WGN Morning News - History

History

Prior to the program's launch, WGN-TV had already carried morning newscasts; the station had debuted hour-long newscasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 8 a.m. in early 1992, this was unusual considering the weekday morning newscast would not debut for another two years and the fact that television stations typically do not carry local news programming on weekend mornings without a weekday morning program already in place. At the time the weekend morning programs debuted, the station ran long-running Chicago television staple The Bozo Show on weekday mornings. By 1994, WGN station management decided to get out of the weekday children's television business and moved The Bozo Show to Sunday mornings as The Bozo Super Sunday Show on September 11 of that year. In its place, the station would launch a new weekday morning newscast, the WGN Morning News made its debut on September 6, 1994 as an hour-long newscast from 7-8 a.m.; it was originally anchored by Dave Eckert, Sonja Gantt and meteorologist Paul Huttner. Around the same time, the Sunday morning newscast was cancelled.

Within a year-and-a-half of its debut, the WGN Morning News was gradually expanded in length: first to two hours (retaining its 7 a.m. start time) in January 1996, and then an additional hour at 6 a.m. was added eight months later in August of that same year. While the weekday morning newscast gained an audience, WGN-TV's lone weekend morning newscast on Saturday mornings was cancelled in 1998. In January 2001, the weekday newscast expanded to 3½ hours, adding a half-hour at 5:30 a.m. and in January 2004, was expanded to four hours starting at 5 a.m. On August 16, 2010, WGN-TV added an additional half-hour to the newscast, which expanded to 4:30-9 a.m.; with the expansion into the 4:30 timeslot, WGN-TV became the third Chicago station to begin its morning newscast at that time, along with NBC-owned WMAQ-TV (which debuted in its current form in 2009), and ABC-owned WLS-TV (which debuted a newscast in that timeslot two weeks earlier).

On October 2 of that year, WGN-TV re-entered into weekend morning news, with the launch of two one-hour newscasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 6-7 a.m. (the Saturday newscast airs in the early time slot for one hour due to The CW's morning animation block). Unlike WGN-TV's other newscasts, the weekend morning newscasts do not use a two-anchor format; it is currently solo anchored by Sean Lewis. The addition made WGN-TV the second Tribune-owned station to carry a weekend morning newscast (Fox affiliate WXIN/Indianapolis debuted weekend morning newscasts in August 2010; Fox affiliate WTIC-TV/Hartford and fellow CW affiliate KTLA/Los Angeles would later join them in January and April 2011, respectively).

On July 11, 2011, the weekday edition of the WGN Morning News expanded once more with the addition of a half-hour at 4 a.m., bringing the program to a five-hour time length. This made it the first station in the Chicago market and the third Tribune station (after WPIX/New York City and WXIN) to have its weekday morning newscast start at 4 a.m. In March 2013, reports surfaced that WGN station management was considering expanding the weekday edition of the WGN Morning News to six hours – with an additional hour of the newscast being added from 9 to 10 a.m., once Live! with Kelly and Michael (which had aired locally on WGN-TV since September 2002) moves to WLS-TV in September.