the Eyewitness News title continued in use for its newscasts. This made for some rather verbose station announcements ("From WJXT News Channel 4 ... this is Eyewitness News"). Since 2014, it has been known as News 4 Jax, a nod to its longtime Website URL. WJXT has been the dominant news station in Jacksonville for almost half a century, in part because many of its personalities have been at the station for ten years or more. Its evening news team of anchors Tom Wills and Deborah Gianoulis, chief meteorologist George Winterling and sports director Sam Kouvaris were together for 22 years from 1981 until Gianoulis' retirement in 2003 – one of the longest-running anchor teams in the nation at the time. Upon losing its CBS affiliation, channel 4 rebranded as a news-intensive independent station. Following the example of a number of former Big Three affiliates that switched to Fox in the 1990s, it has a news schedule similar to its days as a CBS affiliate. It retained all existing newscasts, while tacking two additional hours onto its weekday morning program and adding a 6:30 p.m. newscast on weeknights (the former two replacing The Early Show and the CBS Evening News) and a 10:00 p.m. newscast seven nights a week (airing for an hour on weeknights and a half-hour on weekends). On January 14, 2009, beginning with its noon newscast, WJXT became the first television station in the Jacksonville market to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition (unlike most stations that transition their newscasts to HD, certain newscasts were not upgraded until later dates: the 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. newscasts would not upgrade to HD until two days later on January 16; the weekend newscasts on January 17 and the weekday morning, and 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. newscasts respectively upgraded to HD on January 26 and 28). The upgrade saw the introduction of new on-air graphics (opens were designed in-house at Detroit sister station WDIV-TV, while the graphics were designed at Miami sister station WPLG) and news music (commissioning an updated version of the "WJXT News Theme", a customized package that was originally used from 1992 to 1997, and was composed specifically for the station by Gari Media Group), as well as the upgrade to robotic and computer-operated cameras for studio segments within its newscasts, the automation of its control room using the Miranda Vertigo system and Ignite technology.