on at 9 a.m. WKRC had an unusual broadcast of the 90-minute ABC premiere. It aired the first hour from 3 to 4 p.m. on December 1. The final 30 minutes was telecast December 2 at 11 a.m., where all subsequent episodes aired on a one-day delay. News operation WKRC currently broadcasts 41½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with seven hours each weekday, four hours on Saturdays and 2½ hours on Sundays); it also produces an additional 13½ hours of newscasts weekly (with 2½ hours each weekday and a half-hour each on Saturdays and Sundays) for WSTR. WKRC's newscasts and reports were formerly seen on the Ohio News Network until the regional cable news channel shut down on August 31, 2012. During weather segments, it uses regional weather radar data in a system called "Precision Doppler 12 Network." For most of its history, WKRC has been a solid runner-up to WCPO in the local newscast ratings. However, in the past decade or so, WKRC and WCPO have taken turns in first and second place. WKRC usually wins on weekday mornings and at 11 p.m., while WCPO leads in the 5 to 7 p.m. block. However, since the May 2010 Nielsen ratings period, WKRC has dominated its competition in all newscast timeslots, with WCPO slipping to second. This dominance in the Cincinnati local news race continued as of the May 2012 sweeps period. At one point, all three of Cincinnati's "Big Three" network affiliates were locally owned. WLWT began falling behind in the ratings after becoming the first of the three to be sold to outside interests. WCPO is now the only one of the three to remain under locally based ownership. From 1977 to 1992, its news division was branded Eyewitness 12 News. (The Eyewitness News moniker would be reused by WLWT in 1998.) Afterward, the station was usually announced as 12 News. With the arrival of chief meteorologist Tim Hedrick in 1988, WKRC began using the top of the Chiquita Center as its Weather beacon. In 1994, WKRC refreshed its newscasts with the slogan "A New Generation of News", which referred to anchors Kit Andrews and Rob Braun, along with new graphics, a green screen set, and music originally composed by Rick Krizman for KRON-TV in San Francisco. WKRC made extensive use of "Texta", a graphics package that included a persistent on-screen banner with the current story's