The two stations share studios on Dexter Avenue in downtown Montgomery; WSFA's transmitter is located in Grady along the Montgomery–Pike county line.

WSFA was one of two flagship television properties (alongside CBS affiliate WBTV in Charlotte, North Carolina) of previous owner Raycom Media, which had headquarters downtown at the RSA Tower.

That status ended when WTVY in Dothan, which would eventually become a sister station of WSFA, launched WRGX-LD as an NBC affiliate on June 1, 2013.

[3] They can be traced back to 1930, when Gordon Persons (years before becoming Governor of Alabama) opened a radio station at the Montgomery Regional Airport (now Gunter Annex of Maxwell Air Force Base).

[5] WSFA radio quickly became a landmark in Montgomery and was most famous in its early days for launching the career of country music legend Hank Williams, a native of nearby Georgiana, in the 1940s.

Persons built a state-of-the-art facility on Delano Avenue to house both the television and radio stations in 1954,[3] and WSFA-TV aired its first broadcast on December 25, 1954—a Christmas present to Alabama.

Only two months later, in February 1955, Persons sold WSFA-AM-TV to the Gaylord family's Oklahoma Publishing Company, earning a handsome return on his original investment of a quarter-century earlier.

However, with Raycom's 2008 purchase of Lincoln Financial Media's television stations, WSFA shared flagship status with Charlotte's WBTV.

[13] Not long after the Gaylord family bought the station in 1955, they dispatched Frank McGee, top anchorman at company flagship WKY-TV (now KFOR-TV) in Oklahoma City, to Montgomery as News Director.

Under McGee, WSFA gained a national reputation for its coverage (fed periodically to the network) of local events in the Civil Rights Movement such as the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 involving Rosa Parks and the varied activities of Martin Luther King Jr. during his pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

WSFA established a news share agreement with Fox affiliate WCOV (owned by the Woods Communications Corporation) on January 7, 2008.

After WCOV's contract with WSFA expired at the end of 2010, that station entered into a new agreement with CBS affiliate WAKA to produce a nightly prime time newscast at 9 covering Montgomery.

WSFA-DT2 also includes repeats of newscasts from the main channel, live local weather updates, syndicated programming, and broadcasts from Raycom Sports.

WSFA-DT3 was shut down on December 31, 2009, in order to start beta testing of applications that would transmit its signal to mobile devices, but was then re-opened in October 2014 carrying Grit TV.