Photos: KTUU's leading ladies

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Assistant News Director and Channel 2 NewsHour co-anchor Maria Downey discusses a story with co-anchor Mike Ross at the afternoon planning meeting at KTUU on Wednesday, October 1, 2014, in Midtown.

A lot has changed in broadcast journalism since the mid-1980s. Cameras are smaller while television sets have grown into wall-swallowing behemoths. The Internet and a forever-increasing menagerie of cable channels have forever changed the landscape of television news. The evening news no longer draws a nightly gathering of families, sitting in front of their home's only television to get a sense of what's happening in the world around them. We are, by any measure, a long way from the heydays of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters.

But in an industry known for turmoil, changing faces and a push toward younger reporters, anchors and meteorologists, Maria and Jackie remain integral to the sustained success of KTUU, whose newscast has dominated the Anchorage market – and reaches hundreds of thousands of viewers across Alaska -- for more than 28 years. Unlike what is happening in many other U.S. television news markets, neither Downey, 55, nor Purcell, 53, said they felt pressured to leave their on-air jobs as they aged.

Read more: Queens of the Screen