carried a local newscast from the station's sign-on in 1953 until its news department was shut down in 1967 (Lionel Van Deerlin, later a congressman representing San Diego in the U.S. House of Representatives, served as news director during XETV's early years). In 1980, during its tenure as an independent station, XETV began running local news updates throughout the day; these continued to air until several months prior to the station's affiliation with Fox in October 1986. Although then-general manager Martin Colby originally stated that XETV would not offer a newscast, in response to then-Fox President Barry Diller's comments during the 1991 Television Critics Association Convention in pushing for Fox's affiliates to produce local newscasts that the network "won't tolerate any affiliate that is not in the news business," XETV began reconsidering the possibility of launching a news department. The station would not resume news programming until the establishment of an in-house news department – based out of the satellite facility at the Ronson Road studios – on December 27, 1999, when it debuted a 35-minute newscast at 10:00 p.m.; the program competed against an established prime time newscast on KUSI-TV and another newly launched 10:00 p.m. newscast on KSWB-TV that launched three months earlier in September 1999. Much of the news department's original on-air staff consisted of younger anchors and reporters (most of whom were in their early 30s, with a median staff age of 32) and its story content incorporated more sensationalistic feature reporting designed to appeal to Fox's young-skewing demographic. In September 2000, the station expanded its news programming with the debut of a three-hour weekday morning newscast – originally titled Fox in the Morning (later renamed San Diego 6 News in the Morning in August 2008, Wake Up San Diego in November 2014 and finally CW6 News in the Morning in January 2016) – from 6:00 to 9:00 a.m., and a half-hour newscast at noon. After the station appointed Richard Doutre Jones as its vice president and general manager in the fall of 2001, XETV overhauled its news presentation in January 2002, adopting a more traditional style mixed with faster story pacing and investigative reports. The station also hired older and more experienced journalists to its on-air staff, including main co-anchor Brian Christie, assignment reporter Terry Burhans and entertainment reporter Fred Saxon, all of whom previously worked at rival KUSI. In addition, the flagship prime time