WFAA - News Operation

News Operation

WFAA broadcasts a total of 34 hours of local news a week (5½ hours on weekdays, three hours on Saturdays and 3½ hours on Sundays). WFAA also operates a news helicopter called HD Chopper 8 (formerly known as Telecopter 8), which still has the 1984-1996 dual-outlined "8" logo on the underside of the helicopter and reads: N8TV.

Since 1986, WFAA's news organization has won six Peabody Awards, with a seventh awarded personally to H. Martin "Marty" Haag, who was WFAA's executive news director from 1973 to 1989 and a Belo Corporation executive after that. WFAA's Peabody Awards were for:

• 1986: The SMU Mustangs were given the NCAA's "death penalty" because of the Southern Methodist University football scandal.
• 1995: The Peavy Investigation was a "revealing series of reports into insurance purchases involving the Dallas Independent School District... centered on the chairman of the Board of Education's Committee on Insurance."
• 2002: Fake Drugs, Real Lives was recognized for an investigative series which "revealed that confidential informants working with Dallas police planted powdered Sheetrock or billiard chalk near unsuspecting Mexican immigrants to contrive drug cases."
• 2004: State of Denial was a long-running series into improprieties in the Texas Workers Compensation Commission, part of the Texas Department of Insurance.
• 2007: Money for Nothing, "The Buried and the Dead", "Television Justice", "Kinder Prison", awarded for four separate investigative stories revealing that a major U.S. financial institution is making loans to non-existent companies in Mexico, that regional law-enforcement officers had collaborated with news crews to produce a prime-time TV program, that conditions in a prison housing children were deplorable, and that pipelines carrying gas into homes are unsafe.
• 2010: "Bitter Lessons," an investigation into government-funded career schools.

In 2009, WFAA received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award's Gold Baton for its "continuing commitment to outstanding investigative reporting", the first local station to win that recognition in the 20-year history of the award; reporters Byron Harris and Brett Shipp were recognized for: three exemplary investigative reports about corruption and waste at the Export-Import Bank of the United States, grade changing for failing high school athletes, and the danger posed by aging gas pipeline couplings. Among the Dallas Independent School District high schools exposed by their investigations were South Oak Cliff High School and Roosevelt High School.

Also recognized were Mark Smith (producer), Kraig Kirchem (editor and photographer), and Michael Valentine, executive news director. The pipeline-couplings investigation was featured in the PBS documentary series, Exposé: America's Investigative Reports, in an episode entitled "Beneath the North Texas Dirt."

WFAA started producing newscasts and other local programming in high definition on February 2, 2007. WFAA is one of the few television stations not using the First Warning broadcast weather alert system, instead when severe weather alerts are in effect for viewing area, the warning type and the counties the alert is in effect for are displayed in text form at the top of the screen.