KFWB SIGNAL DIMS FROM THE CAPITAL

“We were the last. All the others shut down some time ago,” said KFWB Sacramento Bureau Chief Tom Woods.

Woods may retain a role as KFWB’s Sacramento stringer, but the last regular Los Angeles broadcast bureau in the state’s capital will be history at the end of this year.

Four years after the last regular television reporter (KNBC’s Doug Kriegel) left the state capital, radio news is also paring its capital presence down to occasional reporting.

Woods was told last month that his 16-year run as KFWB’s Sacramento bureau chief ends in December. Sacramento reporting, he said, has apparently become expendable.

“I was not given a reason (for the closure) that I understood,” Woods told The Times. “I was told that it was not done for economic reasons. I was told they wanted to put somebody else on the street in Los Angeles and they offered me that job.”

KFWB Executive Editor Fred Walters said the decision was simply based on the belief that the all-news outlet needed more experienced reporters like Woods working in Los Angeles. But Woods, who has lived in Sacramento for more than 20 years, turned the job down.

“We’d like to have Tom down here working for us,” Walters said. “I don’t know what Tom eventually intends to do, but I expect he’ll expand his workload (reporting for other broadcast outlets).”

Station manager Dave Graves said the station decided to “give permission to Tom to add other stations to his workload.

“We would not want to lose him. He will still be exclusive to us in Los Angeles. He’ll just be free to redo a story for someone else in San Francisco or San Diego. Redoing a story doesn’t reduce its value at all.”

Walters said Woods gave him the impression that “he plans to work harder than ever” under the new arrangement.

But Woods’ role will be reduced to that of KNX-AM’s (1070) Pat Davis who works part time on Sacramento assignments for Los Angeles’ other all-news station and spends the rest of his workday at another full-time broadcast job in the capital. Executives at both all-news stations point out that their reliance on stringers is at least some coverage . . . unlike television, which ignores Sacramento altogether.

But the last full-time Los Angeles television reporter in Sacramento decried the KFWB decision as loudly as he did his own station’s 1981 decision to recall him to Los Angeles.

Doug Kriegel, now the business reporter for KNBC Channel 4, said that the listening/viewing audiences in Los Angeles are the big losers.

“They brought our camera back down to L.A. and put it in a helicopter,” Kriegel said with undisguised disgust.

Like Woods, Kriegel used to cover far more than politics, he said.

“If you drew a line from Monterey to Reno and included everything up to the Oregon border, that would be the beat,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of (Southern California) interest in the news up there and a wealth of stories.”

Acting as an electronic watchdog of the Legislature was always the primary reporting function, however.

“You know, there’s $30 million in special-interest money spent by lobbyists to influence passing the laws that are binding on everybody in California-- $30 million! And nobody is watching it,” Kriegel said. “It’s a pretty sorry thing when television and radio in the most populous state in the country don’t cover the state capital.”

Walters promised that Woods would continue acting the watchdog role. As proof, he even invoked his own roots as a capital correspondent for 15 years in Pennsylvania, long before he came to KFWB.

“It was almost my birthright as a reporter. Congenitally, I’m prejudiced in favor of capital bureau reporters. I couldn’t turn my back on it,” he said.

In Pennsylvania--where KFWB’s parent company Group W operates four stations--television and all-news radio stations from both of the state’s major cities maintain capital bureaus. Walters was at a loss at explaining why California does not do the same.

“Maybe it’s because Pennsylvania thinks of itself as a state unto itself,” he said. “Stations from both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have reporters in Harrisburg, but I find Sacramento much more interesting.”

KFWB has recently increased its standing in the Arbitron ratings and ranked last year as one of the 20 most profitable stations in the country, but the cost of broadcasting all news is steep. It is for that reason that some industry observers believe the station is cutting costs.

In addition to closing the Sacramento bureau, the station is also reducing its engineering staff from nine to three full-time positions by year’s end.

“We’re basically doing the equivalent of eliminating Linotype operators,” Graves said. “The technology has been in place for some time to allow news people to handle the taping and audio themselves, just as (newspaper) reporters use computer terminals now instead of typewriters.”

At rival KNX, the newsroom has been computerized since June--something that KFWB hopes to duplicate by early 1986, Graves said.

Nonetheless, some members of the news staff grumble that technological advances coupled with cutbacks like the Sacramento bureau closure potentially strike at the quality of KFWB’s chief product.

“The word around the newsroom is that we’re trying to hammer out Chevys,” said one veteran KFWB reporter. “If you want to make Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs, the advice is to go somewhere else.”