Owned by Tegna Inc., the station has studios on South 48th Street in Johnson (with a Springdale mailing address), and its transmitter is located northwest of Winslow, Arkansas.

The station's studios and transmitter were located in the Times Record/Southwest American building at 920 Rogers Avenue in downtown Fort Smith.

Initially, KFSA-TV relied on kinescopes of network programming and various live performers in the Fort Smith area.

Meanwhile, channel 22's UHF signal didn't reach much farther than 30 miles (48 km) from downtown Fort Smith, leaving many homes without clear television reception.

It did not help that viewers in Fort Smith could receive stations from Tulsa and Little Rock by using large masts and rotary antennas.

Talks between Reynolds and KNAC's owner, businessman Hiram Nakdeiman, resulted in an agreement to merge the two stations.

The merged station would use the KFSA-TV call letters under the ownership of the wealthier Reynolds, but operate under KNAC's license using the stronger channel 5 facility.

However, under the terms of an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the merged station used the KNAC call letters until the sale formally closed.

The two stations' operations were merged at a converted furniture warehouse in downtown Fort Smith at North 5th and B Streets that had originally been renovated for KNAC-TV.

After the license transfer to Donrey's broadcasting subsidiary, American Television Company, was finalized in January 1959, channel 5 changed its calls to KFSA-TV.

The area's original MyNetworkTV affiliate, KPBI-CA, which was repeated on full-power KPBI, went silent after its owner Equity Media Holdings went bankrupt.

Full-power KPBI, at one point a standalone RTV affiliate, officially became KFSM's sister station on January 5, 2012, with an FCC "failing station" waiver and changed its call letters to KXNW; at that time, KXNW dropped all remaining RTV programming in favor of a simulcast of KFSM-DT2, which had for a while also carried a part-time affiliation with Antenna TV in addition to its primary MyNetworkTV affiliation (until Antenna TV was ultimately segregated out onto its own dedicated sub-channel via KFSM-DT3, as of spring 2016).

[3] During the analog television era, KFSM was the only big three affiliate that did not need a second full-power station to reach the entire market.

[7] With the completion of the deal, KFSM and KXNW became Tribune's smallest television stations by market size (previously, the company's New Orleans duopoly of WGNO and WNOL-TV held this distinction).

[23][24] (As KXNW does not rank among the top four in total-day viewership and therefore is not in conflict with existing FCC in-market ownership rules, it was retained by Nexstar, thus creating a de facto triopoly with KNWA and KFTA.

[25] On June 14, 2019, KFSM moved most of its operations to a newly built studio in Johnson, a suburb of Fayetteville and Springdale.

According to station manager Van Comer, the new facility is located near the population center of KFSM's 11-county, two-state primary coverage area.

In July 2021, chief meteorologist Garrett Lewis left KFSM after 20 years with the station to pursue a career in finance and community relations.

Over the years, KFSM has been the ratings leader in the area, mainly due to the fact that it was the only commercial VHF station on the air in the Fort Smith–Fayetteville market during the analog television era.

Days later, the Eads Brothers Furniture Building was destroyed by one of largest fires in Fort Smith's history.