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Eyewitness News is a local television newscast format, widely used in different markets across the United States. It is also the name of a very popular music package offered by Gari Communications.

WABC-TV's 11PM Eyewitness News team, 1992. From left to right: anchors Bill Beutel and Diana Williams, sports anchor Scott Clark, meteorologist Sam Champion

In 1965, Al Primo, then-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-TV used the name and format until 1991 and readopted it in 1998. All five major stations owned by Westinghouse Broadcasting prior to its 1996 acquisition of CBS (KYW-TV, KPIX in San Francisco, WJZ-TV in Baltimore, WBZ-TV in Boston and KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh) have used Eyewitness News as their newscast titles at some point in time (the former two 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.

In The late 1980s and Early 1990s, Australia's Ten News branded it's self as Eyewitness news and featured the Move Closer to Your World theme music

In addition, the title had been used in the past in Canada on Edmonton's CFRN (a CTV affiliate), as well as the local newscasts on Australia's Network Ten until the mid-1990s. Spanish-language Telemundo's owned stations also have their own version of Eyewitness News, called Noticias de Primera Plana (Headline News). In Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s, Televisa's local newscasts also used the Eyewitness News format translated in Spanish as Noticias de Primera Plana (a concept translation in Spanish of Eyewitness News). In some middle-sized markets of Latin America, such as Peru's America TV, they also used the Noticias de Primera Plana but sometimes simply as Primera Plana (in the Peruvian case, they used KNBC/WRC-TV's NewsCenter Signature by Michael Randall).

Eyewitness News is also the name of a syndicated news music package, composed by Frank Gari of Gari Communications.

Since 1968, WABC-TV and ABC's other large market owned-and-operated stations, eg. WLS-TV in Chicago, KABC-TV in Los Angeles and KGO-TV in San Francisco, had used the "Cool Hand Luke" theme on their newscasts. In 1983, they started using News Series 2000, an updated version of the original Schifrin theme, composed by Frank Gari, that had been originally commissioned by WLS-TV in Chicago.

However, in 1993, Schifrin raised his royalties for using Cool Hand Luke and its variations to a level that effectively priced the theme out of the local news market. As a result, Gari was commissioned by WABC to compose a new music package called Eyewitness News. This new package, based slightly on Cool Hand Luke, has been updated several times. WABC currently uses the Series 4 version, which was specifically updated for the station in 1999.

Besides being used in America, the Eyewitness News music package has also been picked up for use overseas. Hong Kong Cable News has been using it for its morning newscast, and POP TV in Slovenia has been using it for its main newscasts.

A station using the Eyewitness News music package might not necessarily use the Eyewitness News title for its newscasts, and vice versa. For example, WXYZ in Detroit uses the music package, but uses the Action News format and branding, and in 2006 KGO-TV started using the Eyewitness News package but brands its newscasts as 'ABC 7 News HD'.

In 2005, Gari Communications renamed the Eyewitness News-New Generation news package to the ABC O&O News Collection, as the packages are now only commissable by ABC owned-and-operated stations and affiliates.^{[dubious — see talk page]}Despite this, many still refer to the package as Eyewitness News.