The Little Station That Might : Television: Jeff Wald, former news director of KTLA, is building a news operation at KCOP from scratch.

KCOP Channel 13, for years a mere 98-pound also-ran in the local news wars, is planning to adorn itself with the electronic trappings of a heavyweight contender and vows to slug its way to the top.

To say the station is bucking a trend is an understatement. The combined audience for the well-financed and heavily promoted newscasts at the three network-owned stations has been declining steadily for more than year. And KCAL Channel 9, despite a $30 million investment, has yet to draw higher ratings with its three-hour prime-time newscast than what the station was getting last year with reruns of Angie Dickinson’s “Police Woman.”

But KCOP has its mind set.

“No station in this market has a news product that they can really be proud of,” said Rick Feldman, KCOP’s station manager. “No one really covers Orange County. There’s no one covering Sacramento, no one really doing investigative reporting or some intelligent analysis of what is going on nationally. You never hear one word about the savings and loan crisis, which is probably the biggest problem this country has faced in years.

“Everyone is spending all this money and no one is telling me anything but garbage. It’s a daunting prospect, but we felt that if we made a real stab at putting on a better product, ultimately we could win people over.”

Feldman acknowledged that it’s easy to say his station will put on the most informative newscast in the market and another thing to do it. KCOP embarrassed itself on Election Day just two weeks ago when it opted to finish its sports report before joining gubernatorial candidate John Van de Kamp’s live concession speech in midstream.

But as if to prove that theirs is not an idle boast, the first chunk of money KCOP officials invested in their new news push was to hire Jeff Wald, who since 1981 had guided KTLA Channel 5’s 10 p.m. newscast to its longstanding dominant position among Los Angeles’ independent stations. Wald was given a guaranteed five-year contract that reportedly doubled his salary.

At 38, Wald, who grew up in Los Angeles and has held news jobs at several local stations, is the most locally tested TV news director in Los Angeles. Though rather stoic and traditional, his newscasts at Channel 5 have always been respected for their hard news emphasis and their disdain for the sensational.

Aside from the financial perks, what appealed to Wald was the opportunity to build his dream news operation from scratch.

Wald said that Channel 5, which for many years has drawn about twice the audience of any of its three competitors at 10 p.m., had become “a well-oiled machine” and that he had been reduced to a kind of “maintenance man.” Satisfied with its ongoing success, KTLA had been reluctant to invest additional money in “innovations” that Wald believed necessary to beat back the increasing competition, he said.

“Here they offered me a blank canvas and all the paints I need to create my own vision,” Wald said. “How often does somebody give you that kind of chance?”

And when Wald says blank canvas, he means blank.

When he first toured the facilities at KCOP, Wald wondered how the station had managed to produce any newscast at all. Jeff Webreck, KCOP’s new news engineering manager who has been Wald’s “technical wizard” since they produced the live coverage of the Patty Hearst/SLA shootout in South-Central Los Angeles in 1974 for then KNXT Channel 2, said that he was astonished to find that the tape machines that recorded news feeds from all over the world beginning at 6 every morning were rigged to click on with one of those automatic devices used to turn on sprinklers in suburban back yards.

Webreck, whom KCOP hired as a condition of Wald’s deal to jump stations, will oversee the construction of an all-new, computerized news facility in a cavernous old stage. The station also plans to buy additional news trucks, satellite dishes and other electronic hardware. Wald doesn’t expect the new facility to be completed until sometime next spring.

KCOP will also double its news staff to about 70 people--still less than half that of KCAL or the network-owned stations. Though Wald said there will not be wholesale personnel changes at the station, hiring quality television reporters who are familiar with Los Angeles is one of his top priorities. He also plans to develop a separate investigative unit that will produce up to six “full-fledged documentaries” a year.

Wald said that he will not make any anchor changes until next year, but last week he did fire sportscaster Vic Jacobs, replacing him with KCBS Channel 2’s backup sportscaster, Tony Hernandez.

Wald said that he has assured KCOP’s current anchors, Wendy Rutledge and Warren Olney, that they will both retain an important role within the new broadcast. Neither Feldman nor Wald would specify exactly how much they plan to spend to upgrade their news operation. Wald said it would be a “few” million; Feldman said that it will cost about $1 million to build the newsroom and then KCOP’s annual news budget will be on a par with KTLA’s--about $10 million a year.

But the real key to attracting an audience and cutting into Channel 5’s huge lead is producing a distinctive newscast. Wald said that he will stake his reputation on the fact that KCOP’s broadcasts will be filled with solid, professional reporting, free of “happy talk and soft feature series.”

“We are really going to cover the hard news of the day,” Wald promised. “At 10 p.m., particularly with the busy lives and the commute that people have these days, they want to know simply and straightforwardly what happened in the world. They don’t want to see repetition. They don’t want to see gimmicks.

“What television does well is when you have something happening live and you have a camera there--like the First Interstate Bank fire. But when you don’t have that kind of big story, you can’t just go on live with anything because you have 10 live trucks sitting around. You want to put on news that affects people’s lives and reflects the changes going on around them. That’s why I want to do the documentaries. That’s why I would like to put on some regular commentary on issues that concern the community.”

Though Feldman said he expects a somewhat improved product and improved ratings by the November sweeps, Wald said that the station is progressing methodically with the expansion because he wants to get it right the first time. Expect the revamped news in about one year, Wald said.

At that time, the station will also begin weekend newscasts and an afternoon newscast.

“I think people feel that a local station has got to have ties to the community, and without a news operation it’s tough to show that you do,” Feldman said. “If you don’t have local people on the air talking about local issues, there may be a sense of estrangement. Even in this huge, diverse city in the 1990s, people still yearn for some kind of small-town feeling. Obviously, you’re never going to get there completely, but a strong news commitment can help bring people closer to that feeling.”