For almost 60 years, Eyewitness News has been an iconic brand name for local television news. As the moniker of CBS3’s newscasts, it is associated with legends ranging from Mort Crim and Jessica Savitch in the 1970s and Larry Kane in the 1990s.
The Philadelphia Business Journal reports Eyewitness News will now be no longer as a new station president has decided to sunset the name due to changing viewer habits. The newscast will simply be known as CBS News Philadelphia. CBS3 will still be visible in some logos but as the audience evolves into other distribution platforms such as online and streaming, Kelly Frank, president and general manager of CBS’s Philadelphia properties, said “we wanted to make sure, number one, we kept that to honor that legacy, but at the same time, move forward with how people are actually finding us. And that's how they're finding us.”
Starting Wednesday during CBS3’s 5 p.m. newscast, the station’s familiar gold, silver and blue colors will be replaced with a green palette. Its new tagline will be: “We uncover the heart behind the headline.”
Frank recognizes that Eyewitness News is an iconic brand in Philadelphia. The discussion began when Adrienne Roark, president of CBS Television Stations, approached Frank in December 2021 about relocating from the CBS affiliate in Tampa to become president and general manager at CBS3.
“One of the things I asked about was, the position of Eyewitness News in terms of the relevancy to a local news consumer. And is that something that was even up for discussion if idata supported it?,” Frank said.
When she took the job at CBS3 in April, the station hired an agency specializing in brand analysis. Frank said she learned that the Eyewitness News brand “wasn't as relevant to a growing audience. And that's a difficult thing in Philadelphia [if] you're born and raised here. People like what they like. But Eyewitness was starting to marginalize and that was what our data told us.”
Specifically, she said the research showed that viewers in their 20s, 30s and early 40s did not feel that the Eyewitness News brand spoke to them.
“That is a commitment as a newsroom,” Frank said. “If a story is three minutes or a story of five minutes or one minute, give it what it needs to tell the complete story and then continue to go back if we haven't been able to fully provide that context,” Frank said.
CBS News began making similar name changes to its other owned and operated stations in 2020.
The Eyewitness News brand made its way to Philadelphia and what is now CBS3 in 1965 along with the KYW call letters, management and staffers from the relocated Cleveland station. The station’s news director at the time, Al Primo, was credited with creating the Eyewitness News format that had a faster pace than the normal newscast and had reporters in the field serving as eyewitnesses to news and anchors bantering with one another.
The new format helped KYW pass longtime leader NBC10 (WCAU-TV), then a CBS affiliate, and 6ABC in the ratings, with anchors Mort Crim, Vince Leonard and Jessica Savitch. The station gave up its ratings crown to 6ABC’s Action News in the mid-1970s and, along with NBC10 and Fox29, have been chasing it ever since.
Eyewitness News has been the continuous brand for CBS3’s newscasts since 1965, save for seven years in the 1990s when the station tried names such as News Tonight and KYW News 3.
The change comes just a few months after Jim Gardner retired after almost 45 years leading 6ABC’s Action News to ratings dominance — something that could cause viewers to give other stations a longer look.
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