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The ''WGN Morning News'' is an American morning television news program airing on WGN-TV (channel 9), a CW-affiliated 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. 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. Hour-long weekend editions of the program also air 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. 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. ==History== 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 ).〔(Fall Void Means It's Shuffle Time At Channel 2 ), ''Chicago Tribune'', August 28, 1994.〕 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,〔〔(A day of rest; WGN-TV cancels Saturday morning news show ), ''Broadcasting & Cable'', December 21, 1998. Retrieved June 22, 2013 from HighBeam Research.〕 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. On August 16, 2010, WGN-TV added an additional half-hour to the newscast, which expanded to 4:30-9 a.m.;〔http://corporate.tribune.com/pressroom/?p=1992〕 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 the current incarnation of its 4:30 a.m. show in 2009, although it had an earlier newscast at that time as ''Barely Today'' in 2007), 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). The addition made WGN-TV the second Tribune-owned station to carry a weekend morning newscast (though the first chronologically due to its earlier weekend morning shows in the 1990s; 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.〔(Attention Early Birds! WGN Morning News Starts at 4:00AM Beginning July 11 ), WGNTV.com, June 16, 2011.〕 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) moved to WLS-TV in September.〔(WGN may give morning news crew another hour to play ), ''Time Out Chicago'', March 12, 2013.〕 The news of this expansion was confirmed on June 20, 2013 through a report by media columnist and former ''Chicago Sun Times'' reporter Robert Feder on his Facebook page.〔(ABC 7 Replacing 11:00 a.m. News with ''Windy City LIVE'' ) ''Facebook'', June 20, 2013.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WGN Morning News」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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