OPINION

SOCAL FIRESTORMS
IGNITES TV NEWS

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COVERING THE FIRES
IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

(October 23rd, 2007 8:30PM PST)

BY ERS NEWS

In Southern California most of the local television stations have been covering the fires that range from the Mexico/California border to Santa Barbara.

Nearly one-million people have been evacuated, the largest peacetime evacuation in the U.S. since the Civil War. The saturation coverage has been impressive as well as logistically and financially daunting for the local Southern California broadcast media.

The 800-pound guerilla of fire coverage is KABC. They were on first and off last. KABC has a newscast that starts at 5am on Sunday in LA and they were covering the fire almost immediately. Standout reporters to ERS were Wendy Burch in Malibu and John North an LA "old school" institution. KABC remained on the air, commercial-free all day Sunday. KABC ratings were nearly double that of its nearest competitor.

Neither KNBC nor KCBS did the same. Although KCBS a duopoly, directed its viewers to KCAL when they left the fire coverage for CBS network programming. Stellar reporting could be seen across the channels, ERS favorites, Dave Lopez and Michelle Gile of KCAL/KCBS. On the other hand, KNBC proudly announced they would carry the scheduled NFL game. Over at KABC they remained commercial free and stuck with the coverage of the fires through their 11pm newscast.

On Monday at 4am all the stations resumed coverage of the fires. However at 7am KNBC decided to go to the national NBC "Today" show while everyone else stuck with the fires locally. The ratings prove that KABC was right and KNBC wrong. KABC was number one all day and night long. One former station management person who requested not to be identified said that a move like KNBC's "loses your momentum".

KCAL, incidentally, was the number two station in Los Angeles Monday night with full coverage of the fires.

With the independent stations, KTLA, on the other had tried a unique approach. KTLA's Marta Waller did hourly cut-ins and full coverage on the internet. In fact, over the past 24 hours KTLA.com had over 450,000 live streams of their webcast.

The fires and the havoc they have brought to Southern California are starting to wane and are expected to further diminish as the week rolls on. The TV coverage of this disaster shows that local TV news, still can be real news when and if it wants to be, and the viewers will watch.