no longer owns). When the radio station's studios were built back in 1953, Stuart Avenue was a dirt road running through a pecan grove. For its first three years on-air, WALB-TV transmitted an analog signal on VHF channel 10 from a tower at its studios. As the first television outlet in Albany, it was a primary NBC affiliate with secondary relations with ABC and DuMont.
The latter network was dropped in 1955 when it shut down and ABC remained on WALB until 1980 when WVGA (now WSWG) started up in Valdosta. The station moved to a tower near Doerun was built in 1957. The radio station was sold in 1960 to Allen Woodall, Sr. and became known as WALG to distinguish itself from the television station. In March 1976, a fire destroyed WALB's main broadcasting facilities but did not damage its offices.
WALB was a major beneficiary of a quirk in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s plan for allocating stations. In the early days of broadcast television, there were twelve VHF channels available and 69 UHF channels (later reduced to 55 in 1983). The VHF bands were more desirable because they carried longer distances. Since there were only twelve VHF channels available, there were limitations as to how closely the stations could be spaced.
After the FCC's Sixth Report and Order ended the license freeze and opened the UHF band in 1952, it devised a plan for allocating VHF licenses. Under this plan, almost all of the country would be able to receive two commercial VHF channels plus one noncommercial channel. Most of the rest of the country ("1/2") would be able to receive a third VHF channel. Other areas would be designated as "UHF islands" since they were too close to larger cities for VHF service. The "2" networks became CBS and NBC, "+1" represented non-commercial educational stations, and "1/2" became ABC (which was the weakest network usually winding up with the UHF allocation where no VHF was available).
However, Albany is sandwiched between Dothan (channels 2 and 4) to the west, Columbus (channels 3, 7, and 9) and Macon (channel 13) to the north, Tallahassee (channels 6 and 11) to the south, and Savannah (channels 3, 9, and 11) and Jacksonville/Brunswick (channels 4, 7, and 12) to the east. This created a large "doughnut" in southwestern Georgia where there could only be one VHF license. Although there were no stations on channels 5 or 8 in the immediate area, channel 5 was occupied in Atlanta and Gainesville while channel 8 was allocated to Waycross (which is part of the Jacksonville market); these cities are too close to Albany to reallocate. As a result, WALB remained the only television station in Southwest Georgia until WXGA-TV began broadcasting from Waycross in 1961 (although that station serves the Jacksonville area).
Until 1983, WALB was the default NBC affiliate for Tallahassee. Although WTWC-TV has been that area's affiliate since then, WALB still provides city-grade coverage to almost all of the Georgia side of the Tallahassee market and Grade B coverage to the city itself. WALB dropped the -TV suffix to its call sign in 1993, even though channel 10 and its radio sister had gone their separate ways three decades earlier. As a result of flash flooding caused by Tropical Storm Alberto, WALB stayed on-the-air with non-stop 24-hour coverage to alert citizens and provide a vital link between the public and government agencies.
In 1996, Gray bought WCTV in Tallahassee. The FCC told Gray that it could not keep both WCTV and WALB due to channel 10's aforementioned coverage in Tallahassee; indeed, WCTV had long claimed Albany as part of its secondary coverage area. At the time, the FCC normally did not allow common ownership of two stations with large signal overlaps, and would not even consider a waiver for a city-grade overlap. As a result, Gray sold WALB to Cosmos Broadcasting, the broadcasting division of Liberty Corporation, in 1998.