it exercised six months later after a brief court battle when the owners of the transmitter site tried to stop the sale from taking place. The station was sold to Freedom Communications in 1999. In 2005, a company-wide consolidation of operations at its stations resulted in the move of WLAJ's master control and most other internal operations to the studios of sister station WWMT in Kalamazoo. This left a skeleton crew of six people out of what began with eighty staffers in Lansing. Additionally, WWMT's president and general manager, James Lutton, took over the same capacity at WLAJ after the departure of Ross Reardon. On September 24, 2007, WLAJ was re-branded as "ABC 3" since most Lansing-area cable providers carry it on channel 3. The logo introduced at that time featured the number "53" but emphasized its cable slot ("3") more than the over-the-air channel, with the "5" in negative space. WOTV used a similar logo at the time. On April 7, 2008, a new image makeover including a new logo, similar to WWMT's, but with the hidden "5" like the previous logo was launched. It eventually dropped the hidden "5". WLAJ was unusual for airing The Oprah Winfrey Show at 5 p.m. instead of her traditional 4 p.m. timeslot. The series ended on May 25, 2011, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show replaced Oprah on WLAJ. WLAJ also aired ESPN Plus' Big Ten college football coverage until the launch of the Big Ten Network. While most ABC affiliates in Michigan saw their college football coverage reduced primarily to the network's games, WLAJ and WLAJ-DT2 have in recent years become the Lansing affiliate of the Central Michigan University Chippewas and the Western Michigan University Broncos. Today, whenever a football game involving either CMU or WMU kicks off at noon, the game airs on WLAJ as a lead-in to ABC's college football coverage. All other CMU and WMU football games air on WLAJ-DT2. Freedom announced on November 2, 2011, that it would bow out of television and sell its stations, including WLAJ, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The deal closed on April 2, 2012, but only six months later (on October 11), Sinclair filed to sell WLAJ to Shield Media (owned by White Knight Broadcasting vice president Sheldon Galloway). After the sale's completion, the station then entered into a shared services agreement with Young Broadcasting-owned WLNS. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted