Owned by Tegna Inc., the station has studios on 3 Mile Road NW in Walker (with a Grand Rapids mailing address), and its transmitter is located in Grant, Michigan.

Channel 13 was inserted into Grand Rapids in 1961; station spacing rules of the time required that the transmitter be to the north of the city, closer to Muskegon.

Because of the transmitter site restriction, the station did not and does not provide adequate coverage of the southern portion of the market, namely Kalamazoo and Battle Creek.

An attempt to combine WZZM-TV and WUHQ-TV failed in 1991, and WOTV is today co-owned with WOOD-TV, the market's NBC affiliate.

In 1959, the Atlas Broadcasting Company was organized to pursue the addition of a third very high frequency (VHF) station in West Michigan.

[4] One of the shareholders was L. William Seidman, then on the board of directors of Grand Valley State College and later chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

[5] In its order assigning channel 13 to Grand Rapids, the FCC indicated its willingness to accept proposals for interim operating authority to hasten the construction of the station.

[8] Major and Atlas both withdrew in August 1962; the four remaining contenders formed Channel 13, Grand Rapids, Inc., which received interim authority that same month.

[10] Construction rapidly proceeded, and from studios in the Pantlind Hotel downtown, WZZM made its first broadcast on November 1, 1962, an ABC affiliate from the start.

In May 1963, an FCC hearing examiner gave Grand Broadcasting Company the nod in his initial decision, citing its superior integration of ownership and management, a comparative criterion analyzing the involvement of owners in station operations.

[12] The FCC itself, however, instead selected West Michigan Telecasters in April 1964, citing its principals' involvement in civic affairs and research into local public service programming.

[21] The acquisition closed in January 1978;[22] WZZM-FM was split from the television station by West Michigan Telecasters and sold to separate interests.

Gannett sent Argyle the Cincinnati and Oklahoma City stations (WLWT and KOCO-TV) in exchange for $20 million; WGRZ in Buffalo, New York; and WZZM-TV.

[29][30] From 1967 to 1987, a weather ball sat atop the Michigan National Bank building in Grand Rapids, utilizing 288 colored neon lights to convey forecast precipitation or changes in temperature, until it was removed because its weight had caused structural damage.

The station located the stainless steel ball in a scrapyard in Kalamazoo in 1999 and applied to authorities in Walker to mount a 100-foot (30 m) pole to display it near its studios in 2002.

[34] The FCC reckoned channel 13 as a Grand Rapids–Kalamazoo station when it inserted the allocation,[3] and for most regional viewers the sign-on of WZZM gave West Michigan full service from all three networks; the market was already served by Grand Rapids–based NBC affiliate WOOD-TV and Kalamazoo-based CBS affiliate WKZO-TV.

While the northerly location was necessary to insert channel 13 in the area in the first place, it left much of the market's southern portion without even a fringe signal from the station.

Bill Tompkins of The Battle Creek Enquirer and News wrote that local viewers found WZZM "about as elusive as a flying saucer" when it began broadcasting.

[44] However, the spacing considerations that resulted in the northerly location of WZZM in the first place were an insurmountable obstacle; the FCC denied the proposal because it would have been too close to the channel 13 station in Toledo.

During Hogan's tenure, the station was a stop on the careers of journalists including sportscaster John Keating (known as Steve Knight in Grand Rapids), future Detroit Free Press executive editor Kurt Luedtke, and reporters Jay Schadler and Martha Teichner.