the station spent most of the 1980s and early 1990s in a competitive battle with KMBC-TV and WDAF-TV for news viewers. It was also the first television station in the United States to begin closed captioning of its local newscasts in 1982—years ahead of Boston's WCVB-TV, which claimed to be the first to do so in 1986. By the early 1990s, KMBC-TV had taken a clear first place in the market, particularly among more desirable younger viewers. As part of a major overhaul of the station's news programming, in 1993, longtime sportscaster Don Fortune and reporter Marty Lanus were both let go. At that time, the station also launched weekend morning newscasts, becoming the second Kansas City outlet to do so behind WDAF-TV and complementing the launch of weekday morning news a year earlier. However, ratings continued to slide to lows not seen since the early 1980s. Though figures improved to the point where channel 5 narrowly edged out channel 9 in 1996, but its ratings slid back in most time periods during 1998. KCTV's news presentation underwent a major overhaul under Kirk Black, whom Meredith promoted from WNEM-TV to serve as KCTV's general manager in 2001, and news director Regent Ducas, hired in April 2002. The goal was to overtake KMBC-TV as the top-rated television news operation in Kansas City. The major changes included the assignment of the station's news anchors to conduct field reports, the expansion of its weekday morning newscast to a then-unusual 4:30 a.m. in December 2001, and the debut of a late-afternoon newscast to 4:30 p.m. on March 4, 2002. Six months after Ducas's hiring, KCTV adopted "Live. Late-Breaking. Investigative." as its new slogan and unveiled a new, darker-colored news set and new logo with a larger 5. After a major severe weather outbreak in May 2003 where the station opted to continue with live coverage helmed by meteorologist Katie Horner, KCTV became aggressive in preempting regular programming for severe weather coverage, sparking the ire of some viewers. Another radical change occurred on November 17, 2003, when the station announced that it would shut down its in-house sports department and entered into an outsourcing agreement with local sports cable channel Metro Sports (now Spectrum Sports), using its staff at the channel's Swope Park facility to cover local professional, college, and high school sports events. Under the terms of the deal, the channel would produce sports