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WDSU is New Orleans' NBC affiliate - Louisiana's first television station, on the air since 18 December 1948 and owned by Hearst Television. Broadcasting from studios on Howard Avenue in the Central Business District, it pairs the network's national programming with 38 hours of locally produced newscasts each week, and its signal also streams live online.

The call letters carry the station's founding story - the DeSoto Hotel, the New Orleans States newspaper and radio pioneer Joseph Uhalt - and so does the record: channel 6 was the first station in Louisiana, the first in New Orleans, the first on the Gulf Coast and the first in the Deep South, the 49th in the nation.

The Gulf South's Newsroom

The broadcast day opens with WDSU News First Edition at 4:30 a.m. and runs through morning and midday newscasts, a 4 p.m. edition and the evening and late franchises, with chief meteorologist Margaret Orr leading a weather operation that grew out of one of the deepest traditions in the business: Nash Roberts, one of the country's first television weathercasters, drew his forecasts by marker on wall maps at channel 6 in the 1950s, and the station later put the market's first station-owned Doppler radar - Super Doppler 6000 - on the air. The station's classic local programming ran in the same register, from the Morgus the Magnificent horror-movie host to the early magazine program Midday.

Katrina, Gustav and the Hurricane Tradition

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, WDSU evacuated its operation to sister station WAPT in Jackson, Mississippi, and broadcast from there for weeks while both of its transmitters lay destroyed - rebuilding in Chalmette with a raised, hurricane-resistant transmitter facility. Three years later, five continuous days of Hurricane Gustav coverage ran nationally on DirecTV and was picked up by C-SPAN2 and a Baton Rouge station, while New Orleans radio partners simulcast the audio for a region short on electricity. In hurricane country, that record is the station's calling card.

Saints, Pelicans and the First-Station Legacy

Sports runs deep as well: WDSU carries Monday Night Football simulcasts whenever the New Orleans Saints play on ESPN - a right the Hearst chain holds through its stake in the network - and has added New Orleans Pelicans games under NBC's basketball package since 2025, after airing Saints AFC home games through the 1970s and 1990s. The first-station legacy still shows in the air work: WDSU originated the first live broadcasts of the Sugar Bowl and Mardi Gras, gave a young Dick Van Dyke his television start in the 1950s, and today multiplexes its signal into NBC, MeTV, 365BLK, Story Television and QVC subchannels from the Chalmette tower.

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