four prime time news briefs. However, Scripps began planning to launch a nightly 9 p.m. newscast for the station. Mark Olinger was hired as news director; he had last worked at KSTW, an independent station in the Seattle market that produced local newscasts. There, he had come under fire and ultimately quit in the middle of a ratings period, having orchestrated the layoffs or demotions of several veteran on-air personalities. Olinger formulated a conversational style of news writing, with phrases like "cop" instead of "police officer", and derided the appearance of news sets at his network competitors as sterile "airline counters". On August 1, 1993, Fox 41 News at 9:00 debuted. The original Sunday–Thursday anchors were Pam Davis, a former soap opera actress and reporter in Sacramento, California, and Jim Condelles, who had last worked in Indianapolis. While the newscast made heavy use of video, the format also de-emphasized weather, presented in a forecast running about 40 seconds each night, and lacked sports completely. The anchors signed off each night by telling the viewer, "See ya!" NBC expansion Concomitant with becoming an NBC affiliate in September 1994, the station moved its 9 p.m. newscast to 10 p.m. and immediately began the process of expanding its newsroom to eventually produce a full suite of local newscasts. This required adding 54 people to an existing staff of 18. It initially did little to change the young-skewing format adopted as a Fox affiliate, though the set was lightened to better match the NBC Nightly News. The news expansion took place over a period of nearly two years. The first new program to debut, in October 1994, was a half-hour early-evening newscast at 5:00 p.m., which was conceived as primarily containing feature reports geared toward women with segments like "Just for Women" and health feature "Howdaya Feel". On March 13, 1995, a 6 p.m. newscast followed, emphasizing local and breaking news stories. By this time, the newscast was adopting a more mainstream format, and Olinger and executive producer Jeff Burnside departed in December. The news expansions were completed in June 1996 with the addition of a 90-minute weekday morning newscast at 5:30 a.m. Though the newsroom had successfully grown to the size and output expected of an NBC affiliate, the station's news ratings remained low. Barry Garron of The Kansas City Star cited the profusion of out-of-town news reporters and the general lack of