WSFL-TV - History

History

Channel 39 signed on as WDZL on June 1, 1982. It was owned by Channel 39 Broadcasting Ltd. As an independent station, it aired a general entertainment format consisting of cartoons, off-network dramas, old movies, a few old off-network sitcoms, and religious shows. Odyssey Partners, a firm which would later become Renaissance Broadcasting (and who owned WTXX (now WCCT-TV) in Waterbury, Connecticut) owned an interest in WDZL.

In 1983, WBFS-TV (owned by Grant Broadcasting System II) signed on with a stronger general entertainment lineup and surpassed WDZL in the ratings immediately. Still, WDZL was profitable especially with the huge amount of barter cartoons available to the station. It was still running shows other stations passed up until the wave of affiliation switches in 1989. When WCIX (now WFOR-TV) was sold to CBS and dropped most of its syndicated shows, Fox programming moved to WSVN. A couple of the cartoons from WCIX moved to WSVN to run on weekends. Most of WCIX's movies also went to WSVN. A couple syndicated shows also remained on WCIX. But the rest of the programming dropped from WCIX, mostly cartoons and sitcoms, moved to WDZL. By the early-1990s, WDZL had become a far stronger independent station. It acquired Fox Kids programming from WSVN in 1993.

WDZL became a charter WB affiliate on January 11, 1995. In 1997, the Tribune Company acquired the six television station group that was owned by Renaissance Communications. Kids' WB programming on WDZL expanded to three hours on weekdays and the station dropped Fox Kids (which moved to Home Shopping Network station WYHS (now WAMI-TV). WDZL changed its call letters to WBZL in 1998 to emphasize its affiliation with The WB. Throughout this affiliation, the station was known on-air as "WB 39". By then, the station began airing more first-run talk and reality shows during the day along with children programming and off-network sitcoms in the evenings. By 2005, it was the only remaining station in South Florida that still ran kids' shows weekday afternoons with Kids' WB (a practice which ended on December 30, 2005).

On January 24, the Warner Bros. Television unit of TimeWarner and CBS announced that they would close the WB and UPN networks and merge them to form The CW Television Network. Tribune announced that most of its WB affiliates, including WBZL, would become affiliated with The CW. This was a result of Tribune signing a ten year affiliation agreement with the new network. It would not have been an upset had WBFS (which is owned by CBS) been chosen, however. The CW officials were on record as preferring the "strongest" WB and UPN stations for their new network, and South Florida was one of the few markets where The WB and UPN stations were both relatively strong. Throughout the summer, WBZL started using the CW logo for local television ads and also began referring to itself as "CW South Florida". On September 17, WBZL changed its call letters to the current WSFL-TV to remove the reference to the no-longer-existent WB in its calls and generalize them to its geographic location. The next day, The CW debuted on WSFL. Starting in 2006, the station aired The Tube, a 24-hour music video channel, on its second digital subchannel and Comcast digital cable channel 224. It was dropped on October 1, 2007 when that network went off the air due to a multitude of factors.

On September 1, 2008, in a corporate move by Tribune to de-emphasize the references of "The CW" branding for their CW affiliates, channel 39 was rebranded as "SFL" and it debuted a logo featuring the capital "S" in the Sun-Sentinel nameplate. Around the same time, WSFL moved its operations into the Fort Lauderdale offices of the Sun-Sentinel. By February 2012, the station rebranded to de-emphasize its connection to the Sun-Sentinel, as WSFL no longer offers full-scale local newscasts.