CBS Overnight News

CBS Overnight News is an American overnight television news program that is broadcast on CBS during the early morning hours each Monday through Friday. The program maintains a hard news format, incorporating national, international and business news headlines; feature reports; interviews; national weather forecasts; sports highlights; and commentary. CBS has carried an overnight news block since 1982 when it debuted CBS News Nightwatch, which ran from 1982 until 1992; it was replaced with Up to the Minute that year, which the title of the block ran under until September 18, 2015.

CBS Overnight News draws from the full resources of CBS News, including the CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, Newspath, owned-and-operated stations and affiliates of the television network and APTN. It also featured rebroadcasts of selected stories from CBS News Sunday Morning, 48 Hours, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. From 2013 to 2015, the program was solo anchored by Anne Marie Green, who also anchored the network's early-morning news program CBS Morning News.

Overview

CBS Overnight News broadcasts beginning at 2:00am ET/1:00am CT and is transmitted in a continuous one-hour tape delayed loop until 7:00am ET/4:00am PT when the CBS Morning News – the network's early-morning news program – begins in certain areas of the Pacific Time Zone. Most CBS stations air the CBS Morning News at 4:00 a.m. local time or earlier, depending on the start time of the station's local morning newscast). Most of the network's stations do not air the program's entire broadcast loop and preempt portions of it in order to air local programming (usually infomercials or syndicated programs) – joining the program in progress anywhere from five minutes to as much as 1½ hours after the start of the program – with affiliates looping the show until the CBS Morning News begins.

Its main competitor is ABC's World News Now, which follows a more irreverent format than the more straightforward news style of CBS (NBC has not aired a late-night newscast since the cancellation of NBC Nightside in 1998, and instead currently airs rebroadcasts of the fourth hour of Today and sister network CNBC's financial talk show Mad Money during overnight time slots).

History

Former "Up to the Minute" title card.

The program's history traces back to the launch of the network's first overnight news program, CBS News Nightwatch, in 1982; that program was originally anchored by Christopher Glenn, Harold Dow, Felicia Jeter and Karen Stone, who were later joined by Mary Jo West. Production of Nightwatch was later moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., at which time Charlie Rose (who remains with CBS News as co-anchor of CBS This Morning) and Lark McCarthy became the program's anchors.

Up to the Minute

CBS announced its decision to cancel Nightwatch in early 1992, and replaced it with a reformatted news program, Up to the Minute, on March 30, 1992. The program was originally anchored by Russ Mitchell and Monica Gayle, who both left the program in 1993 (Gayle subsequently became co-anchor of the CBS Morning News), and were replaced by Troy Roberts, at which point the program switched to the single-anchor format which it used for the rest of its run. Regular on-air contributors to Up to the Minute included John Quain, who served as the program's technology consultant beginning in 1998.

The program's on-air graphics package and set were often several years behind that of CBS News's daytime broadcasts, with the news division's early-1990s era graphics package being used on the program well past 2000. These graphics were updated in 2005, 2006, 2009, and then again in 2011 to match the current look of the CBS Evening News. In March 2009, when Michelle Gielan was named anchor of Up to the Minute, production of the program was integrated with the CBS Morning News, with the same anchors being used on both programs.

In November 2012, Up to the Minute became the last remaining news program on any of the Big Four television networks or major cable news channels to begin broadcasting in high definition; at that time, production of the program was moved to Studio 57 at the CBS Broadcast Center, the same studio space that is also home to CBS This Morning. Until then, Up to the Minute had continued to broadcast in standard definition (by comparison, the CBS Morning News had upgraded to HD two years earlier in November 2010).

Rebrand as CBS Overnight News

On June 25, 2015, Newsday reported that CBS News had decided to cancel Up to the Minute but planned on retaining the 3 a.m. time slot for news programming.^[1][2] Up to the Minute ended its run after 23 years on September 18, 2015. The program was replaced three days later on September 21 by the CBS Overnight News, a rebranding made primarily to be consistent with the rest of CBS News's productions; in terms of content, the show is largely unchanged from its predecessor.^[3]

The primary change is that the regular anchor from the previous day's CBS Weekend News (Elaine Quijano) and CBS Evening News (Scott Pelley) "hosts" the program along with various fill-in CBS News correspondents via introducing stories rebroadcast from the West Coast final edition of the Evening News and additional content. The CBS Evening News branding remains on the story packages. There is no live anchor. The Overnight News room is staffed to accommodate breaking news at all times.^[4]

Anchors

• Russ Mitchell (1992–1993; now with WKYC in Cleveland)
• Monica Gayle (1992–1993; now with WJBK in Detroit)
• Troy Roberts (1993–1995; now a correspondent for 48 Hours Mystery)
• Sharyl Attkisson (1993–1995; now with WSYX-TV in Columbus, Ohio and special correspondent for Sinclair Broadcast Group)
• Nanette Hansen (1995–1998)
• Mika Brzezinski (1998–2000; now with MSNBC)
• Melissa McDermott (2000 – March 10, 2006)
• Meg Oliver (March 20, 2006 – March 20, 2009)
• Michelle Gielan (March 23, 2009 – June 18, 2010)
• Betty Nguyen (June 21, 2010 – April 6, 2012; now with NBC News)
• Terrell Brown (April 9, 2012 – January 18, 2013; now with WLS-TV in Chicago)
• Anne-Marie Green (January 21, 2013 – September 18, 2015)
• Jeff Glor (September 21, 2015 – May 2, 2016)
• Scott Pelley (September 22, 2015 – present)
• Elaine Quijano (May 9, 2016 – present)

References

External links

• CBS Overnight News at the Internet Movie Database