KNBC Will Broadcast Live From Seoul

In 1984, the Summer Olympic Games came to Los Angeles. In 1988, Los Angeles will be going to the Games: KNBC Channel 4 plans to relocate 20 members of its news staff to South Korea during this summer’s Olympic competition to provide live news broadcasts from Seoul twice a day.

With this move, station executives say KNBC becomes the first local TV station to originate its daily newscasts from an Olympic site. And they believe the chance to be right in the middle of the Olympic action is well worth their $500,000 investment in the project.

Two other West Coast stations, KRON-TV of San Francisco and KING-TV of Seattle, will do some live news spots from Seoul during the Olympics, but only KNBC will provide complete news broadcasts from the city throughout the Games, Sept. 17-Oct. 1.

The reason: The scheduled half-hour breaks for local news in NBC’s live network coverage of the Games fall at 9 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time--giving West Coast NBC stations a half hour right in the middle of prime time for news.

“The ratings we should be achieving at 9 o’clock in the evening are the type you would expect extraordinarily successful prime-time shows to get,” said KNBC general manager John Rohrbeck, noting that the Olympics’ normally strong ratings are likely to be even better because the competition on CBS and ABC may be reruns due to production delays caused by the Writers Guild of America strike.

“When we saw that (Olympics telecast) schedule a year ago, we thought, ‘We can do our regular newscasts here, or we can do something special,” said KNBC news director Tom Capra. “We hope this will be a showcase for our people, our coverage, as well as the athletes of Southern California.”

During an interview at KNBC’s Burbank headquarters, where he was joined by news anchor Jess Marlow, sportscaster Fred Roggin and executive producer Nancy Valenta, Capra said that Channel 4 would differentiate its Olympics coverage from the network’s by tracking the 50 to 75 Southern California athletes competing in the Games. KNBC’s newscasts also will provide features on the cultural and economic links between the Los Angeles area and Korea.

The station began its focus on Seoul in April with its eight-part news series “Korea Today,” and plans a special program on the city for Sept. 15.

“You meet a businessman in Korea, you find out he went to UCLA,” Marlow observed. “There are an awful lot of ties between Korea and Southern California, and not just the fact that there are a lot of Koreans here. Garden Grove is a sister city to Seoul.”

“That’s where they make Reeboks; that’s where they make L.A. Gear,” Capra added about South Korea.

Among the 20 of KNBC’s 175-person news staff going to Seoul will be weekday news anchors Marlow, Kelly Lange, Linda Alvarez, John Beard and Keith Morrison, plus sportscaster Roggin and weatherman Fritz Coleman.

Capra called the move to Seoul expensive, but not prohibitive because the station will share equipment and facilities with NBC’s news division. In fact, KNBC will be sharing quarters with NBC’s “Today” show. Both will use the roof of a 6,000-student girls’ school in Seoul as their base of operations.

Capra said that the financial commitment would not affect the station’s coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions in July and August. It will send reporter Linda Douglass and a staff of producers to both. He said that regardless of the Olympics, the station has no plans to send a team of news anchors to the conventions, since the time difference between Los Angeles and the convention cities, Atlanta and New Orleans, would only allow the station one hour of time, 4-5 p.m., for live convention coverage.

Although much of the Seoul newscasts will naturally come out of the Olympics, the KNBC officials maintained that the news of Southern California will not be neglected during the Games. Following the network’s national news broadcast from 3:30-4 p.m., the station will have a local broadcast originating from Burbank from 4-4:30, and other breaking stories from Los Angeles will be incorporated in the Seoul broadcasts.

“It’s important to know that, although 20 of us will be in Seoul, our newsroom will be fully staffed here,” Valenta said. “We’ll be covering whatever stories have to be covered here.”

“There will be a few left to cover an earthquake, if there is one, and our broadcast would originate from here (Burbank),” Capra said. “But what usually happens is, news coverage slows down during the Olympics--people are watching the Olympics. We will do all the news of L.A. and all the news of Seoul in that half hour from Seoul.”