Countywide : TV News to Return to Ventura County

After four years without Ventura County news programming, an Oxnard-based television station has announced plans for daily newscasts beginning in June.

On June 28, KADY Television will begin broadcasting a 60-minute news program at 6 p.m. and a 30-minute show at 10 p.m. that will focus on Ventura County and the neighboring communities of Westlake Village, Agoura Hills and Malibu, said Dan Green, the station’s news director.

The newscast is the result of an agreement reached this week between KADY and Jones Intercable Inc., which serves about 36,000 cable television customers in Oxnard and Port Hueneme, representatives of the companies said Friday.

The cable company will provide capital and split profits with KADY, said John W. Hutton, Jones’ general manager. He said the news operation’s first-year budget will be $1 million.

KADY, the county’s only English-language television station, abandoned an earlier news program in 1989, leaving Ventura County the most populous area in the country without local daily news coverage in English, Green said.

KSTV, a Spanish-language station based in Ventura, covers news from Ventura County in addition to its coverage of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, said Claudio Macarty, the station’s general sales manager.

In recent years, the only English-language television news about Ventura County came from Los Angeles stations, which provide only sporadic coverage of the county, and from Santa Barbara station KEYT, which has a single reporter to cover Ventura County.

Green said Ventura County deserved its own news programming.

“Ventura County is thought of as a bedroom community of Los Angeles and as ‘that place to the south’ by Santa Barbara,” Green said. “It’s a great place, it just needs better news coverage.”

The station is in the process of hiring 25 additional staffers, including reporters, anchors, producers and technicians.