airs weekday mornings at 9:00 a.m., and the half-hour sports highlight and discussion program The Zone, which airs on Sunday nights following the 10:00 p.m. newscast; since September 2015, a daily extension of the latter program has also aired on Monday through Thursday nights on WTTO/WDBB. News department history After the announcement that W58CK would become Birmingham's ABC affiliate, then-owner Allbritton Communications agreed to invest in an in-house news department for the station. It moved the operations of W58CK, WCFT-TV and WJSU-TV into a new studio facility at the Riverchase complex near Hoover, a digital-capable building that was equipped with more than $2 million of Philips digital equipment for newsgathering and signal transmission. W58CK's newly created news department effectively took over newscast production for WCFT and WJSU; the latter two stations concurrently discontinued their in-house newscasts (which had focused their news coverage on their respective cities of license, and surrounding areas near Tuscaloosa and Anniston) and shut down their separate news departments on August 31, 1996. Incidentally, one main reason that ABC approached WCFT and WJSU to become its new central Alabama affiliate was that both were the only remaining stations in the market with functioning news departments. W58CK began airing regular long-form newscasts once it became an ABC affiliate the following day on September 1, beginning with that evening's 5:00 p.m. newscast; the station's newscasts were originally branded as The (airtime) News on Alabama's ABC 33/40, before eventually being shortened to the unified ABC 33/40 News in 2001. At that time, the station launched a full slate of local news programming – airing newscasts at 5:30 a.m., noon, 5:00, 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. on Monday through Fridays (the late newscast being then titled The Night Team on Alabama's ABC 33/40), along with weekend evening newscasts. WCFT and WJSU began simulcasting its newscasts on that date, following their conversion into satellite stations of channel 58 as part of the "ABC 33/40" trimulcast operation. W58CK maintained certain primary personnel from WCFT and WJSU's news staffs that Allbritton had transferred from those stations to the new combined operation, including respected veteran WCFT anchor Dave Baird. (Baird served as co-anchor of the weeknight newscasts from the new station's debut, until his retirement in 2017.) In addition, the station hired many well-known Birmingham television personalities to work as part of its news staff in the run-up to the department's launch; among them were news