As KTVK's affiliation with ABC began to wind down in 1994, the station gradually increased its news programming output, eventually carrying just over 40 hours a week by 1997. Besides relaunching its weekday morning newscast as the originally three-hour "Good Morning Arizona" and debuting the half-hour "First News" that preceded the program and retaining its other existing newscasts, KTVK added a half-hour newscast at 5:30 p.m. weeknights (creating a 90-minute early evening news block by bridging the 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts). Unlike other former Big Three affiliates that joined one of the post-1986 networks or became an independent station, KTVK did not initially carry a prime time newscast; the station began producing a half-hour 9 p.m. newscast for KASW when that station signed on in September 1995. Prime time newscasts on KTVK began with the launch of an hour-long 8 p.m. newscast in the late 1990s, which was later discontinued and replaced with syndicated programming on June 23, 2008, when the station launched an hour-long 9 p.m. newscast (which competes with the 9 p.m. newscast on Fox-owned KSAZ).