TV Reporter Gets Off to Jolting Start on New Job

Less than a week into her new job as the second field reporter on “NewsWatch,” the nightly half-hour broadcast at KDOC Channel 56 in Anaheim, 32-year-old Jerilyn Donovan had one of the busiest days of her 10-year career--and an opportunity to demonstrate why she was hired.

Adding Donovan is a significant step for the 6-week-old “NewsWatch,” says the station’s production manager, Hoshang Moaddeli, who promises more upgrades of the news operation as soon as ratings and advertising revenues warrant.

For viewers, Moaddeli said, two field reporters mean more local stories each night; the goal is now is four or more. It also means an extended period of coverage in the field, with reporter Eric Alverez starting in the morning and Donovan available for stories as late as 7 p.m., and more flexibility when big news is breaking around the county.

On Friday, for example, while Alverez was editing a story in Anaheim, Donovan was en route from Santa Ana to an assignment on the heat wave. Then the earthquake hit, centered in Newport Beach, providing a tailor-made opportunity for the county’s only regular television news operation.

Without benefit of a police scanner or even a telephone in the station’s only van, Donovan and photographer Jon Hale listened to an all-news radio station to determine the epicenter and then headed for Newport. While they were on the road, “NewsWatch” co-anchor Pat Matthews went on the air live with bulletins, 15 and 30 minutes after the quake.

Donovan and Hale interviewed and shot on what seemed to be a nonstop basis on Lido Isle, at Fashion Island and back to Santa Ana, talking to residents, firefighters, paramedics, schoolchildren and a telephone repair man they spotted in one neighborhood. Donovan kept in touch with the studio via pay phones.

“It was so exhilarating,” Donovan recalls.

Donovan wrote her piece in the “NewsWatch” van, driving back to the studio, since the shoestring operation cannot yet broadcast live from the field. Nonetheless, her 2-minute package of tape was edited in time to dovetail with a 90-second report on quake damage in Costa Mesa by reporter Alverez, as well as with additional pieces by Matthews and a segment by Michelle Merker, the show’s co-anchor and news director, who was taping an interview when the quake hit. The entire package was ready by “NewsWatch’s” 8:30 air time.

For Donovan, as well as for the station, the slot with KDOC is a significant step. Two and half years ago, Donovan, a Los Angeles native and Cal State Northridge graduate, felt she was at a “crossroad” in her career. She gave up a weeknight anchor slot with WOI, an ABC affiliate in Des Moines, Iowa, to return to Southern California--without a job. “This is the place I wanted to be,” she explained.

Donovan, who is married to a photographer/editor, took a series of free-lance news writing and reporting jobs with network and independent stations in the area and with CNN. One of those free-lance assignments involved substituting for Merker on KDOC’s hourly news updates, which led to her recent hire.