The station is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, and has offices on Prestige Park Drive in Hurricane; its transmitter is located near Milton, West Virginia.
After originating as a construction permit in 1987 and receiving several extensions, WLPX-TV applied for its license on September 11, 1998.
[2] In the construction phase and for its first month on air, the station's calls were WKRP (the same as the fictional radio station in Cincinnati); it adopted its current call sign on October 5 of the same year.
It has been a member of Ion (previously known as Pax TV and i: Independent Television) since its inception.
The station's signal is multiplexed: WLPX-TV ended regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 29, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate.