WZZM (channel 13) is a television station licensed to Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States, serving West Michigan as an affiliate of ABC. 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. The station went on the air in November 1962 under interim operating authority; four companies jointly owned the station until West Michigan Telecasters was granted the permanent license in 1964 and bought out the others' interim holdings in 1965. Because of the transmitter site restriction, the station did not and does not provide a signal to the southern part of West Michigan, namely Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the station's efforts to build additional transmitters to serve those cities were ordered closed to protect a new station on channel 41 in Battle Creek, WUHQ-TV (now WOTV), which also broadcasts ABC but with separate non-network programming. 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. Satellite television providers Dish Network and DirecTV provide both stations across the entire market, and WZZM is also on cable in Battle Creek. In local news, the station had a highly regarded news department from the 1960s through the 1980s; it had one news director for the first 25 years of its history. While the station continues to be competitive particularly in the Grand Rapids area, coverage shortfalls and the aggregate nature of the television market have given the overall edge to WOOD-TV since the 1990s. The station maintains a lit weather ball displayed near its Walker studios. History Assignment of channel 13 to Grand Rapids; construction In 1959, the Atlas Broadcasting Company was organized to pursue the addition of a third very high frequency (VHF) station in West Michigan. It applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposing the addition of channel 13 to Grand Rapids. The station would transmit from an area near Muskegon, north of Grand Rapids, where it would be appropriately spaced to channel 13 stations in Toledo, Ohio, and Rockford, Illinois. Atlas also proposed moving WWTV in Cadillac to channel 9, where it