The two stations share studios on North Road near the WIS 172 freeway in Ashwaubenon (with a Green Bay postal address); WGBA-TV's transmitter is located in the unincorporated community of Shirley, east of De Pere, Wisconsin.

[3] In early 1983, coinciding with the purchase of a licensing deal of approximately 1,000 movies and other syndicated programs,[3] WLRE took on the tagline "The Great Entertainer".

After Ace TV acquired the WXGZ license, WGBA helped to relaunch the station through a local marketing agreement in June 1994.

Relief did not come until October 2004, when the Journal Broadcast Group bought it for $43.2 million after Aries Telecommunications sold the station.

Although Journal wanted to buy WACY outright, this had been unlikely since Green Bay has only seven full-power stations (not enough to legally permit a duopoly).

However, in September 2010, WLUK owner LIN TV Corporation exercised an option to purchase CW affiliate WCWF (channel 14) from ACME Communications, and filed for a "failing station waiver" – which permits duopoly in such situations if the petitioner can prove the station is in an economically non-viable position – to allow LIN to own WLUK and WCWF.

Because WCWF was hampered for years by several factors, including insufficient cable carriage and an analog signal originating more towards its city of license, Suring, than Green Bay, the waiver was granted in February 2011.

This became more evident in 2008, when WGBA outsourced sports and weekend weather reports to WTMJ, and had simulcast that station's morning and noon newscasts for a short time.

After several extensions of the original June 30, 2013, expired agreement, and the invocation of the sweeps rule disallowing cable providers from pulling the main signal of a carried station during local sweeps periods (which includes July),[12] the main signals of WGBA and WACY were pulled off Time Warner Cable systems in the market at midnight on July 25, 2013.

The main effect of the blackout on Time Warner Cable systems was the carriage of three Packers preseason games on WTMJ and WGBA, which were blacked out on the provider due to the dispute, though the games were still available via the Spanish language simulcast using the Packers Television network camera positions produced for Milwaukee's Telemundo affiliate WYTU-LD (channel 63/49.4), which is carried on the subchannel tier in the Green Bay market (and was simulcast on WACY), with the suggestion to listen to English play-by-play via either WTMJ radio from Milwaukee or the local FM stations in Green Bay or Appleton carrying Packers Radio Network coverage.

[18] Journal and Time Warner Cable came to an agreement for carriage on September 20, 2013, to last at least through the 2016 Summer Olympics, returning WGBA and WACY to their lineups as of 7 p.m. that evening.

The combined firm would retain their broadcast properties, including WTMJ-TV and its radio siblings, with the print assets being spun off as Journal Media Group.

On March 2, 2012, the Green Bay Packers and Journal announced that WTMJ would be retained as the Official Packers Station in the Milwaukee market after the expiration of the previous agreement, and that WGBA would become the official station for the team in the Green Bay market beginning in August 2012, replacing former partner WFRV-TV.

[25] As a result, WGBA carries the majority of the team's preseason schedule (the game broadcasts use CBS Sports announcers, with the NBC Sunday Night Football graphics package) along with Packers Live Tuesday nights and Total Packers with Matt LaFleur on Wednesday evenings before prime time, and the Inside Lambeau program on Sunday nights, along with other official team programming; the station also provides gametime and 'ride home' forecasts for the "TundraVision" scoreboard displays at Lambeau Field during Packers home games.

In addition, the station also held the rights to the September 13 Thursday Night Football game of the Packers–Bears rivalry broadcast on cable/satellite on NFL Network, a network unavailable to much of the Green Bay market at the time due to conflicts with Time Warner Cable (three weeks later Time Warner added the network to its systems); this unusually forced the season seven finale of America's Got Talent to air the same night over WACY (the station's first move of NBC programming to that station in a pre-emption situation), and re-air after Saturday Night Live on September 15 on WGBA due to the preemption.

It also carried the team's first London appearance in the NFL International Series on October 9 against the New York Giants at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

In addition to its main studios, the station operates a Fox Cities Bureau in Downtown Appleton on West College Avenue.

In early 1996, shortly after WGBA picked up the NBC affiliation, then-owner Aries Telecommunications announced plans to start a full-fledged news department for the station.

Ratings were unable to improve after the Journal purchase, even with the ties to WTMJ's news department, which had issues in itself in the Milwaukee market.

On July 14, 2008, due to low ratings and inconsistent viewership, WGBA discontinued its weekday morning and noon newscasts, while laying off some of its staff.

In September 2009, reporter Bonnie Kirschman, the final employee to remain with WGBA's news operation since its 1996 launch, left the station.

[34] On January 10, 2011, WGBA restored a weekday morning newscast to its schedule under the slightly revised title of NBC 26 News Today from a new secondary set exclusively used for the program.

In October 2014, the station added Wisconsin Tonight, a pre-prime time newsmagazine to nights without Packers team programming which features news rundowns, feature segments and various NBC affiliate service reports, along with some shared content from WTMJ, which also carried their own edition of Wisconsin Tonight; this averted a situation where Inside Edition, which was moved to an earlier timeslot, might only air up to two of their five programs a week on the station in the fall and early winter.

On June 15, 2020, WGBA began producing a 9 p.m. newscast for WACY entitled My News at 9, the first time WLUK-TV's 9 p.m. news has had competition; the latter half hour is filled with a same-night replay of NBC26 Tonight, the station's local version of Scripps' national program The Now (it is unknown if WGBA's Packers Television Network programming will repeat in the fall in that timeslot).

[43] At the end of October 2021, the station picked up Ion Television (formerly a WBAY subchannel since 2015), which had come under common Scripps ownership in January 2021.

[46] During that period, residents of Northern Door County and the southern portion of Michigan's Upper Peninsula could easily receive the three Green Bay network stations on VHF and WFRV semi-satellite WJMN-TV from Escanaba, Michigan, along with PBS member station WNMU from Marquette, Michigan, but not WGBA and PBS Wisconsin's WPNE-TV (channel 38); the latter is served by Sister Bay translator W15DJ-D. WLWK-CD (channel 22) in Sturgeon Bay is officially licensed as a Class A station; this translator was known as W22BW prior to November 27, 2012.

Scripps sold the Milwaukee radio stations in 2018 to Good Karma Brands, making it unlikely any other calls will be warehoused on channel 22.