standalone local news programming effort debuted in 1968, when it launched a half-hour weeknight 10:00 p.m. newscast titled A Black's View of the News, a program focusing on news relevant to Chicago's African American community and commentary. The program—which served as a launching pad for eventual Soul Train host Don Cornelius—was canceled in 1982. In September 2009, WCIU debuted You and Me This Morning, a weekday morning program featuring a broad mix of entertainment news, lifestyle features and weather forecasts. The program—which effectively maintains a lighter format, which does not incorporate conventional general news segments—originally aired in the form of locally produced inserts of varying length interspersed within what otherwise was a three-hour block of syndicated programming on WCIU and classic television series on WWME-CA from 6:00 to 8:00 a.m. Although it trails behind the WGN Morning News on WGN-TV and Good Day Chicago on WFLD (as well as the national morning programs on WMAQ-TV, WLS-TV and WBBM-TV that the second hour of the program also competes against) in the ratings, viewership for the program has increased since its debut; in particular, its ratings doubled from an average of 40,000 viewers in May 2012 to 73,000 in May 2014. You & Me This Morning expanded into a full three-hour program (running from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m.) on September 8, 2014. On December 14, 2014, WCIU entered into a news share agreement with ABC owned-and-operated station WLS-TV to produce a weeknight-only 7:00 p.m. newscast for channel 26. Titled ABC 7 Eyewitness News at 7:00 on The U, the program debuted on January 12, 2015 as the third prime time newscast among the Chicago market's commercial television stations, behind the longer established in-house 9:00 p.m. newscasts on WGN-TV and Fox owned-and-operated station WFLD (channel 32). With the news share agreement, WLS-TV became the fifth ABC-owned station to produce a newscast for a separately owned station in its home market (along with existing programs produced by ABC O&Os in Raleigh, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Los Angeles for WLFL, WPHL-TV, KOFY-TV and KDOC-TV in the respective markets, and a since-cancelled newscast produced by KFSN-TV for KAIL in Fresno). On July 29, 2019, WCIU-TV and WLS-TV jointly announced that the newscast would end on August 30, a move related to WCIU's affiliation with The CW. On June 14, 2017, WCIU announced that it would launch The Jam, a new morning show that would replace You