County Seen as a Lucrative Market for 24-Hour Cable TV News

Tired of watching “local” TV news that rarely includes Orange County? Frustrated by traffic reports that barely mention county highways? Starved for hometown public affairs programming beyond “Jim Cooper’s Orange County” on KOCE and politicians on the public access channel?

Imagine switching on your TV and finding polished, professionally presented news of the county: its county government, its 28 cities, its roads, its sports, its arts, its political races and its personalities--24 hours a day.

You may not have to imagine much longer: The founder of the nation’s first 24-hour, regional TV broadcast service, located on Long Island, called Orange County a fertile market for such an operation.

Charles F. Dolan, chairman of the giant Cablevision Systems Corp. and the guiding spirit behind the Long Island service known as “News 12,” discussed the 2-year-old operation--which is drawing attention of cable operators and journalists from around the country--at the recent Western Cable Assn. Show in Anaheim.

Cablevision operates no systems in Orange County and hasn’t made any official moves toward establishing a News 12 service here. But in an interview after the show’s opening session, Dolan said that, in looking around the country to see where the concept might work, Cablevision is particularly interested in Orange County.

The two major factors, he said, are the concentration of affluent cable subscribers here and the county’s being “in the shadow of a major metropolitan area (so it) has to settle for whatever attention the metropolitan stations can give.”

Two all-news AM radio stations, KNX 1070 and KFWB 980, maintain county bureaus, but there are no Los Angeles TV crews based here full time. Most outlets cover county news on an as-needed basis.

Brian Lamb, chairman of C-Span, who shared the panel with Dolan, predicted that there will be more operations like News 12 around the country and that the county would be a “perfect” venue for such an operation.

“People are more interested in local news than national news,” said Lamb, whose own service provides live coverage of congressional debates, campaign speeches and public affairs programs.

Cablevision’s Long Island operation cost about $6.5 million to get off the ground and may ultimately cost $10 million before it moves into the black, according to Dolan. The staff consists of about 100 people, including six anchors, eight reporters and eight one-person camera crews.

John Hillis, News 12’s news director and general manager, has found that the station’s niche among the viewers is live coverage on Long Island.

“I can do any hard news CNN can do, plus I can give them the local weather forecast,” Hillis said from Long Island.

On News 12, there are regular morning, early evening and late night news broadcasts, with much repetition among them.

One of the first things the channel did was to hire some top local radio reporters to work in the field and several prominent network newscasters to anchor the night broadcasts. This group, Hillis said, brought with them a good deal of of journalistic credibility.

A certain amount of innovation and trial-and-error in the format followed, Hillis said, but “the audience acceptance just overwhelmed me.”

In addition to announcers giving local traffic reports on the air, the station mounted robot cameras on the Long Island Expressway and other traffic points to show viewers how traffic was flowing. Local election coverage, including many live debates and campaign appearances, was intense. On weekends, there are rotating public affairs shows dealing with health, education, the arts, family affairs and law enforcement.

When a sensational murder case came to trial, local reaction to coverage of opening arguments was so great that the station broadcast 11 days of gavel-to-gavel coverage.

“The trial was natural for us to follow through on,” Hillis said, because New York City stations covered it only on a spot basis.

News 12 is now supported by an advertising mix of auto and boat dealerships, doctors and lawyers, investment firms and real estate companies, grocery chains and small retailers. Locally based banks and corporations do image advertising; the New York ad firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn has bought time on the service for such national clients as Lever Bros.

Given its extensive coverage of local political races and the perception that a high percentage of News 12 viewers vote, the service sold a considerable amount of time to candidates, ranging from school board races to contests in Long Island’s five congressional districts.

“We did very well on the political season,” Hillis said.

Hillis predicted that the format could be easily transplanted to Orange County, a market that he said is “as close to the Long Island area as we could find in the country. It’s very analogous to the way Long Island is treated in the (New York City) media. It’s not unusual to go a week without seeing anything about Long Island of significance on the New York stations. There’s sort of an inferiority complex here.”

So, is Orange County ready for its own local version of the Cable News Network? Political consultants and some ad people are enthusiastic about the prospect.

“I think it would be exciting,” political consultant Harvey Englander said. “I think Orange County is ripe for this sort of thing. . . . We’ve got a very high demographic population that hungers for news. . . . I think it would be very successful.”

Over the years, various politicians have taken to cable systems around the county, including Supervisors Don R. Roth, Harriett M. Wieder, Roger R. Stanton and Gaddi H. Vasquez; former Orange Mayor Jim Beam; and former Irvine City Councilman C. David Baker. To date, none was able to cobble together a countywide hookup.

“I’d want to look at the numbers,” said Jeff Adler, of the Irvine-based firm of Adler Public Affairs. “Once I’ve determined that people were watching it, as a political consultant I would certainly be interested in using it as an advertising medium.”

Adler agreed with Englander that such a service would also be ideal for local corporate image-making as well as for political candidates.

“We are always looking for vehicles for getting our message across,” Englander said.

Joe Martin of Martin Advertising in Tustin said that in the past TV has been too expensive for advertising residential real estate in the county but that if a local cable news service could deliver an audience, his clients would probably be interested.

For all the obvious similarities between Long Island and Orange County, there are also significant differences. The county’s population of about 2 million people, scattered through 28 cities, is served by two strongly competitive newspapers. Long Island is divided into two counties, with a population of 2.7 million people living in 108 cities and a single, dominating daily, Newsday.

The formula for succeeding with such a news operation, said Larry Gerbrandt, senior analyst with Paul Kagan Associates of Carmel, is having a large enough concentration of cable subscribers in “a community that is a subset of a much larger metropolitan area, where TV stations must cover the top local stories for the region. That leaves a hole.”

The county’s already-high demographics would be further enhanced and defined by those who can afford cable and have time to watch it--especially an all-local news station. As for numbers, “when you reach critical mass--in excess of 150,000 cable homes--you begin to approach the economics of being able to do something,” Gerbrandt said.

Long Island has 550,000 cable subscribers, Orange County about 398,000. A more discouraging difference is the number of cable systems serving the county.

Cablevision has 80% of Long Island’s cable subscribers, with two other companies dividing the remainder. The other two other companies have agreed to carry News 12 on their systems, also on Channel 12, in exchange for 4 commercial minutes per hour.

By contrast, Orange County’s cable subscribers are divided among more than a dozen local systems, which are controlled by 10 major operators, according to the Southern California Cable Assn. There is no guarantee that all or most of the systems would agree to carry a local news service on the same channel.

The reaction among cable executives in the county was more tempered.

“You couldn’t work out the same deal here that they did on Long Island,” said Mark Andrews, production supervisor for Copley/Colony Cablevision of Costa Mesa. “I just don’t think it would be possible.”

Andrews said he is a strong supporter of local news on cable and helps to produce a nightly broadcast covering the news of Costa Mesa.

“People like watching local news, and they like to see it professionally done,” he said. And although a regional newscast is “not an impossible idea,” he said, “I think it would be a tough nut to crack in Orange County because you have so many different operators.”

Mike Schenker, general manager of Roger’s Cable TV, which covers Huntington Beach, Garden Grove and Fountain Valley, said that while his company would be unlikely to create such a service in the county, “we’d absolutely be interested in carrying it” if someone else made the investment.

He said he would go so far as dropping an existing channel on his system’s basic service to make room for the local news channel and predicted that establishing a countywide hookup would become easier in the next 5 years, as a few cable operators expand and consolidate their coverage areas.