Chinese-Language Newscast Will Bow in San Francisco

Eyeing the market for Asian viewers, a foreign-language television station here embarks Monday on a daring venture in Pacific Rim broadcasting when it starts the nation’s first live, local, Chinese-language newscast.

Executives at KTSF-TV Channel 26 could not hide their excitement this week as they introduced their “Chinese News at 9” team, a young crew of bilingual broadcasters from Hong Kong, to the local media at a restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

“The time is right, we’ve got the money and we’re going ahead with it,” said Mei-Ling Sze, an anchorwoman who was watched by 2 million viewers at her previous job with Hong Kong Television Broadcasting, one of three major news stations in the British colony. “This is really a big challenge.”

During a hectic rehearsal Tuesday, the 27-year-old Sze primped before the cameras and adjusted her pearl necklace. She offered counsel in Cantonese to her green co-anchor, Philip Choi, also 27.

The mock broadcast went smoothly except for minor miscues.

At one point, Choi missed a story and the savvy Sze picked it up without flinching. A video on Afghan refugees was run while the anchors were reading a cute feature on the 50th anniversary of “Gone With the Wind.” And the anchors’ navy-blue blazers and black hair blended into the set’s poorly lit background, a slab of plywood painted a dark, rich brown to resemble Chinese lacquer boxes.

“Things were in a shambles a week ago,” said a red-eyed Michael Sherman, KTSF’s station manager and a former marketing executive for MGM studios. “But we’re getting calmer and more in control. Seven rehearsals down and three to go.”

KTSF is gambling that its newscast will boost the audience for its other Chinese shows, now estimated at 100,000 to 200,000 a day. Executives also hope their move will give them a stronger foothold in the fast-growing Asian market of the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We plan to showcase the news,” Sherman said. “We know it won’t be a money-maker the first year, but it will certainly draw an audience and become a good lead-in for our other programs.”

Nielsen and Arbitron collect little data on viewers who speak foreign tongues. So, two years ago, KTSF hired the SRI Research Center in Lincoln, Neb., to survey Chinese television watchers. The findings confirmed that Chinese viewers are usually well educated and have more buying power than advertisers previously believed.

So far, commercial time has been bought by the Bank of America, United Airlines, Cathay-Pacific, Lucky Stores, the California Lottery, Levitz and others. Sales are ahead of projections, according to general manager Brian Holton.

The newscast will be a rougher ride. Despite a shoestring budget of $400,000 a year and a skeleton staff of eight young journalists and translators, news director Rose Shirinian hopes to put on a strong half-hour newscast Monday through Friday. Compared to KTSF, a typical local news station may boast an editorial staff of 100 and an annual news budget of $10 million.

“We’re going to play to the local community--that’s our goal,” said Shirinian, a public affairs specialist and the producer of PBS documentaries on Taiwan and Japan.

“We want to be a bridge between the Chinese community and the outside world,” said Choi, who took a huge pay cut from his reporting job at Hong Kong Television to work in San Francisco.

A sample newscast this week covered a mix of national and international news: the trial of Oliver North, the Alaskan cold wave, baby boomers in China, the latest financial news from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Another story analyzed the huge wild dog population in Shanghai.

KTSF also broadcasts shows in Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Hindi, Farsi, Italian and Greek. The 13-year-old independent station is owned by the Lincoln Broadcasting Co., which is run by Lillian Lincoln Howell, the heiress to an arc-welding fortune.