KTTV Hopes to Wake Up L.A. With ‘Day’ : News Show to Focus on City With Quirky Man-on-the-Street Coverage

After ceding its primary competitor a two-year head start, KTTV-TV Channel 11 will finally unveil a morning news show and a glitzy new set Monday with expectations of taking the morning news genre to places it has never been before.

KTLA-TV Channel 5, emulating similar local shows in other cities, premiered its own morning news two years ago and quickly outpaced the long-established network programs such as “Today” and “Good Morning America” with a two-hour broadcast of weather, traffic and a lot of informal bickering and banter among its anchors and reporters. The show has been a solid No. 1 in the 7-9 a.m. time period for the past year.

“Channel 5 will maintain the lead for a while. Our expectation is not to kill them right out of the blocks--but later,” said Tom Capra, general manager of Fox-owned KTTV.

Capra formerly produced NBC’s “Today” and is a former news director at KNBC-TV Channel 4, where he oversaw the invention of early morning news in this market more than five years ago with a 6 a.m. local newscast that to this day maintains a ratings lead. Not incidentally, KTTV will debut a “straight-ahead” hourlong newscast at 6 a.m. to compete against all three network-owned stations next Monday as well.

Capra said that KTTV’s “Good Day, L.A.” will compete with the existing morning shows by taking viewers outside into the city as much as possible.

Capra’s model is the old “City at Night,” with Bill Stout. “It was live and out there somewhere every week with all kinds of things going on,” Capra said. “I’d like ‘Good Day, L.A.’ to have the feel and texture of that show. ‘The KTLA Morning News’ doesn’t have that feel. They have more of a family feel, of people sitting around inside kibitzing. . . . I really think this is an opportunity to show and showcase Los Angeles itself.”

Jose Rios, KTTV’s news director, said that like most morning shows, this program will include helicopter traffic shots, five-day weather forecasts and quick news summaries at regular intervals. But even though “Good Day” will be anchored from the huge and fancy new set to be shared by this program and the station’s 10 p.m. newscast, Rios insisted that Channel 11’s morning show will guide viewers “on a process of discovering the city of Los Angeles.” His goal is to introduce the audience to people and places in Los Angeles that they would not normally encounter during the course of their day.

“I think there is a real hunger for news that gets away from the police blotter, and we’ve actually cut back on that on our 10 p.m. news as well so it’s not just, ‘here comes death,’ ” Rios said.

“It’s not going to be like Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood: ‘Come along with me, kids, to the train at Griffith Park.’ It will be more like having someone like Paul Rodriguez come on and say, ‘Come along and meet my friends, Juan and Lupe, who own this restaurant where I come for breakfast every time I’m in L.A. I come here to catch up on the neighborhood and to talk politics,’ and then they will talk about the new mayor and how he is or isn’t doing anything. So you will get the same type of observation with that group dynamic as you get on KTLA, but rather than in the studio, you’re seeing it out in real life.”

Barbara Beck, one of the anchors of “The KTLA Morning News,” disagreed with the characterization that her show takes place primarily inside the studio, pointing out that the program features live reports from two reporters in the field every morning.

“I assume they will promote and they’ll get some sampling,” said Warren Cereghino, KTLA’s news director, “but I think the audience will be sticking with us. We are the tried-and-true, familiar format. We are the winner.”

Showmanship, KTTV executives promised, will also distinguish this show, which is as much a talk/entertainment program as it is a newscast.

“We will be a little bit more irreverent, a little bit more glib than our competition,” said Kim Paul Friedman, the show’s executive producer. “We’re looking for the unusual and when we find it, we will approach it in a Lettermanesque sense. . . . You need to have something to balance the serious news.”

The Fox-owned station in New York has for the past several years produced a similar show that includes wacky elements KTTV intends to imitate. Look for KTTV to include some version of the New York program’s crazy man-on-the-street reporter, who has been known to wander onto someone’s front lawn at 7 a.m. and light up a barbecue.

Capra declined to reveal how much the three-hours-per-day venture will cost or how much additional staff KTTV has hired to produce the programming. But the set alone, which includes a kitchen, a video bank area, performance stage, several chroma-key screens and backdrops and a variety of interview and anchor desk settings, was obviously not built on the cheap.

“It’s all costing many dollars,” Capra said. He added, however, that it is almost a “no-gamble” proposition because the news will score bigger audiences and higher ad revenues than the children’s programming the station has been airing in the mornings.

Capra said that the morning show will need ratings in the 2’s or 3’s (about 150,000 homes) to make money. KTLA last month averaged a 5 rating for its two-hour morning news. “We expect to be in the black in about a year,” Capra said.

Rick Feldman, station manager at KCOP-TV Channel 13, said he was pleased that KTTV was expanding its news coverage because it means one less competitor for young viewers in the morning.

“It will help us because now kids will have just us and KCAL (Channel 9) in the mornings and I’m sure it will eventually hurt KTLA a little,” Feldman said. “But there is definitely news overkill in the market. I’m not so sure that the public is served by having three or four stations all doing news in the same time period.”

Actually five of the seven VHF stations in this market will present news from 6-9 a.m. In response to KTTV’s morning assault, KTLA will expand its own morning news to three hours, beginning at 6 a.m. Monday.