After WVUE became a Fox affiliate in January 1996, the station increased its news programming output from about 15 hours a week to nearly 25 hours, retaining all of its existing newscasts. The station initially retained its noon and 6 p.m. newscasts, but opted air syndicated programming in the 5:30 p.m. half-hour rather than expand its 5 p.m. newscast to a full hour, a move that was atypical of the Big Three stations that switched to Fox during the affiliation switches that occurred between 1994 and 1996. The existing 10 p.m. newscast was moved one hour earlier to 9 p.m. and was expanded to one hour; however, ten months later in October 1996, it was split into separate half-hour newscasts at 9 and 10 p.m., with off-network syndicated sitcoms filling the 9:30 p.m. timeslot. This scheduling for the late evening newscasts continued until 2001, when the weeknight 9 p.m. newscast reverted to an hour-long broadcast, and the 10 p.m. newscast was dropped for a second time due to the lack of a strong program lead-in. Even after the weeknight broadcast expanded to one hour, atypical for most Fox stations that produce their newscasts in-house, the Saturday and Sunday editions of WVUE's 9 p.m. newscast remained a half-hour in length; until those editions were expanded to one hour in 2012, WVUE had been among the largest Fox affiliates by market size to air its prime time newscast in such a fashion.