specifically for those areas of the state. After it exclusively aligned with NBC, channel 13 chose to fill the now-vacated 10:00 p.m. hour with off-network syndicated reruns to serve as a lead-in to its late newscast, which itself would move to 10:00 in 1977; however, the station continued to delay The Tonight Show by one hour in favor of running syndicated programming until September 1993, when it moved the program to its network-standard 10:35 slot. News operation WVTM-TV presently broadcasts 44½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with seven hours each weekday, four hours on Saturdays and 5½ hours on Sundays). News department history Channel 13 launched the first full-scale television news department in Alabama in 1951. For most of the last half of the 20th century, channel 13's newscasts were a solid, if usually distant, runner-up to long-dominant WBRC. This remained the case even during the second half of the 1980s, despite having the benefit of NBC's powerful prime time programming lineup of that period (which included such series as Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show and The A-Team) as a lead-in to its 10:00 p.m. newscast. However, after WBMA-LP replaced WBRC as the market's ABC affiliate in September 1996, WVTM had to fend off a spirited challenge from the upstart station (to which it lost two of its well-known anchors, Pam Huff and Tracy Haynes, who were later hired to anchor that station's morning newscasts). Since the start of the new millennium, it has also had to contend with a resurgent WIAT, whose news ratings prior to the February 1998 relaunch of its news department had generally languished at a very distant fourth place for much of its history up to that point. Indeed, since 2006, WIAT has consistently beaten WVTM in the late news ratings. In contrast to WIAT's renewed performance under Media General ownership, ratings averages for WVTM's newscasts slipped to fourth place among the market's five major television news operations (ahead of WVUA-CD (channel 7) and behind WBMA-LD and WIAT) during the company's ownership of channel 13, where it remains to this day. In 2004, WVTM began utilizing a Doppler weather radar system originally branded as "Skywatch Doppler One Million" (which was later renamed "WeatherPlus Doppler One Million" and later named "Alabama's 13 Live Doppler" which is located on Bald Rock Mountain in St. Clair County; the radar provided live Doppler radar data from