 In January 1996, it reached a unique deal with Allbritton Communications in which WCFT-TV (channel 33, now Heroes & Icons affiliate WSES) and WJSU-TV (channel 40, now WGWW, also a Heroes & Icons affiliate), the respective CBS affiliates for Tuscaloosa and Anniston (which had both been annexed from the Birmingham Designated Market Area by Arbitron in 1977, and eventually were collapsed back into that market by Nielsen in September 1998), would jointly become the ABC affiliate for central Alabama (weeks prior to that deal, Allbritton had entered into an agreement with Osborne Communications Corporation to take over the operations of WJSU under a local marketing agreement).However, because over-the-air reception of both stations in Birmingham proper was marginal at best and neither would likely be able to be counted in Nielsen ratings reports for that market as WCFT and WJSU were officially out-of-market stations, Allbritton purchased low-power independent station W58CK (channel 58, now WBMA-LD); under the deal, Albritton would also affiliate W58CK with ABC and make it the main station of the cluster, while WCFT and WJSU would serve as its satellites.Gadsden Fox affiliate WNAL-TV (channel 44, now WPXH-TV) replaced WJSU-TV as the CBS affiliate for northeast Alabama – the second in the area, alongside Birmingham's WIAT (WNAL would later become the Pax TV (now Ion Television) O&O for the entire Birmingham market in August 1999, three years after it was acquired by Paxson Communications (now Ion Media Networks), the network's parent company).