He says CityPulse Tonight, a half-hour program that only airs on weekdays, has a brisker pace than the 6 p.m. hour-long show, and delves more deeply into entertainment to reflect what happened that night in Vancouver, with lots of sports scores because they're fresh.

Other information programming debuts include a Vancouver version of BreakfastTelevision and multicultural magazine show DiverseCity. The Vancouver version of BreakfastTelevision isn't set in the same type of innovative storefront studio made famous by its Toronto counterpart. Instead, says Phillips, a unique BT house has been built with a kitchen for cooking segments, a living room for chats and even a bedroom. The hosts move around the house while on the air and a few times every morning everyone jumps on the bed to conduct some of the interviews.

Citytv is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the station in Vancouver, says Phillips, and much of that advertising is focused on the news properties. The intensive media campaign includes radio, wrapped buses and the sides of the SkyTrain, as well as ads in washrooms in bars and restaurants.

Phillips says the message is very urban and very Vancouver-centric, with an emphasis on City's "faster" and "more nimble" approach to delivering the news.

The newscast itself will feature a delivery, format and on-air look quite different from the old CKVU days, but many of the seasoned news people from the old newscast are still with the station, including Russ Froese, the anchor of CityPulse at Six.

"When people flipped on the channel on Monday night [July 22], there were new colours, a new look, and Russ walking around - but it was still Russ," says Phillips. "So hopefully he was able to take our existing audience base and pull many of them through to the new approach. I think we've found the right mix of new but maintaining the base we had."

While media buyers do not expect CityPulse to draw an appreciably bigger audience than the old CKVU newscast enjoyed a year ago, it will draw a different audience and perhaps bring new viewers to news programming.

During the month prior to the City Vancouver launch, CKVU was fourth overall for local news, with a 1.3 rating for its 6 p.m. weekday newscast and a dissappointing 0.6 rating at 11 p.m. (adults 18+).

Rick Sanderson, media director at Bryant Fulton & Shee in Vancouver, welcomes Citytv to the market, and hopes that the station and its news properties will help bring viewers lost to specialty channels back to conventional television so they can be reached by regional advertisers.

"So much of the conventional audience has drifted into specialty channels over the past few years. That fragmentation has been a real problem for us [regional agencies] so it's great to have a new conventional channel that's so different it may pull viewers back."

Sanderson also expects that CityPulse has the potential to pick up viewers that may not previously have been news watchers. But he thinks it will be City's non-traditional presentation rather than its local focus that will have the most draw.