a news helicopter and pool video footage between the two stations. On May 10, 2009, WFLD became the last news-producing English-language station in the market to begin broadcasting its newscasts in high definition; however, remote field footage continues to be broadcast in 16:9 widescreen standard definition. On July 5, 2016, WFLD launched an hour-long, weekday-only newscast at 5 p.m, becoming the fifteenth Fox-owned station and the fifth television station in Chicago to air a late-afternoon newscast; the program competes against with half-hour early evening news programs on established competitors WBBM-TV, WMAQ-TV and WLS-TV and the second hour of WGN-TV's Evening News block. On March 30, 2017, WFLD announced that it would expand the length of Good Day Chicago to six hours, with the addition of a half-hour to the start of the program at 4 a.m.; ironically, when the expansion took place on April 10, WFLD became the third station in Chicago to expand its morning newscast into that time period (following WGN-TV, which began its expansion into the 4 a.m. hour in July 2011 and WMAQ-TV, which launched a 4:00 a.m. newscast in August 2015). Ratings Historically, WFLD has been one of Fox's weakest owned-and-operated stations, particularly in regards to its newscasts. In recent Nielsen ratings sweeps periods, WFLD has been mired in last place among the late evening (9 or 10 p.m.) newscasts seen on the market's five English-language news-producing stations. As such, Chicago, prior to WGN's disaffiliation from that network in September 2016, was one of the few markets in the country where the Fox station actually trailed that market's CW-affiliated station (WGN-TV) in the local viewership ratings, from sign-on to sign-off. This is primarily due to WGN-TV's strong news department, local sports programming, and higher-rated syndicated programming, even though WFLD has a much stronger network lead-in. In the February 2011 sweeps period, WFLD's 9 p.m. newscast slid to a 2.3 rating share, down more than a full point from a 3.4 during the February 2010 sweeps period. This is despite the pairing of co-anchor team Bob Sirott and Robin Robinson, suggesting that the pairing of the anchors has not been able to improve ratings. By February 2015, the 9 p.m. newscast — by then, anchored by Dawn Hasbrouck and Jeff Herndon — had dropped to a 0.9 share (a decline from a 1.3 in May 2014), behind the 1.6 share accrued by WGN-TV's 9 p.m. newscast.