WSPA-TV
CW affiliate in Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States
WSPA-TV (channel 7) is a television station licensed to Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States, serving Upstate South Carolina and Western North Carolina with programming from The CW. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside Asheville, North Carolina–licensed WYCW (channel 62), an independent station. The two stations share studios on International Drive (next to the I-26 and I-85 Business/Veterans Parkway interchange) in Spartanburg and a transmitter on Hogback Mountain in northeastern Greenville County, South Carolina, southwest of Tryon, North Carolina.
WSPA-TV began broadcasting in April 1956 amid a controversy that spanned a decade over the station's proposed transmitter site. Owned by the locally based Spartan Radiocasting Company (renamed Spartan Communications in 1995) for more than four decades, it was a CBS affiliate from its inception and the second VHF television station in Upstate South Carolina. Its original studios in downtown Spartanburg were destroyed by fire in 1960; the station rebuilt at another site downtown but constructed its present facilities in 1979. Spartan Communications was acquired by Media General in 2000; under Media General, the station enjoyed strong local news ratings performances, moving from its traditional second-place to first against traditional news ratings leader WYFF. Nexstar acquired Media General in 2017; the station has since slipped back to second place in news ratings. On August 1, 2026, WSPA-TV lost its CBS affiliation to WYFF and began airing CW programming and expanded local news coverage.
Early years
Permitting
When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended its multi-year freeze on television stations in April 1952, it allotted very high frequency (VHF) channel 7 to Spartanburg instead of the state capital of Columbia. Two radio station owners in Spartanburg made plans to apply for the channel: the Broadcasting Company of the South, owner of WSPA (950 AM), and the Spartan Radiocasting Company, owner of WORD (910 AM). Spartan's owner, Walter J. Brown, had been instrumental in getting channel 7 assigned to Spartanburg and not Columbia; when a proposed table of allotments threatened to leave Spartanburg without any VHF channels, he pressed South Carolina's governor, fellow Spartanburg resident James F. Byrnes, to use his influence with the FCC to move channel 7 from Columbia to Spartanburg.
“WSPA-TV” enters the record as cW affiliate in Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WSPA-TV, affiliate and Spartanburg can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14709683. Authority coordinates are 34.971, -82.005. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1995, 1960 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “WSPA-TV” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.