twotrey

This spot kind of explains why KCAL is now the unified news brand, with Pat Harvey bringing up Jerry Dunphy with two vintage Prime 9 News opening clips (the first with Dunphy and long-forgotten 10pm anchor Kate Sullivan; the second with her successor, Tawny Little). It's telling that they're evoking Dunphy's KCAL history as opposed to KNXT; it goes to show how *long* ago the CBS affiliate's news heyday was, while KCAL has been fairly consistent in reputation/perception over the last 30+ years, even with the ownership changes since then.

It may be its first attempt one of these multi-hour morning shows, but KCAL did have a half-hour 6am weekday morning newscast that ran for about a year or so during the Disney era, whose March 1990 premiere was on the same day as launch of the flagship 8-11pm Prime 9 News block. The morning newscast, anchored by Paula Lopez and Jim Murphy (the latter later replaced when Kerry Kilbride arrived) was titled "First 9 News." If that name sounds familiar, KCAL used it again a couple of years after the 6am show was dropped, but this time for their half-hour 6:30pm local newscast alternative (anchored by the Dunphy + Harvey duo) to the national network shows. It was also short-lived, morphing into an hour-long 7pm show retitled "9 News Live at 7," anchored by Harvey + David Jackson, which also didn't last very long. Re: the intro clip, I noticed beginning on Monday's 8pm show on KCAL, the main anchors have been regularly been throwing it to the assignment editor in the newsroom, which I'm not sure I quite like, but we'll see how this new wrinkle/angle evolves.