WGWW (channel 40) is a television station licensed to Anniston, Alabama, United States, serving the eastern portion of the Birmingham market as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Heroes & Icons. The station is owned by Howard Stirk Holdings, a partner company of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. WGWW's transmitter is located at Bald Rock Mountain (off of Kelly Creek Road), near Moody in unincorporated southern St. Clair County.
WGWW operates as a full-time satellite of Tuscaloosa-licensed WSES (channel 33), whose advertising sales office is located on Golden Crest Drive in Birmingham. WGWW covers areas of northeastern Alabama that receive a marginal to non-existent over-the-air signal from WSES, although there is significant overlap between the two stations' contours otherwise, including in Birmingham proper. WGWW is a straight simulcast of WSES; on-air references to WGWW are limited to Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-mandated hourly station identifications during programming. Aside from the transmitter, WGWW does not maintain any physical presence locally in Anniston.
Through a time-brokerage agreement (TBA) with Sinclair, WGWW's second digital subchannel serves as a repeater of ABC affiliate WBMA-LD (channel 58), of which WGWW had served as a full-time satellite station on its main feed from September 1996 to September 2014.
History
Beginnings in Anniston
The station first signed on the air on October 26, 1969, as WHMA-TV. Originally operating as a primary CBS and secondary NBC affiliate, the station was initially owned by the Anniston Broadcasting Company, which was run by members of the family of Harry M. Ayers, who also owned the Anniston Star newspaper and local radio station WHMA (1390 AM and 100.5 FM, the FM station is now Atlanta-based WNNX-FM). It originally operated from studio facilities located on Noble Street in downtown Anniston.
Harry Mabry—who served as WHMA-TV's original general manager—came to Anniston from Birmingham, where he had served as news director at WBRC-TV (channel 6) for several years. Mabry already was familiar with Anniston, though, having worked as a staff announcer for WHMA-AM more than fifteen years prior to WHMA-TV's sign-on. Another former Birmingham personality who was part of the station's original staff was "Cousin Cliff" Holman, who left WAPI-TV (channel 13, now WVTM-TV) in 1969 after that station moved his cartoon showcase series, The Popeye Show, from weekday mornings to Saturday and Sunday mornings (due to declining ratings resulting from the show's move to a weekday morning slot and its switch from a mostly live broadcast to being pre-recorded the day before air several months beforehand) the previous year. Holman, who was also hired as its publicity director, resumed his program on WHMA-TV in the afternoons as The Cousin Cliff Show. However, the show was hampered by changes in the television industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s decision in the early 1970s to prohibit children's hosts from promoting products directly on-air, forcing channel 40 to cancel the program by the summer of 1972. In later years, in addition to making public appearances at various children's gatherings (among other jobs), Holman would revive his program on a cable access channel in Birmingham in 1985, before moving to WBRC, which hired him to host the Saturday morning children's program Cousin Cliff's Clubhouse from 1990 to 1992.
WHMA-TV ultimately reached approximately 100,000 households across east-central Alabama, and management fought almost constantly to ensure that Arbitron maintained the distinction of Anniston as a separate television market from those encompassing the larger metropolitan areas of Birmingham and Atlanta. This was a maneuver that was critical to the station's survival; despite being the only television station located within the Anniston–Gadsden market (other than Alabama Public Television satellite station WCIQ (channel 7) in Mount Cheaha), WHMA faced immense competition from stations in the two larger nearby markets that provided "spill-in" (Grade B) signal coverage within eastern Alabama. The station's ratings victories in this part of the state garnered it access to numerous national advertisers, a rarity for a small-market television station of that time.