The WGN Morning News is an American morning television news program airing on WGN-TV (channel 9), an independent television station and national superstation in Chicago, Illinois owned by Nexstar Media Group. The program broadcasts every day from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. 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 August 2014, hour-long weekend editions of the program have been aired on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m., which is formatted more similarly to the station's midday and evening newscasts with a general news/weather/sports format. unlike WGN-TV's other newscasts, the weekend morning newscasts did not use a two-anchor format; on the weekend of September 10–11, 2016, 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 stayed with the newscast as weather presenter. Secondly, the scheduling of WGN's Weekend Morning News has moved from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. and has expanded from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. Saturdays and 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. Sundays, making the broadcast match with programs like the weekday versions of the midday and evening news.
History
Prior to the program's launch, WGN-TV had already carried morning newscasts; the station ran five-minute news briefs following its morning movie showcases on weekdays from the 1970s through the early 1990s. An attempt was made at a full-fledged morning newscast in May 1984, titled Chicago's First Report; replacing the agriculture-focused Top 'o' the Morning, First Report was canceled by December of that year thanks to low viewership. WGN would later debut full-fledged, hour-long newscasts on Saturdays and Sundays 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.
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; an additional hour at 6 a.m. was added eight months later in August 1996. That year, Larry Potash (who remains on the newscast to this day as anchor of the 6:00-10:00 a.m. block) replaced Eckert as co-anchor of the program. While the weekday morning newscast gained an audience, WGN-TV's lone weekend morning newscast on Saturday mornings was cancelled in December 1998, leaving only the flagship 9 p.m. newscast as WGN's only news program on weekends (outside of public affairs programs People to People, Adelante, Chicago and the since-discontinued Minority Business Report) for the next twelve years. In January 2001, the weekday newscast was expanded to 3½ hours, adding a half-hour at 5:30 a.m. and in January 2004, it was expanded to four hours starting at 5 a.m.