News Operation
XETV presently broadcasts a total of 30 hours of local newscasts each week (with five hours on weekdays and 2½ hours on weekends). Out of the six English-language television stations in the San Diego-Tijuana market with news departments, XETV is the only one that does not produce local newscasts that air in midday or early evening timeslots.
XETV had previously carried a local newscast from the station's launch in 1953 until 1967 (Lionel Van Deerlin, later a San Diego congressman, was a news director in XETV's early years). As an independent station, XETV then ran local newsbriefs throughout the day until the station affiliated with Fox in 1986. The station established its current news department on December 27, 1999, starting out with a 35-minute local news program at 10 p.m. (which later expanded to one hour in 2002), subsequently followed by the debut of its weekday morning newscast (initially three hours in length) and a now-defunct noon newscast in September 2000.
On September 5, 2006, XETV's news team gained national attention, when investigative reporter John Mattes was badly beaten by Sam Suleiman and Rosa Barraza, a husband-and-wife team accused of a real estate scam who were being investigated by the reporter. The incident was captured on tape and shown on many news programs throughout the nation. On January 20, 2007, XETV debuted a two-hour weekend morning newscast (the program originally aired at 7 a.m., but was moved to 8 a.m. after the CW affiliation switch); the station is one of only four CW affiliates with a local newscast on weekend mornings.
XETV became the only CW affiliate with an evening newscast in the traditional late news timeslot (11 p.m. Pacific time on the California side of the market) when it debuted the 11-minute long weeknight program 11@11 following the affiliation switch; this program was discontinued on January 14, 2013 in favor of expanding the 10 p.m. back to one hour on weeknights. The following year in 2009, the 10 p.m. newscast was pared back from one hour to 33 minutes then reduced to a half-hour (the length of the 11 p.m. newscast and the reduction of the 10 p.m. program resulted in an odd-numbered amount of news programming hours, making XETV the largest news-producing minor network station serving the United States whose evening newscast did not run for 30, 35 or 60 minutes, as well as having the only half-hour San Diego-targeted television newscast at 10 p.m., due to KUSI and KSWB having hour-long newscasts).
On March 9, 2009, XETV shut down its sports department, and sports anchors C.S. Keys (who returned to XETV as a weather and traffic anchor in October 2011) and Andrea Nakano and sports producer Mike Lamar were fired by then-vice president and general manager Richard Doutre Jones (who left the station in June 2010 and was replaced by veteran sales manager Chuck Dunning). On April 23, 2011, XETV became the sixth television station in the San Diego market to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition.
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—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)