WNCN (channel 17) is a television station licensed to Goldsboro, North Carolina, United States, serving as the CBS affiliate for the Research Triangle area. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains studios on Front Street in north Raleigh, and its transmitter is located in Auburn, North Carolina.

Built in 1988 as a second-tier independent station operating from studios in Clayton, North Carolina, under the call sign WYED, channel 17 was purchased by Outlet Communications in 1994 and replaced the anemic WRDC (channel 28) as the market's NBC affiliate in 1995, which included the establishment of a local newsroom and the adoption of the present WNCN call letters. NBC owned the station for more than a decade before spinning it off to Media General in 2006. WNCN became the new CBS affiliate for the Triangle market on February 29, 2016, switching with longtime CBS affiliate WRAL-TV, which had announced it would become the new NBC affiliate for the region.

In 1983, three parties applied to build channel 17 in Goldsboro: Group H Broadcasting, owned by Randall Harvey; Wayne Telecasters Inc., owned by radio station owner George Beasley alongside the Beasley Broadcast Group; and Friendship Broadcasting of Elizabeth City. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave the nod to Group H in 1984.

The station first signed on the air on April 11, 1988, as WYED on UHF analog channel 17. It operated as a small station that primarily carried programming from the Home Shopping Network (HSN), along with some religious and hunting/fishing shows that aired on weekends. Three months after going on air, WYED was sold to Beasley, becoming the large national radio chain's first—and only—television property (George Beasley had started his company with the 1961 sign-on of WPYB (1130 AM) in nearby Benson). Channel 17's original studios were located at 622 South Barbour Street in Clayton, with a 1,550-foot (470 m) transmitter tower located nearby, broadcasting with 2.6 million watts of power. The station had limited cable carriage, mainly on smaller providers in the eastern part of the state. Another source of programming for channel 17 was the short-lived Star Television Network, for which it signed on as an affiliate.

WYED was almost sold two years after it started to Elvin Feltner's Krypton Corporation; Feltner proposed a movie-heavy schedule for channel 17. However, a problem developed in another pending Krypton acquisition, of television station WTVX serving West Palm Beach, Florida, which delayed any filing of the license transfer with the FCC. Beasley retained the station, which dropped home shopping in 1991—when HSN cut its payments to affiliated stations—to air movies, older syndicated shows, and Baltimore Orioles games. The station's longstanding issue of cable carriage was resolved in 1992 when changes to federal regulations prompted Cablevision to put WYED on its basic lineup in Raleigh and Durham. (It did not appear on cable in Fayetteville until February 1995.)

For the next two years, WYED continued with a slightly better schedule than it had. In addition, the station dabbled in local sports with the production of several high school football telecasts as well as a local children's show, Kam and Kids, whose producers would be sued by channel 17 for failure to pay for air time.

Beasley sold WYED in 1994 to Outlet Communications of Providence, Rhode Island, for $5.4 million. Outlet made major changes in programming, affiliated channel 17 with the new WB network, and changed the call letters to WNCN at the start of 1995. The call sign was permanent, but the affiliation was temporary: in November 1994, the station was announced as the new NBC affiliate for the Triangle beginning in the fall of 1995.

Outlet had good relations with NBC. Its other two stations, WJAR in Providence and WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, were affiliated with NBC, which was looking for an upgrade in the market. NBC had a long history of misery in the Triangle: it had been affiliated since 1971 with WRDC (channel 28), a perennial also-ran in local television that ceased producing local newscasts in 1991; prior to then, NBC had aired on WTVD (channel 11) in the 1960s, with some shows moving to channel 28 when it began broadcasting in 1968. WRDC picked up the UPN affiliation at launch and displaced two nights of NBC programming to air UPN fare; those two nights turned up on WNCN. As construction began to turn the former WLFL studios on Front Street into a new facility for channel 17 and on improvements to yield an increase in transmitter power, and the assembly of a news department began, so too would the ownership change: Outlet accepted a $396 million offer from NBC in August 1995.