a two-hour extension from 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. – and the consolidation of its half-hour weeknight 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. newscasts into a single 90-minute block – although the early-evening block was structured as three separate half-hour broadcasts – filled timeslots vacated by the departures of Today and NBC Nightly News from its schedule as Fox, unlike NBC, does not have daily national news programs. The weekday morning newscast would gradually expand over time, eventually attaining its current 5½-hour format with the addition of an hour-long block at 9:00 a.m. on March 24, 2011, and a half-hour early extension at 4:30 a.m. on October 3 of that year. Since Fox does not provide network programming during that hour, Channel 4 also added an hour-long prime time newscast at 9:00 p.m. – originally titled Newschannel 4 Primetime until January 1997 and then Fox 4 News: Primetime at 9:00 until September 1999, when it was renamed as simply Fox 4 News at 9:00 – to lead into its existing 10:00 p.m. newscast (WDAF is one of several Fox stations that offer newscasts in both the final hour of prime time and the traditional late news time slot – as well as one of the few affiliated with the network that runs a nightly newscast in the latter slot – and one of ten that continued its Big Three-era late-evening newscast after switching to Fox); the addition marked the first time WDAF had aired a local newscast at that hour since its days as a hybrid NBC/ABC/CBS/DuMont affiliate, when the station aired its late-evening newscast at 9:30 from its sign-on in September 1949 until the program moved to 10:00 p.m. after the station became a full-time NBC affiliate in September 1953. On January 15, 1996, WDAF-TV reformatted its 5:30 p.m. newscast as Your World Tonight, a program focusing primarily on national and international news headlines that was modeled similarly to the national news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC (as with the national newscasts that Your World Tonight competed directly against, the program maintained a single-anchor format, with Phil Witt – who joined WDAF in August 1979 as a weekend evening anchor/reporter, before being promoted to main co-anchor of the weekday evening newscasts in 1981, a role in which he remained until Witt retired from broadcasting on June 20, 2017 – at the helm). Because Fox did not have a news division –