WGN Morning News
| WGN Morning News | |
|---|---|
| Opening theme | "Chicago's Very Own" by 615 Music |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Aline Cox |
| Location(s) | WGN-TV Studios, 2501 W. Bradley Place, Chicago, Illinois |
| Camera setup | Videotape; Multi-camera |
| Running time | 360 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | WGN-TV |
| Picture format |
480i (SDTV) 1080i (HDTV) |
| Original release | September 6, 1994 – present |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by |
WGN Saturday Morning News (1992–1998) WGN Sunday Morning News (1992–1994) |
| Followed by | WGN Weekend Morning News (2011–present) |
| External links | |
| Website | |
The WGN Morning News is an American morning television news program airing on WGN-TV (channel 9), a independent television station and national superstation in Chicago, Illinois that serves as the flagship station of the Tribune Broadcasting division of the Tribune Company. The program broadcasts each weekday morning from 4:00 to 10:00 a.m and each weekend morning from 7:00am to 9:00am Central Time.
The program is formatted as a newscast with a somewhat less serious tone than WGN-TV's other local news programs and is known for its fun and rambunctious nature, with the anchors and reporters often shown more relaxed on-air, often pulling on-air pranks and practical jokes. The 4:00-6:00 a.m. portion of the newscast is more staid in tone to some extent and is a more generalized news/weather/sports/traffic format, while the 6:00-10:00 a.m. portion incorporates feature segments, interviews and includes some humorous elements.
Since September 4th hour-long weekend editions of the program have been aired on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 6:00-7:00 a.m., which is formatted more similarly to the station's midday and evening newscasts with a general news/weather/sports format. Since September 4th Unlike WGN-TV's other newscasts, the weekend morning newscasts did not use a two-anchor format; On the weekend of September 10-11, WGN added an expansion to the weekend morning newscasts. Firstly by adding a two anchor format as WGN reporter Tonya Francisco joined Sean Lewis to head the weekend mornings, Mike Hammernik has stayed with the newscast as weather presenter, Secondly the scheduling of WGN's Weekend Morning News has moved from 6:00am-7:00am and has expanded from 7:00am-9:00am making the broadcast match with programs like the weekday versions of the midday and evening news. Coming in the fall of 2017, Steve Sanders and Sean Lewis will swap roles between WGN's Weekend Morning News and WGN's Midday News.
Prior to the program's launch, WGN-TV had already carried morning newscasts; the station ran five-minute newsbriefs following its morning movie showcases on weekdays from the 1970s through the early 1990s. WGN would later debut full-fledged, 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 (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 the 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, revamping it as The Bozo Super Sunday Show on September 11 of that year. In its place, the station decided to launch a new weekday morning newscast; the WGN Morning News made its debut on September 6, 1994 (debuting on a Tuesday due to the occurrence of Labor Day one day earlier) as an hour-long newscast from 7-8 a.m.; it was originally anchored by Dave Eckert, Sonja Gantt and meteorologist Paul Huttner. Concurrent with the move of Bozo to Sundays, the Sunday morning newscast was cancelled.
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