WUGA-TV - History

History

WUGA-TV signed on air as commercial independent station WNEG-TV on September 9, 1984. Its first owner was the Stephens County Broadcasting Company, who also owned WNEG radio (630 AM). The station's founder, Roy Gaines, felt that northeast Georgia received little news coverage from stations in Atlanta, Augusta, and Greenville/Spartanburg, and that WNEG would fill this void. However, the station struggled to make money, as there were barely enough viewers in this rural area for it to be viable. Additionally, northeast Georgia is very mountainous, and UHF stations don't carry very well in mountainous terrain. This area of the country was one of the last where cable got significant penetration. Only the revenues from WNEG radio kept it afloat.

Finally, in 1990, Gaines gave up and put channel 32 up for sale. He was unable to find any buyers until August 1995, when it signed a time brokerage agreement with Spartan Communications, making WNEG a sister station to Spartan's flagship station, WSPA-TV in Spartanburg. Spartan bought the station outright two years later. (WNEG radio still exists in Toccoa today, but under different ownership from WNEG-TV.)

In becoming a sister station to WSPA, WNEG was able to obtain a CBS affiliation, restoring over-the-air CBS service to areas of northeast Georgia that had lost it a year earlier, when Atlanta's WAGA-TV switched to Fox; the new Atlanta CBS affiliate, WGNX (now WGCL-TV), did not have the broadcast range WAGA had in northeast Georgia. Spartan also beefed up WNEG's news department, and rebranded the station NewsChannel 32, using a logo similar to the one that WSPA used from 1994 to 2001 (which was also used by another sister station, WJBF in Augusta, Georgia, around the same time period). WNEG, along with the rest of the Spartan company, was acquired by Media General in 2000. WNEG kept the Spartan-era logo, while WSPA and WJBF switched to a standard Media General one.

On October 29, 2007, Media General announced that it was exploring the sale of WNEG. This was followed on June 25, 2008 with an announcement that the station would be sold to the University of Georgia Research Foundation, with plans to use channel 32 as a training facility for students in the University's Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The University took control on October 15; at that time, CBS programming was dropped and replaced with America One and This TV programming. UGA moved its studios from Toccoa to its campus in Athens in the fall of 2009, and also added more local programming. As a result of WNEG dropping CBS, WSPA now serves as Northeast Georgia's default CBS affiliate, while WGCL became the sole CBS affiliate for the Atlanta market.

It was the home of the syndicated reruns of Degrassi: The Next Generation in the Upstate when the station acquired the rights to the show from 2008 to 2009. Also, WNEG-TV acquired the local rights to the syndicated TV show Family Feud from WMYA-TV (formerly WBSC) after airing it for seven years.

On December 23, 2010, WNEG and the University of Georgia announced it will be starting a programming partnership with the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission (also known as Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB), which would provide all programming to the station, with most of the content coming from its GPB Knowledge subchannel. The station has recently filed to the FCC to change to a non-commercial license. The station also announced its intention to change its call letters to WUGA-TV. This is due to a reduction of advertising dollars, resulting from the economic downturn and the loss of CBS affiliation. On January 6, 2011, WNEG announced that the changes will include staff reorganization, with 12 permanent staff members and 5 temporary staff members laid off in that reorganization; the station also eliminated its news operation, with a student-produced newscast, UGA Newssource, replacing it on January 31 (in the interim, the only news programming on WNEG was an America One-provided national newscast produced by Independent News Network). In addition, WNEG's This TV affiliation ended on January 1, 2011, with the affiliation moving to a subchannel of the market's NBC affiliate, WYFF. WUGA-TV will be operated in conjunction with WUGA radio (91.7 FM), which is owned by GPTC but operated by the University of Georgia.

At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 1, 2011, the station began broadcasting PBS World programming through GPB's "GPB Knowledge" network. The call letters were officially changed to WUGA-TV on May 2.

On October 2012, WUGA-TV was picked up on Channel 32 to customers of DirectTV, Dish Network and AT&T U-verse in the Atlanta market. WUGA-TV also was recently added to the Comcast systems as Channel 96 in Barrow, Jackson, Hall and northern Gwinnett counties. The station broadcasts national and international news, informational programs as well as UGA and community-focused local shows.