WGAL (channel 8) is a television station licensed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States, serving the Susquehanna Valley region as an affiliate of NBC.

Owned by Hearst Television, the station maintains studios on Columbia Avenue (PA 462) in Lancaster Township.

[3] It was the fourth television station in Pennsylvania and the first to sign-on outside of Philadelphia, beating WDTV (now KDKA-TV) in Pittsburgh which began operations in November of that year.

WGAL was a major beneficiary of a quirk in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s plan for allocating stations.

On December 31, 1952, the station moved to channel 8 as a requirement by the FCC in order to prevent interference with WRC-TV in Washington.

It has always been an NBC affiliate, but also carried some programs from CBS, DuMont and ABC until 1963 when Nielsen collapsed the Lancaster and Harrisburg–York areas into one large market.

Although the radio and television stations had gone their separate ways 15 years earlier, channel 8 dropped the "-TV" suffix from its callsign in 1992.

On February 14, 2014, a portion of the roof at WGAL's Columbia Avenue studio facility collapsed due to heavy accumulations of snow and ice caused by a winter storm that moved through the Eastern United States earlier that week.

Fire officials determined that a concrete support beam and slab in an adjacent studio that is no longer used by WGAL had shifted and dropped.

[4][5][6][7] WGAL staff members were allowed to re-enter its studios on the afternoon of February 15 after a steel column was installed in the room to prop up a sagging roof beam in the affected area of the building, following which the station resumed regular programming.

WGAL lost ground in other time periods, including at 6 p.m., and fell to a virtual tie with WHTM at noon.

On August 29, 2011, WGAL became the second station in South Central Pennsylvania (behind Fox affiliate WPMT) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

As of April 14, 2012, with WHP-TV's upgrade to HD newscasts, all four major stations in the Susquehanna Valley (WGAL, WPMT, WHP-TV and WHTM-TV) now air their local newscasts in HD; however, unlike the other three, WGAL airs only in-studio segments in the format (its field video continues to be presented in enhanced definition widescreen).

On February 4, 2013, WGAL debuted a nightly half-hour 10 p.m. newscast on its then This TV (now MeTV) affiliated second digital sub channel.