that hour; however, it filled the 9:30 p.m. half-hour with syndicated programs (originally reruns of Seinfeld, then from 1997 afterward, Jeopardy!) as a tentpole between the 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts from the September 1996 switch until September 2002, when it expanded the prime time newscast to one hour (WBRC is one of several Fox stations that offer newscasts in both the final hour of prime time and the traditional late news timeslot, one of the few affiliated with the network that runs a nightly newscast in the latter slot and one of the few to continue its Big Three-era late-evening newscast after switching to Fox). In addition to compensating for the absence of daily national morning and evening newscasts on Fox's schedule, the expansion of WBRC's news lineup also filled timeslots vacated by the departures of Good Morning America and World News Tonight through the discontinuance of its ABC affiliation. WBRC also lost several longtime anchors and reporters to the W58CK/WCFT/WJSU trimulcast at that time, including news anchors Linda Mays and Brenda Ladun, meteorologists James Spann (who himself reportedly left WBRC due to his disapproval over the edgier content of Fox's programming) and Mark Prater, and sports anchor Mike Raita. In 2009, WBRC became a founding member station of the Raycom News Network, a service created to allow the sharing of news resources among the four Raycom-owned television stations that serve Alabama – including NBC affiliate WSFA in Montgomery, NBC affiliate WAFF in Huntsville and ABC affiliate WTVM in Columbus, Georgia (the latter of which includes a portion of eastern Alabama in its service area) – which combined, cover almost half of Alabama's population. The service allows the stations to pool story content seen on the stations' newscasts and websites, as well as share information and newsgathering equipment (such as satellite trucks). The four stations also comprise the Raycom Weather Network and the Raycom Alabama Weather Blog, where meteorologists from all four stations post forecasts and storm reports, and which provide live feeds from cameras and Doppler weather radar systems that each of the stations operate (the only Raycom-owned station in Alabama that did not participate in the arrangement was fellow Fox affiliate WDFX-TV in Dothan, whose news programming was produced by WSFA under a news share agreement and is no longer a sister station to those other stations). On July 14, 2009, the station eliminated its Saturday evening