stability; Condelles was demoted to weekends, a decision Garron panned as "a new shipment of razor blades" to an operation he characterized as sabotaging itself. Lynn Heider became news director after Olinger; while she was credited by Aaron Barnhart of The Star with hiring Kansas City-area native Elizabeth Alex—who remained with the station until 2013—and with setting up an investigative reporting unit, the station continued to be stuck in fourth place in the market, even if it was doing slightly better than before at 10 p.m. in retaining NBC prime time viewers who were switching to other stations for local news. In 1997, the station attempted a radical shakeup of its early evening news programming. It scrapped its separate 5:00 and 6:00 p.m. newscasts in favor of a single half-hour newscast at 6:30 p.m., where there was no local news offering in the market at the time and where stations rarely programmed their own newscasts. The move was not a ratings or business success, and in March 1999, the station reverted to airing 5:00 and 6:00 newscasts. It also extended its morning news to two hours at the request of NBC, which was launching Early Today and wanted stations to program a full two hours of news between that program and The Today Show. Since acquiring KMCI-TV, at various points, channel 38 has aired newscasts from the KSHB-TV newsroom. The first local newscast at channel 38, at 9 p.m., debuted in 2000; it was scrapped in 2003, a victim of low ratings. News returned to channel 38 in 2015, when a 7 a.m. morning news extension was added. Action News In January 2003, the station rebranded as "NBC Action News", removing references to the channel number; it also extended its morning newscast even further out to 4 a.m. The brand was tweaked to "41 Action News" in 2012, with station management noting that people still called the station "channel 41" despite not having used the channel number in on-air promotion in nearly a decade. Despite the brand having gone mostly unchanged, there had been significant turnover in management: between 1999 and 2014, KSHB-TV had four general managers and five news directors. For the first time in its history, KSHB-TV experienced ratings momentum in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It had stanched the bleeding of viewers: where 10 p.m. news viewership once represented a 40 percent decline from NBC's prime