In 1965, Al Primo, the new News Director at KYW-TV in Philadelphia created the "Eyewitness News" format. The reporter would be the "eyewitness" to the anchor in the studio and the viewer at home.
He used the cue "007" from the 1963 film From Russia with Love as the theme. The format quickly became a hit in Philadelphia and allowed KYW to surge past longtime leader WCAU-TV for first place, a position it kept on and off until the late 1970s. Rival WFIL-TV (now WPVI-TV) developed the Action News format to compete with it.

KYW used the name and format until 1991 and readopted it in 1998. All five major stations owned by Westinghouse prior to the merger with CBS (KYW, KPIX-TV San Francisco, WJZ-TV Baltimore, WBZ-TV Boston and KDKA-TV Pittsburgh) have used "Eyewitness News" as their newscast titles at some point in time (the former three still do to this day).

In 1968, Primo moved to WABC-TV in New York City and took the Eyewitness News concept there with him, choosing music from the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke--the "Tar Sequence" cue (composed by Lalo Schifrin)--as the theme. However, he added a new twist at WABC--chatter among the anchors, which came to be known as "happy talk". WABC has kept the name and format since then, and has been the highest-rated station in New York for much of that time.

The format, as tweaked by WABC, was copied by many other stations in the United States, with most other stations owned and operated by ABC using the Cool Hand Luke theme. Ironically, WPVI, which developed the Action News format, is now an ABC owned-and-operated station.