WTLV First Coast News NBC 12

WTLV is the NBC television station for Jacksonville and Northeast Florida, broadcasting on Channel 12. Together with its sister station WJXX (ABC 25), it produces local news under the First Coast News brand from studios at 1070 East Adams Street in downtown Jacksonville.

The station signed on September 1, 1957, as WFGA-TV, owned by the Florida-Georgia Television Company, whose backers included Jacksonville radio owner Harold Cohn and the Miami theater company Wometco. It was an NBC affiliate from its first day and was built for color broadcasting from the start, so Jacksonville viewers saw local color programming early. In its first years Channel 12 also carried part of ABC's schedule, until the city got a full-time ABC station in 1966.

Early local programming included a Jacksonville edition of Romper Room and the long-running cartoon show hosted by "Skipper Ed" McCullers. The station's cameras covered rocket launches at Cape Canaveral, supplying footage to NBC and often the pool feed for other networks. Its first news director, Harold Baker, anchored the 6 p.m. news for 17 years.

The license spent years in legal dispute after an FCC influence scandal of the late 1950s. The case ended when the competing applicants formed a single local company, Channel 12 of Jacksonville, which took over in 1971. That December the station became WTLV. Harte-Hanks bought it in 1975, and WTLV went on to launch Good Morning Jacksonville in 1982, the city's first local morning newscast. In 1984 it became the first Jacksonville station to broadcast in stereo.

WTLV switched to ABC in 1980, then returned to NBC in April 1988 shortly after Gannett bought the station. From 1995 to 2000 it was the first local TV partner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, airing preseason games and coaches' shows. In 2000 Gannett acquired WJXX and merged the two newsrooms into First Coast News, which debuted on April 27, 2000. That same year WTLV became the first Jacksonville station to broadcast a digital signal. Gannett's broadcast division became TEGNA in 2015, and in March 2026 Nexstar Media Group completed its purchase of TEGNA.