CBS Atlanta to launch morning newscast. Here’s what to know.

CBS Atlanta is adding a one-hour weekday morning newscast starting Monday, its first since the new affiliate’s launch last summer.

Filling the 6 a.m. hour, the “CBS News Atlanta Mornings” newscast will feature community-focused reporting and a seven-day forecast, along with national headlines, according to a news release from CBS.

The morning team will include Jobina Fortson-Evans, who previously anchored the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts, along with traffic anchor Alexa Liacko, meteorologist Troy Bridges and reporter Kaley Fedko. In the coming weeks, reporters La’Tasha Givens and Jamal Goss will also join. Sharon Lawson will shift to the evening newscasts.

The launch of the newscast comes about six months after CBS took over national programming on the once-independent WUPA-TV and began building a local news operation from the ground up. Atlanta News First, once known as CBS46, ended its affiliation with CBS midway through last year and transitioned to an independent station, which now runs more than 90 hours of local news a week.

To build its newsroom, CBS Atlanta hired about 70 people across editorial, production and digital teams, and implemented a virtual/augmented reality studio for both its local news and weather operations that is the first of its kind in the market.

The station did not want to rush into starting a morning newscast, said CBS Atlanta President and General Manager Tom Canedo. It wanted to gain a foothold in the community and gain trust with its audience through its reporting before launching another avenue to put stories on the air, he said.

“We wanted to start out with doing it right, not doing it fast,” Canedo said.