Building on Strong Station Identification : Television: New KTLA General Manager Greg Nathanson plans to focus on local sports, news.

When Greg Nathanson arrived last week as general manager of KTLA Channel 5, he found that not much had changed since he’d left the station in 1980. Touring Channel 5’s Hollywood lot, he saw all sorts of familiar landmarks.

“The technicians were all the same. The news people like Hal Fishman and Stan Chambers were all the same.” Even the colorful mosaic coffee table decorated in tribute to the number “5” sat unmoved in the place it had always occupied in the middle of the general manager’s office.

But 12 years after giving up his post as program director at Los Angeles’ top-rated independent station for a series of television jobs elsewhere, Nathanson conceded that the independent television landscape in Los Angeles had changed dramatically.

Back then, cable was virtually nonexistent, the three network stations dominated prime time the way the Olympic “Dream Team” wins basketball games, and the four area independents all competed with some variation of the same formula: local news, local sports, old movies and sitcoms, shows for kids and quirky locally produced relics like “Bowling for Dollars.”

Today, KTTV Channel 11--where Nathanson served as general manager from 1988 to 1990, and then as president of the Fox Television Stations until quitting last month--has abandoned much of its local orientation in favor of serving the needs of the surging Fox network. KCAL Channel 9 is now owned by Disney and has attempted to carve out a niche by focusing primarily on Disney cartoons, talk shows and blocks of local news. And KCOP Channel 13, has teamed up with a network of indies around the country to create a first-run national programming service--featuring such shows as “Baywatch” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

While all this, plus the addition of cable, has intensified the competition for viewers, the differentiation of each station has served, Nathanson said, to distinguish KTLA even more than ever as “ the Los Angeles station.” That, and swiping the Dodgers from KTTV, as of next season.

“Every independent station today has to have a unique selling position to break through the flood of cable,” Nathanson explained. “So all the local stations are trying to position themselves with a certain identity and this station very intelligently is going with two strong Los Angeles images: sports--with the Dodgers, Angels, Kings (and area college games)--and local news.”

Nathanson, 45, said that nothing truly represents Los Angeles like Vin Scully and the Dodgers. “If the goal is to be the local station, you can’t really do it with sports unless you have the Dodgers or maybe the Lakers as part of that,” he said. Up until a month ago, KTLA had neither. KCAL has the Lakers locked up and KTTV, where the Dodgers can be seen through the end of this current season, had been the home of the local baseball team for 34 years.

Though Nathanson said Dodger games brought a huge influx of advertising revenue to his former station, the conflict between network programming and baseball, especially as Fox expands, became unworkable both for the Dodgers and KTTV.

“I know the Dodgers are having a lousy season, but what do we do if you have Orel Hershiser pitching for the pennant in September and that same night you have the premiere of ‘The Simpsons,’ ” Nathanson said.

Fox’s conflict became KTLA’s windfall, which Nathanson inherited when he moved down the street to Channel 5. The station will also retain broadcast rights to the Angels, intends to expand the number of Kings hockey games it airs this fall and has also purchased a package of Pac 10 basketball games. While Nathanson concedes that all of these sports are readily available on cable, such a concentration of local teams, especially in baseball, will distinguish KTLA from other outlets. He thinks that local flavor should help bring in new viewers.

Though Nathanson had decided to leave Fox a few months ago, he had no expectations of ending up with the Dodgers at KTLA. In fact, KTLA had previously announced the hiring of Michael Eigner, the general manager of WPIX in New York, to replace longtime General Manager Steve Bell, who left last month to run the network television division of 20th Century Fox. After announcing his resignation from Fox, Nathanson, in fact, contacted executives at Tribune Broadcasting, which owns seven stations including KTLA and WPIX, about Eigner’s job in New York.

When Tribune began to show urgent interest in him, Nathanson, the father of three young boys, said he hesitated, telling them that he’d first have to take his family to check out New York “because my wife’s never been out of California and one of my sons has never even worn long pants.” His fear of the Eastern winter was premature because Eigner and his family decided they did not want to move to Los Angeles, and Tribune turned to Nathanson for the KTLA job.

Nathanson said he quit Fox because owner Rupert Murdoch’s reorganization of the seven Fox-owned stations meant that news directors would report to a Fox executive developing a network newscast rather than to a local general manager. Nathanson said that under such an arrangement he would have lost control over the news show and seen Fox network interests take precedence over local news departments.

“At Fox stations, you do feel sort of like a stepchild and that your only purpose is to build this greater monster,” said Nathanson, who also regretted that his time as station group boss was consumed with worries about such things as transmitter problems in Dallas rather than with the nuts-and-bolts of local programming that he relishes most.

A movie buff who has worked as an executive at Showtime and ABC and the man credited with creating KTLA’s “Twilight Zone” holiday marathons, Nathanson said that KTLA will continue to air movies in prime time as an alternative to network fare, especially now that the field among the independents is far less congested than it was five or 10 years before.

But the key to KTLA’s local identity, he insists, will still be local news. Though station executives still brag about KTLA’s coverage of news events that occurred before many of its viewers were even born, the 10 p.m. newscast, anchored by Hal Fishman, has continually clobbered its competitors for more than a decade. Even in recent years, as the other three independents have beefed up their news departments in an effort to topple KTLA, its scholarly, traditional broadcast has remained firmly on top.

During most emergencies, such as last month’s earthquakes, KTLA’s coverage draws far more viewers than any of the other independent stations. Nevertheless, Channel 5’s quake coverage trailed the three network stations by a wide margin.

And while Nathanson said that the station pays its star anchor a handsome salary--reportedly in the mid- to high-six-figures annually--he contends that throwing huge sums of money at an anchor, as KNBC Channel 4 has done in its $8-million-plus deal with Paul Moyer, is not a strategy that will keep KTLA on top.

“I’m not sure there is audience loyalty to anchors like Moyer who switch from station to station. I think the stability at KTLA of Hal Fishman and Stan Chambers is so much more powerful,” Nathanson said. “Trying to see how high you can inflate an anchor’s salary is a stupid game to play. What happens, I think, is that the public may actually start to resent that salary like they have done with some of these baseball players and very well could end up responding negatively to him.”

Whatever its costs, local news is vital, Nathanson said, because it above all else gives a station an identity--a reason for viewers to turn there. He added that the old axiom--the station that is No. 1 in news is generally the No. 1 station in the market--still mostly holds true. News is so crucial that at KTTV, Nathanson approved the gavel-to-gavel broadcast of the Rodney G. King beating trial, despite a loss of about $1 million in ad revenue, in hopes that such a news commitment would rub off on the station’s regular news programs.

KCAL has found success in expanding news to time periods in which it has no local news competition. Following that lead, KTLA scored big last year when it debuted a light-hearted morning newscast that regularly defeats the network morning shows and, Nathanson claims, has brought a new and younger audience to KTLA.

Nathanson said he plans to expand locally produced programming in an effort to lure new audiences, specifically the growing Latino population. He said he is unsure as yet exactly what form the “next step in localism” will assume. It could be expanded news hours or even, borrowing from his former employer, “something like a Hispanic ‘In Living Color.’

“L.A. is such an amazingly diverse community and I think the station has to figure out ways to reach all segments of that population,” he said. “If you look at the success of the top radio stations in the market (such as KPWR-FM and KIIS-FM), they have figured out a way to reach the Hispanic and other minority audiences that are becoming the majority out there. Television hasn’t done much of that yet, and I think our greatest goal is we’ve got to make sure that our fastest-growing segments have a reason to tune to us.”