Eyewitness News

Eyewitness News is a name used by local television newscasts, widely used in different markets across the United States. It is also the name of a very popular music package offered by Gari Communications.

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Origins
The earliest known use of the Eyewitness News name in American television was in April 1959 when KYW-TV (now WKYC-TV) in Cleveland, owned at the time by Westinghouse Broadcasting, launched the nation's first 90-minute local newscast (under the title Eyewitness), combined with the then 15-minute national newscast. ([1]) The name was then adopted for use by Westinghouse's other television stations—KPIX in San Francisco, WJZ-TV in Baltimore, WBZ-TV in Boston and KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh—for its local newscasts.

After KYW-TV moved to Philadelphia in 1965 (the result of a government-ordered reversal of the 1956 Westinghouse/NBC station swap) its then-news director, Al Primo, created the Eyewitness News format. In this format, which was meant to be faster in pace than the standard format (in which an anchor simply read headlines), a reporter (and cameraman) in the field would be the "eyewitness" to a news event to the anchor in the studio and the viewer at home. Primo used the cue 007 from the 1963 film From Russia with Love as the musical theme. The format quickly became a hit in Philadelphia and allowed KYW-TV to surge past longtime leader WCAU-TV for first place, a position it kept on and off until the late 1970s. KYW-TV's success spawned rival station WFIL-TV (now WPVI-TV) to develop the Action News format to compete with it. (After NBC was ordered back to Cleveland in 1965, the Eyewitness News name left that city until WEWS adopted it for its newscasts in the 1970s.)

KYW-TV used the name and format until 1991 and readopted it in 1998. All five major stations owned by Westinghouse prior to its 1996 acquisition of CBS have used Eyewitness News as their newscast titles at some point in time; KYW-TV, KPIX, and WJZ-TV continue to do so.

Expansion
In 1968, Primo moved to WABC-TV in New York City and took the Eyewitness News concept there with him, choosing music from the 1967 Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke—the "Tar Sequence" cue (composed by Lalo Schifrin)—as the theme. However, he added a new twist at WABC-TV—chatter among the anchors, which came to be known as "happy talk". WABC-TV has kept the name and format since then, and has been the highest-rated station in New York for much of that time.

The format, as tweaked by WABC-TV, was copied by many other stations in the United States, with four other stations owned and operated by ABC—KABC-TV in Los Angeles, WLS-TV in Chicago, WXYZ-TV in Detroit and KGO-TV in San Francisco—using both the format and the Cool Hand Luke theme. (In the case of KGO, since KPIX was already using the Eyewitness News name, KGO named its newscast Channel 7 NewsScene in 1969 and by 1983 simply Channel 7 News, while WXYZ used the Action News name since rival WJBK-TV called its newscasts Eyewitness News; KABC and WLS were free to use the Eyewitness News name as did WABC). Ironically, WPVI, which developed the Action News format, is also now an ABC owned-and-operated station.

In addition, U.S. Spanish-language stations also use their own version of Eyewitness News, called Noticias de Primera Plana (Headline News, a concept translation in Spanish of Eyewitness News) on its owned-and-operated stations.

A separate, but mostly unrelated, Eyewitness News format was developed by Irv Weinstein in Buffalo, New York for WKBW-TV. This format was mostly based not on the original Eyewitness News (though it used the same logo) but rather on the Action News format of its sister stations in the Capital Cities Communications stable. While based on Action News's brief and numerous reports, Weinstein built his Eyewitness News newscast around attention-grabbing catch phrases and alliterative headlines, along with occasional wisecracking or sarcastic one-liners about the day's news stories.

This version of Eyewitness News was used on WKBW as well as other CapCities stations where the Action News name was in use by another station, such as WTVD in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was also used on a few stations not owned by Capital Cities, including WOKR in Rochester, New York.

Outside of the United States
In Mexico and other Hispanic American countries during the 1970s and 1980s, some local newscasts also used the Eyewitness News format, under the names Noticias de Primera Plana (Headline News) and Noticias de Acción (Action News).

The title was used in Canada, on CTV affiliate CFRN-TV in Edmonton.

In Brazil, the format was used by Rede Globo's key stations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo for their local newscasts, with the name of Praça TV (City TV (News)), which is also the network's local newscast branding. It's also the newscast brand for Globo's affiliate networks. From 1983, this newscast airs twice a day in Rede Globo and its affiliates from Mondays to Saturdays.

In Japan, TV Tokyo branded its newscasts as Eyewitness News, but abbreviated as EyeNews.

In Australia, BTQ-7 Brisbane adopted the Eyewitness News branding in the early 1970s. The branding was also employed by NWS-9 Adelaide for its evening newscast. TEN-10 Sydney and ATV-0 Melbourne, the principal stations in the Ten Network, adopted the Eyewitness News branding in the mid-1970s and it was later adopted by other stations in the Network Ten group as BTQ-7 and NWS-9 later relinquished the brand. Regional affiliates for the Ten Network, including CTC-7 in Canberra (Ten Capital Eyewitness News), Southern Cross Network in Victoria, and QTV in Townsville, also used the Eyewitness News name. The Australian version of Eyewitness News more closely resembled Weinstein's version than the original format. The Ten Network dropped the use of the Eyewitness News name in September 1988 but later re-instated it in July 1989 for six months, and then again in January 1991 for four years.

In South Africa Eyewitness News in used by Talk Radio 702 in Gauteng, Cape Talk in Cape Town as well as Eyewitness News

Stations that use or have used the Eyewitness News format or name
1Indicates station was originally owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting and now is owned-and-operated by CBS 2Indicates station is owned-and-operated by ABC

Music package
Eyewitness News is also the name of a syndicated news music package, composed by Frank Gari of Gari Communications.

Since 1968, ABC's large market owned-and-operated stations had used the "Cool Hand Luke" theme on their newscasts. In 1983, they started using News Series 2000, an updated version of the original Schifrin theme, composed by Frank Gari, that had been originally commissioned by WLS-TV in Chicago.

However, in 1993, Schifrin raised his royalties for using Cool Hand Luke and its variations to a level that effectively priced the theme out of the local news market. As a result, Gari was commissioned by WABC-TV in New York to compose a new music package called Eyewitness News. This new package, based slightly on Cool Hand Luke, has been updated several times. WABC-TV currently uses the Series 4 version, which was specifically updated for the station in 1999.

Besides being used in America, the Eyewitness News music package has also been picked up for use overseas. Hong Kong Cable News has been using it for its morning newscast, and POP TV in Slovenia has been using it for its main newscasts. It is also used by Nine Network and its affiliates for their newscasts in Australia. Its rival network, Network Ten, used Move Closer to Your World as theme music for their Eyewitness News newscasts on all of its stations except for its Brisbane station from 1976 to 1988 (Network Ten did not reach Perth until 1988), a record twelve years before the theme music was changed to reflect the full reach of the network across Australia's five major cities.

A station using the Eyewitness News music package might not necessarily use the Eyewitness News title for its newscasts, and vice versa. For example, WXYZ-TV in Detroit uses the music package, but uses the Action News format and branding, and in 2006 KGO-TV started using the Eyewitness News package but brands its newscasts as 'ABC 7 News HD'.

In 2005, Gari Communications renamed the Eyewitness News-New Generation news package to the ABC O&O News Collection, as the packages are now only commissable by ABC owned-and-operated stations and affiliates.[dubious – discuss] Despite this, many still refer to the package as Eyewitness News. In Buffalo, New York, Move Closer to Your World is known as the Eyewitness News theme. It was used on WKBW-TV from 1972 to 2003, and from 2008 onward.