WPGX (Fox 28) — Panama City, Florida

WPGX, virtual channel 28 and branded as Fox 28, is the Fox-affiliated television station serving Panama City and Florida's central Panhandle coast. Licensed to Panama City, it broadcasts digitally on VHF channel 9 from a transmitter on Blue Springs Road in the Youngstown area north of the city, with studios on West 23rd Street in Panama City. Owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group since 2019, the station provides Fox prime time, Fox sports and syndicated programming to a market that also includes Panama City Beach, Lynn Haven, Callaway and surrounding Bay County communities. Its website is wpgxfox28.com.

WPGX's biography is a compact history of independent television in a small American market: founded by a Tampa-based group owner in the late 1980s, launched as an independent, affiliated with the young Fox network within a year, and then passed through a succession of group owners — Ashling, Wicks, Waitt, Raycom — before a major merger forced its sale to Lockwood. Along the way it gained digital subchannels, survived being knocked off the air by Hurricane Michael, and spent decades as one of the few Fox affiliates in the country without a regular prime time newscast before finally launching one in 2020.

Overview and market position

Panama City is a small television market — ranked around 149th to 154th nationally in recent listings — serving Florida's Gulf coast between Tallahassee and Pensacola. Its full-service stations divide the major networks among them: NBC on WJHG, ABC on WMBB, CBS via WECP-LD, PBS via WFSG, and Fox on WPGX. In a market of that size, each affiliate's identity is unusually clear-cut, and WPGX's is built on the Fox combination of prime time entertainment, national sports including NFL and college football coverage carried by the network, and syndicated daytime programming.

The call letters tell the affiliation story: WPGX was interpreted from its early years as referencing Panama City, the Gulf Coast and Fox. The station brands simply as Fox 28, using its historic analogue channel number even though its digital signal operates on channel 9. Since 2019 most of its master control operations have originated not in Panama City but from Gray Media's WBRC in Birmingham, Alabama — a common small-market arrangement in which a station keeps local studios and sales while technical playout is centralised elsewhere.

Founding and the independent year, 1987–1989

WPGX was founded by Family Group Broadcasting of Tampa. The station was first announced in August 1987, with a launch initially expected around December of that year or the following January. It signed on May 21, 1988, broadcasting an analogue signal on UHF channel 28. RabbitEars call-sign records show the construction permit previously used the calls WDGH from January 1986, with WPGX adopted on May 1, 1988, shortly before launch.

For its first year, WPGX operated as an independent station, airing syndicated general-audience programmes, religious programming and sports. That independent start was typical of late-1980s UHF sign-ons: a new station built an audience with reruns and movies while deciding which, if any, of the emerging networks to join. Despite initial disinterest in an affiliation, WPGX signed with the Fox network — itself founded only in 1986 — on May 2, 1989, and began airing Fox programming four days later. The affiliation gave Panama City a local home for the fourth network and gave WPGX a prime time identity it has kept ever since, making it one of Fox's longer-serving small-market affiliates.

Ownership through the 1990s: Ashling, Wicks and Waitt

The station's first ownership change came on April 30, 1990, when Family Group sold WPGX to the New York-based Ashling Broadcasting Group. Ashling held the station through most of the decade before selling it to Wicks Broadcasting Group in January 1997. Wicks in turn sold WPGX to Waitt Media in October 1998, in a deal valued at 7.1 million dollars.

These transactions reflect the economics of small-market television in the 1990s, when regional group owners assembled portfolios of UHF stations in modest markets, professionalised their operations, and traded them as consolidation accelerated ahead of the 1996 Telecommunications Act's full effects. For viewers, the changes were largely invisible — Fox programming continued on channel 28 — but each owner made its mark on facilities and investment. It was during the 1990s, under this succession of owners, that WPGX briefly experimented with local news, an experiment the market would not sustain for long.

The Raycom years, 2003–2019

Waitt Media sold WPGX to Raycom Media in December 2003, beginning the station's longest period of stable group ownership. Under Raycom, WPGX at one point operated from facilities on Luverne Avenue in Panama City, in a building known as the Fox Television Center that it shared with a SunTrust Bank branch. In May 2010 the station relaunched its website under Raycom's control; the site initially carried limited station content — FCC public file and equal employment opportunity disclosures — and functioned partly as an advertising vehicle featuring promotions from Panama City businesses.

Raycom's ownership also brought the digital-era improvements described below: subchannels for Bounce TV, Grit and Court TV, and the end of the station's short-lived music-video subchannel. The Raycom period ended because of a merger far larger than WPGX itself. Atlanta-based Gray Television announced its acquisition of Raycom on June 25, 2018. Gray already owned Panama City's NBC affiliate WJHG-TV, channel 7, together with WECP-LD, so it could not also keep the market's Fox affiliate; WPGX was immediately placed on the market as a required divestiture.

Sale to Lockwood Broadcast Group

On August 20, 2018, Gray announced that WPGX would be sold to Lockwood Broadcast Group, alongside three fellow Fox affiliates facing the same merger logic: WTNZ in Knoxville, Tennessee, WFXG in Augusta, Georgia, and WDFX-TV in Dothan, Alabama. The sale was completed on January 2, 2019, and WPGX's licensee became Panama City TV LLC under Lockwood operation.

The divestiture was also overseen through the federal antitrust process: the Department of Justice's competitive impact statement for the Gray-Raycom merger named Lockwood as the proposed purchaser for WPGX in the Panama City market, alongside the other Fox stations. Under Lockwood, WPGX has operated as part of a family of Southeastern Fox affiliates rather than as one small outpost of a very large group — and, notably, Lockwood also operates WDFX in nearby Dothan, giving the two Panhandle-area Fox stations common ownership. Master control, however, remained centralised at WBRC in Birmingham, the former Raycom and Gray flagship that had already been handling playout.

News operation: a long gap, then Fox 28 News at 9

For most of its history, WPGX had little local news. In the 1990s, NBC affiliate WJHG produced a 9 p.m. newscast for the station, but the arrangement was very short-lived, leaving Panama City as one of the very few markets — and WPGX one of a select group of Fox affiliates — with no prime time newscast at all. In January 2010, ABC affiliate WMBB began producing pre-recorded local weather cut-ins for WPGX. Speculation that the arrangement would grow into a full 9 p.m. newscast did not materialise at the time; the WMBB weather segments eventually ended, and WPGX returned to taped forecasts produced by WeatherVision, which had supplied them before.

The breakthrough came on June 1, 2020, when WPGX debuted an hour-long weeknight newscast at 9 p.m., Fox 28 News at 9:00, produced by WMBB — by then owned by Nexstar Media Group. The launch paralleled a similar arrangement at sister station WDFX in Dothan, where WDHN began producing a 9 p.m. newscast. The Panama City programme ran for five years; the 9 p.m. newscasts on both WPGX and WDFX ended effective June 1, 2025. Viewers seeking the station's current local information are directed to its website and social channels, while Fox network and syndicated programming again fill the prime time shoulder hours.

Programming and subchannels

WPGX's main channel, 28.1, carries Fox network programming in 720p high definition — Fox's native broadcast format — including prime time series, live sports and national events. Around the network schedule, the station airs syndicated talk, court and entertainment programmes and off-network reruns; titles associated with the station in reference listings have included The Big Bang Theory, Judge Judy and Two and a Half Men.

Its digital signal is multiplexed across four services. Channel 28.2 carries Bounce TV, 28.3 carries Grit, and 28.4 carries Court TV. The history of the second subchannel traces a small history of American diginets: WPGX-DT2 was a charter affiliate of The Tube Music Network, a 24-hour music video service, until The Tube ceased operations in October 2007. After an interval, the subchannel was relaunched in 2013 with Bounce TV — like WPGX under Raycom, Bounce had launched across many Raycom stations in 2011 — Grit joined on 28.3 in September 2014, and Court TV joined on 28.4 in May 2019, coinciding with that network's national relaunch. For antenna viewers on the Gulf coast, those three subchannels substantially expand free television choice beyond the main networks.

Digital transition and Hurricane Michael

WPGX shut down its analogue UHF channel 28 signal on June 12, 2009, the official national transition date for full-power stations. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition VHF channel 9, with virtual channel 28 preserving the station's established identity. The station's current technical listing shows an effective radiated power of 24.1 kilowatts for the VHF digital signal from its Blue Springs Road transmitter site in unincorporated Bay County, near Bennett and Youngstown.

Ten years into the digital era, the station faced a harder test than technology policy: weather. Hurricane Michael, the Category 5 storm that devastated Panama City and Mexico Beach in October 2018, briefly knocked WPGX off the air. The interruption is a reminder of the physical vulnerability of Gulf coast broadcasting — transmitters, towers and studios sit in the same storm path as the audience that most needs information — and of the expectation that local stations restore service as part of a community's recovery infrastructure.

WPGX today

Today WPGX operates as Lockwood Broadcast Group's Fox affiliate for Panama City, from studios on West 23rd Street, State Road 368, with a four-channel digital service and centralised master control in Birmingham. Its trajectory — independent start-up, early Fox affiliation, five owners, a forced merger divestiture, a hurricane knock-out and recovery, and a five-year experiment in produced prime time news — mirrors the modern history of small-market American television. For Panhandle viewers, the essentials are unchanged since 1989: Fox is on channel 28. Schedules and station information are available at wpgxfox28.com.