ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs

ABS-CBN News and Current Affairs, known on-air as ABS-CBN News (formerly known as ABS-CBN News and Public Affairs), is the news and current affairs division of the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN Corporation. The division is the country's largest international news gathering and broadcast organization, maintaining several foreign news bureaus and offices through ABS-CBN's Global division.

The division generates news output for the company's media assets such as radio station DZMM Radyo Patrol 630; the former main ABS-CBN terrestrial television network (including its former free-to-air television and radio stations) and its replacements Kapamilya Channel, A2Z, All TV and PRTV Prime Media; cable television through ANC and DZMM TeleRadyo; international channel TFC; and news websites news.abs-cbn.com and patrol.ph, which the former ranks as the top news website in the country as of November 2021.

History

News division

The oldest of the two components, the news division began as the news section of two radio stations - DZBC (opened 1949) and DZAQ (opened 1950) both in the Manila area, and DZRI (opened 1951) in Pangasinan, all under the Bolinao Electronics Corporation and later under the Alto Broadcasting System, which broadcast news programs and commentary as part of their programming schedules. In 1956, the Chronicle Broadcasting Network, together with the first news broadcasts on DZXL, started the short-lived 24-hour station DZQL Radyo Reloj broadcasting news and current affairs until late 1959, the first station of its kind in the country. When the two networks merged in 1957, first as part of Bolinao Electronics Corporation and later on in 1961 adopting the ABS-CBN brand (which it started to adapt the ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation as corporate name on February 1, 1967, and later ABS-CBN Corporation on October 1, 2008, with the former now serves as the conglomerate's secondary and alternative name since the said date of October 2008), the news services of these four Manila stations, later reduced to three, were combined into a unified news service but then with separate programs, as the network began expanding with the purchase and later opening of additional stations, first in the Ilocos region and the Cordillera, and then into the Visayas islands, Mindanao, and southern parts of Luzon, with the national radio service broadcasting from the Chronicle Building along Aduana street, Intramuros, Manila, which began broadcasting the two Manila stations in 1958. Alongside them was a small television news service on DZAQ-TV 3 and DZXL-TV 9 with updates broadcast daily, owing to the lack of proper news programs from the beginning of broadcasts in late 1953, with both stations' news bureaus based in the television studios in Roxas Boulevard, Pasay (opened in 1958).

Proper news programming on TV, however, would begin in 1960 when news coverage for the national elections began. Channel 9's Coverage would be the first weekly news program produced by ABS-CBN and it would be followed by the first Filipino-language TV newscast, Balita Ngayon, in 1966 on Channel 3 and in November 21 with the English-language newscast The World Tonight on late nights, which is today the longest running English-language national newscast. Channel 9 followed suit with the long-running Newsbreak as well, joined later by Apat na Sulok ng Daigdig.