It is owned by Cox Media Group, which provides certain services to CBS affiliate WJAX-TV (channel 47) under a joint sales agreement (JSA) with Hoffman Communications.

The three stations share studios on Central Parkway; WFOX-TV's transmitter is located on Hogan Road, both in Jacksonville's Southside section.

The station's original studios and transmitter facilities were located on Hogan Road on Jacksonville's Southside, part of the Killarney Shores antenna farm.

As was the trend for many Fox affiliates throughout the mid to late 1990s, WAWS began shifting its programming toward talk and reality shows and decreased its reliance on classic sitcoms.

After WTEV took the CBS affiliation from longtime affiliate WJXT (channel 4), which dropped the network after it demanded that Post-Newsweek Stations reverse compensate CBS to carry its programming and run the entire network schedule in pattern—only allowing preemptions for extended local breaking news and severe weather coverage,[5][6] WAWS took over the local rights to the UPN affiliation on July 15, 2002, airing the network's evening programming on a secondary basis each weeknight from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. following the station's prime time newscast, as well as its children's program block Disney's One Too, which it aired on Sunday through Friday mornings in addition to its existing carriage of Fox's competing children's block, FoxBox (later known as 4Kids TV), on Saturdays.

On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would respectively shut down UPN and The WB, and enter into a joint venture to form a new "fifth" broadcast television network, The CW, that would initially feature a mix of higher-rated programming from both of its forerunner networks (and assumed the scheduling model and most programming operations of The WB) as well as new content developed specifically for The CW.

After the group deal closed on March 14, 2008, Newport had originally planned to sell off WAWS to another company while keeping WTEV.

On May 21, 2008, High Plains Broadcasting agreed to purchase the license assets of WTEV and six other stations from Newport Television due to ownership conflicts in the affected markets (including Jacksonville).

[20][21] On August 26, 2014, Cox announced its intention to change WAWS' call letters to WFOX-TV, contingent on FCC approval, through a request made to the agency on July 30.

In an email to The Florida Times-Union, general manager Jim Zerwekh stated that the change would better reflect the station's status as one of Fox's ten strongest affiliates.

[23] In February 2019, it was announced that Apollo Global Management would acquire Cox Media Group and Northwest Broadcasting's stations.

The stations utilize Doppler radar data from the National Weather Service Forecast Office near Jacksonville International Airport.

Ironically, the station also hired First Coast News weekday morning traffic reporter Michelle Jacobs just weeks earlier (she would eventually return to WTLV and WJXX in October 2008).

Shortly after she left, WAWS hired Julie Watkins (who previously worked at First Coast News before moving on to WFTV in Orlando) as a weekend meteorologist.

[30] The layoffs drew criticism from Jacksonville city council president Bill Guilford stating that Cox Media Group "exercised bad judgment" in cutting the five anchors.