The station provides at least secondary coverage to the extreme east-northeastern portions of the Atlanta market, including Athens, Gainesville and Braselton.

Gaines felt that northeast Georgia received very little local news coverage from stations in the adjacent Atlanta, Augusta, and Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville markets, and launched WNEG in order to fill this void.

[2] However, the station struggled to make money, as there were barely enough viewers or advertisers in its primarily rural area for it to be viable.

Spartan bought the station outright two years later[3] (WNEG radio still exists, but operates separately from and maintains different ownership than the former WNEG-TV).

The new Atlanta CBS affiliate, WGNX (channel 46, now WANF), was located on UHF, and did not have nearly the signal coverage that WAGA had in northeast Georgia.

[7] UGA moved the operations of WNEG-TV from its studios in Toccoa to the university campus in Athens in the fall of 2009, and also added more locally produced programming.

[16][17] On March 25, 2015, the University of Georgia agreed to sell WUGA-TV to Marquee Broadcasting, owner of WMDT in Salisbury, Maryland, for $2.5 million.

Under the terms of the deal, Marquee returned channel 32 to commercial operation and changed the station's call letters to WGTA (in reference to its "Greenville to Atlanta" coverage area).

[18][19] UGA had considered selling the station as early as November 2013,[20] and on March 27, 2014, announced that it would eliminate WUGA-TV's local programming (which comprised only one percent of channel 32's schedule) effective July 1; this resulted in six staffers being laid off.

[21] The change to WGTA took place on July 1, 2015,[22] when the sale to Marquee was completed; at the same time, the station dropped all GPB Knowledge and World programming and began broadcasting Heroes & Icons on 32.1, Decades on 32.2, and Movies!

WUGA-TV was later added to Comcast systems on channel 96 in Barrow, Jackson, Hall and northern Gwinnett counties.