It might have gone unnoticed outside of the reach of the tv antennas mounted atop the 977-foot landmark Sutro Tower on the San Francisco skyline, but fortunately, the good folks who run the fantastic NewscastStudio.com website picked right up on the change. This past Monday, February 3rd, KGO-TV, the ABC Owned and Operated station in the Bay Area, changed the name of its newscasts to “ABC 7 Eyewitness News.”

The addition of the “Eyewitness News” brand to KGO can be seen in a couple of different ways. At last, the San Francisco station was claiming the brand name, which has been on nearly all ABC O&Os since WABC-TV in New York first adopted it in 1968 under then-news director Al Primo.

But why has it taken nearly sixty years for the “Eyewitness News” moniker to land on Channel 7 in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose market?

Were they just that stubborn about making the change for all this time?

Not at all. Actually, they couldn’t have the name for their newscasts, because it was already being used a couple of clicks down the TV dial. (Back then, your television probably still clicked when you changed the channel.)

You see, “Eyewitness News” had been on the air in San Francisco since 1965, but on Channel 5. KPIX had adopted the “Eyewitness News” name as a Westinghouse Broadcasting-owned, CBS affiliate at the time

And the very same Al Primo was to blame for the name being taken before KGO could claim it.

Before decamping in 1968 to New York City and WABC, Primo had been the News Director for Westinghouse’s KDKA in Philadelphia. While there in 1965, he created the name “Eyewitness News” for his new kind of local TV newscast, one which was immediately successful and quickly adopted by other Westinghouse-owned stations across the country.

Given the FCC rules at the time, that was only four other markets — Baltimore (WJZ), Boston (WBZ), Pittsburgh (KDKA), and in San Francisco.

From 1965 onward, KPIX's local news was known as “Channel 5 Eyewitness News.” That was until 1993, when the geniuses at 855 Battery Street decided that the “Eyewitness News” name was…well, it was something not woth keeping, and they dropped the nearly thirty-year-old franchise to become just “KPIX 5 News.”

By 1996, the “Eyewitness News” name would be rightfully returned to Channel 5’s newscasts, where it would be for another 17 years.

But before “Eyewitness News” returned to KPIX, the station became a CBS-owned-and-operated one when Westinghouse Electric Company and its broadcasting subsidiary merged with CBS, Incorporated in 1995. That same year, Westinghouse stations WBZ, WJZ, and KYW would move from NBC to CBS affiliation, joining their sister stations KDKA and KYW, which had long been CBS affiliates.

In 2013, KPIX would ultimately drop the “Eyewitness News” brand for the second and final time. The station would eventually be rebranded as “CBS News Bay Area” in 2022, joining all of the CBS O&Os in a group-wide effort that de-emphasized each market’s call letters or channel number in an effort to convince viewers that their local station was now merely an outpost of the larger network news organization.

The bottom line was that Bay Area television viewers didn’t hear the name “Eyewitness News” on local television for some thirteen years, from 2013 to 2026.

While it once was in nearly every local market in the country, in recent years a growing number of stations have dropped the name. Reasons for the change have varied, but the common sentiment we have heard is that those stations felt like “Eyewitness News" just didn’t seem to resonate with viewers anymore.”

Which brings us back to this week, and the obvious question: Why would KGO finally adopt the “Eyewitness News” name after all these years? While we could have done some investigating and tried to get the official response, we’ve decided to provide our own speculation, which we believe is probably more accurate than any PR response we’d likely receive.

Our answer is another question: Why wouldn’t you adopt the single most successful local television newscast brand ever created? Certainly, the other ABC O&Os have done pretty well under the “Eyewitness News” banner (Yes, we know that WPVI in Philadelphia and KFSN in Fresno, have always used the name “Action News” but that’s because “Eyewitness News” was already in use in their markets back in the early 1970’s)

KGO has always looked and sounded like an “Eyewitness News” station. It has long followed the format principles that Al Primo implemented on WABC in the late 60s and into the 70’s. It has used the ABC O&O news music for years, the long-running Frank Gari-composed package that replaced the needle drop of Lalo Schifrin’s track “The Tar Sequence” taken from the movie soundtrack of 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke” for the original theme when “Eyewitness News” debuted in New York City.

The addition of one word to the KGO newscasts wasn’t really a huge change, nor was it presented that way. Instead of the anchors and reporters all saying “ABC 7 News” this past Monday, they just started saying “ABC 7 Eyewitness News.”

And that was that.

Certainly, we’d suspect there were countless meetings and discussions about the pros and cons of adopting a name that had been in the market on another station for decades. Maybe some research was done to assess viewer impressions of the name and its association with the previous station on which it appeared. Maybe it was all part of some master corporate synergy plan that outgoing CEO Bob Iger signed off on before new CEO Josh D’Amaro takes over?

Speaking of this week’s announced transition at The Walt Disney Company, once Iger rides off into the sunset, how long do we think it will be before the new CEO, who grew up on the “Experiences” side of the business (theme parks, cruise lines and such), begins to look at the move to separate his corporate behemoth into two parts, cleaving off some of the “legacy media” parts as Comcast has done with Versant and Warner Brothers is poised to do with Discovery Global. While a lot more complex than those transitions, there are some advantages that may prove too irresistible to keep all of “the mouse house” under one roof.

Probably time to get a bet down on that over at Polymarket or Kalshi.

But back in San Francisco at KGO, maybe someone just said, “You know if we start using that name, we won’t have to get reporters at KABC in Los Angeles to retrack the end of their packages anymore.”

However it came to be, we’re pleased that someone recognized there was likely still some value to be had in making the change. Of course, the viewers will ultimately determine just how much value over the longer term.

And they often recognize that everything old is…

Well, you know.

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