History
The station signed on September 27, 1953, owned by Southeastern Broadcasting Company along with WMAZ radio (AM 940, now WMAC; and FM 99.1, frequency now occupied by WDEN). It is the fourth-oldest station in the state and the oldest outside of Atlanta, beating WDAK-TV (now WTVM) in Columbus by only a day. Southeastern Broadcasting won a television license on its second try; it had previously made an unsuccessful bid for channel 7 a year earlier. The new station was one of the most powerful VHF stations in the country, providing at least secondary coverage from the southern Atlanta suburbs to the western suburbs of Savannah. It carried programming from all three major networks, but has always been a primary CBS affiliate owing to WMAZ-AM's long affiliation with CBS Radio.
WMAZ's callsign comes from its AM sister's roots as a physics project at Mercer University. The call letters stand for Watch Mercer Attain Zenith.
Southeastern Broadcasting sold WMAZ-AM-FM-TV to Southern Broadcasting Corporation in 1963, earning a healthy return on its 1935 purchase of WMAZ-AM. Southern Broadcasting merged with the News-Piedmont Company of Greenville, South Carolina to form Multimedia, Inc. in 1967. In 1974, WMAZ-AM-FM-TV moved to a new studio on Gray Highway in Macon.
Multimedia merged with Gannett in 1995, making WMAZ-TV a sister station to Georgia's third-oldest station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta.
WMAZ was the only station in town until 1968, when WCWB-TV (now WMGT-TV) started and took the NBC affiliation. WMAZ continued to carry selected ABC shows until WGXA began in 1982.
It is still the only VHF station in the market, in part because Macon is sandwiched between Atlanta to the north, Columbus to the west, Augusta and Savannah to the east. In part due to this, it has dominated central Georgia ratings for most of its history.
Its current image campaign, "Straight from the Heart," dates to 1983, based on Bryan Adams' song of the same name. Its sister station, WBIR-TV, an NBC affiliate in Knoxville, also uses the slogan and image campaign.
On November 4, 2011 WMAZ moved all their newscast to the "Law Call" set, with the normal red and black newsroom/control room backdrop. Three days later, on November 7, WMAZ announced during their 5 o'clock newscast that they will be upgrading to HD in the upcoming weeks. The first reporting of the transition was on morning anchor Stephanie Susskind's Facebook page where she wrote, "If things look a little different this morning, it's because we are getting ready to go HD! Stick with us for some temporary changes as we get our studio ready to broadcast in High Definition soon". Ten days later, WMAZ began broadcasting their newscasts in HD, becoming the first full power station in the Macon market to do so (behind WRWR-LD, a low power station in Warner Robins which began airing HD newscasts on September 17, 2010). Unlike most CBS affiliates in the Eastern Time Zone, WMAZ does not broadcast local news weeknights at 5:30 p.m.
Read more about this topic: WMAZ-TV
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