KOCO-TV - News Operation

News Operation

KOCO-TV presently broadcasts a total of 29 hours of locally-produced newscasts each week (with four hours on weekdays and 4½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). The station's Doppler weather radars are presented on-air as "Advantage Doppler HD" and "Advantage Doppler 3D", operating at the main studios in Oklahoma City with the latter utilizing live VIPIR data from several radars operated by regional National Weather Service forecast offices. KOCO also provides news content to Community Newspaper Holdings publications The Norman Transcript and the Enid News & Eagle. KOCO also provides local weather updates for the Enid News and Eagle as well as six area radio stations owned by Cumulus Media: KATT-FM, KWPN, KQOB-FM, WWLS-FM, KKWD and KYIS-FM.

As is the case with competitor KOKH, one of KOCO's weaknesses has been the turnover rate of the station's anchors and reporters, leading to the unfamiliarity that some of its on-air personalities have in the market (the longest-serving member of the station's on-air news staff presently is evening anchor Jessica Schambach, who joined the station as a reporter in 2002). KOCO has made a bigger commitment to news and weather coverage in recent years, with these efforts helping propel the station's 5 p.m. newscast to first place in the ratings in 2004, followed by its first-ever outright win at 6 p.m. in November 2006.

In 1992, KOCO debuted a morning newscast from 8-9 a.m. on Saturdays; that program was later dropped, but returned in 1996 as a two-hour program starting at 10 a.m. That same year, its weekday morning newscast expanded from one hour to a 90 minute broadcast from 5:30-7 a.m., before eventually expanding to two hours in 1999; the midday newscast at noon also expanded to one hour, before reverting to a half-hour program during the run of the ABC soap opera Port Charles from 1997 to 2003. During its waning years as a Gannett-owned station in the mid-1990s, KOCO had its own investigative unit (under the "I-Team" name that is also used for investigative reporting teams on other Gannett stations such as KSDK/St. Louis). From 1998 to 1999, the station's weather staff provided hourly weather updates during regular programming near the start of each hour, similar to the hourly news updates that KFOR-TV had been airing around that same timeframe.

The station expanded its weekend morning newscasts in February 2006, with the addition of a two-hour newscast from 7-9 a.m. on Sundays. That same year, the station expanded 10 p.m. newscast on Sundays from 35 minutes to one hour, absorbing the station's sports wrap-up segment Sunday Sports Xtra, which was reduced 15 minutes at the tail end of the program. The week of January 2, 2008 saw changes to the scheduling of its news programming: the noon newscast was cancelled, replaced with a 30-second weather update before ABC Daytime programming in that timeslot (this resulted in none of Oklahoma's ABC affiliates having news programs during midday timeslots, as KTUL/Tulsa and KSWO-TV/Lawton also do not produce one). The 5 p.m. newscast was also extended to Saturday evenings, while the Saturday and Sunday morning newscasts were moved to an earlier, uniform timeslot from 5 to 7 a.m. In October 2009, KOCO upgraded its severe weather, school closings and news tickers to be overlaid on high definition programming without having to downconvert HD programming to standard definition.

Newscasts on the station were broadcast with pillarboxing from October 2009 to October 11, 2010, when the station began broadcasting local newscasts in widescreen standard definition. Some cameras used for newsgathering by KOCO do not shoot in native widescreen, so certain news footage has to be upconverted to widescreen from the 4:3 picture format in the control room for broadcast. On July 31, 2010, the station's weekend morning newscasts expanded with an hour-long extension debuting from 8-9 a.m. This was followed on September 22, with the expansion of the weekday morning newscast to 4:30 a.m., making KOCO Oklahoma's first television station to extend its morning newscasts before 5 a.m. Sports sports segments on the station used the Sports Xtra umbrella title until February 2012, this brand (originally used as Sports Extra) had dated back to its Gannett ownership when the station debuted its Sunday night sports wrap-up show under that name as a Gannett station in the early 1990s; from that timeframe to 2004, KOCO produced Prep Sports Extra as a 15-minute wrap-up show on Friday nights during the high school football season.