news programming scored less than a 1% ratings share, with its 10:00 p.m. newscast scoring lower ratings than reruns of Sanford and Son on WABM. A few months after Media General took over the station following its merger with Park Communications, newly appointed general manager Eric Land decided to completely reboot the news department. On December 12, 1997, Land announced to station employees that the bulk of channel 42's news staff, totaling 21 employees (eight anchors and thirteen other on-air and production staff members, including all of the station's on-air reporters and several producers and editors), would be laid off. The late newscast on December 31 would be its last newscast as WBMG. On January 1, 1998, Land temporarily suspended the news department, cancelling the station's morning and evening newscasts. All of the remaining members of channel 42's news staff were fired, with the exception of weekend sports anchor Sam Smith. Over the next month, channel 42 rebuilt its news department from scratch with input from focus groups and market research. During that time, the station began filling the 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. time slots respectively with religious and syndicated programming; meanwhile, it also showed a much-talked-about slide of a computer-animated digital countdown clock during the 5:00 and 10:00 p.m. half-hours, where newscasts would air once the department was relaunched. During this time, the station sent coverage of the January 29 bombing of the New Woman All Women Clinic in Birmingham's Southside neighborhood by Eric Rudolph to CBS Newspath, CNN, and stations in neighboring markets, even though it did not have a formal news department at the time. The new format debuted on February 5, 1998 – coinciding with CBS's broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics – under the title 42 Daily News. Land had overseen less drastic relaunches during earlier stints at WEYI-TV in Saginaw, Michigan and WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, New York. However, in an interview with the American Journalism Review, Land later said that the decision to overhaul the news department in such a dramatic manner was because, even with its Associated Press award wins earlier in the decade, the station's research "found that our people were so closely identified with a poorly performing product that we had to create a new brand and start over again." Television news analyst Don Fitzpatrick called the drastic changes an "extremely rare [...] act of desperation". The