City, Greg Hurst of ABC flagship WABC-TV and Len Cannon of Fox flagship WNYW (the latter also a former NBC News correspondent and substitute anchor), would respectively join the station in 1999 (when Hurst replaced Smith) and 2006 (when Cannon replaced Jerome Gray who went to rival KPRC-TV), with Cannon himself becoming lead anchor in 2017, succeeding Hurst (now with fellow CBS affiliate WREG-TV in Memphis). On February 4, 2007, following CBS' coverage of Super Bowl XLI, KHOU began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, becoming the first station in the market to do so. On September 7, 2009, KHOU-TV expanded its weekday morning newscast with the addition of the 4:30 a.m. program First Look; despite being the last station in the Houston market to launch a 4:30 a.m. newscast, KHOU was the first station in the market to announce its intentions to do so (three of Houston's major network affiliates – KHOU, KTRK-TV and KPRC-TV – launched 4:30 a.m. newscasts within three weeks of each other in the late summer of 2009 with little fanfare). On August 1, 2011, KHOU debuted a new half-hour newscast at 4:00 p.m. on weekdays to replace The Oprah Winfrey Show; this would expand to a full hour in 2015 after losing the Houston rights to Jeopardy! to KTRK. Recently, the station expanded its weekend 10 p.m. news broadcast to a full hour, including the aforementioned KHOU 11 Sports Extra on Sunday nights. In 2018, the station rebranded its weekday morning newscasts as HTownRush, with a format emphasizing social media interaction including its own namesake hashtag, a summary of top stories during the first five minutes of each half-hour, and special segments including in-house features exclusive to Tegna stations such as Deal Boss, one-minute business/technology news briefs from Cheddar, and consumer reporter John Matarese's Don't Waste Your Money consumer segments (which usually air on stations owned by the E. W. Scripps Company). In June 2019, KHOU rebranded its 4 p.m. newscast as The 411, emphasizing a conceptual format and on-air graphics style similar to that of its morning newscast. Unlike most CBS affiliates, the station did not air a newscast until January 5, 2020 when it launched a new Sunday Morning newscast from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. prior to CBS Sunday Morning, with the hour instead being filled by one of CBS's three hours of E/I programming which KHOU preempted to carry