Will KTTV’s ‘Mr. Emmy’ Report a Win This Time? : Television: Chris Blatchford’s previous eight nods didn’t earn him the trophy. He’s up for six tonight.

His colleagues and his boss teasingly call him “Mr. Emmy.” In his three years as “undercover”/investigative reporter at KTTV-TV Channel 11, Chris Blatchford has received 14 local Emmy Award nominations--although, he points out, he’s yet to win a single one.

“These aren’t touchy-feely [stories],” Blatchford said, trying to explain why he hasn’t collected an Emmy yet. “We sort of live in a touchy-feely world, and I think some people are offended by what I do. They just don’t understand it.”

What Blatchford and his producer, Dan Leighton, do is hang out, sometimes with hidden cameras, with the kind of people and in the kind of places that most people hope they never have to face. Gun-toting gangsters, runaway teen-age “gutter punks,” junkie prostitutes--Blatchford tells their stories. He gets inside these worlds for weeks at a time, revealing how they live and why they live that way.

“I have always been interested in the underside of life. Crime and poverty are sort of the cutting-edge to me. I don’t know why,” said Blatchford, 48, who grew up in suburban Chicago among a family of journalists. “The rough stuff, the underbelly, the little guy, that’s what I like. It’s exciting. Covering City Hall is not exciting.”

For his excitement this last year, he was honored with six Los Angeles Area Emmy Award nominations: two in the “serious news” category, one in the “light news” category, and one each for hard news reporter, investigative reporter and news writer. The winners will be announced at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium tonight by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

“It’s hard for me to say what, if anything, distinguishes me as a reporter, but I think mostly we stand out because we tell stories, and that isn’t happening much in local news,” said Blatchford, who is married and has two teen-age children. “People want stories, and that’s part of the success of the tabloids like ‘Hard Copy.’ It’s not only because of the T&A; and murders. They tell stories. They’re talking about a salacious murderer, and you see where he went to high school and his little town. You’d never see that on [the news on] Channels 2, 4 or 7. It gives you something to digest. And I think that’s one of the awful things about local news today, they don’t have storytellers anymore.”

For his success in that regard, Blatchford thanks Leighton, a 49-year-old TV producer, who, with his white beard and baggy shorts, looks as if he’s been following the Grateful Dead around his entire life. Leighton, a homeless runaway at 14 and then a community organizer in South-Central Los Angeles during the 1960s and ‘70s before becoming a TV producer in 1976, is of “the street” like few other TV news professionals.

“What I try to do is just be out with cameras looking for stories,” he said. “I just find things on the street and start to shoot stuff. Chris is usually doing something else, because usually the station can’t afford to have an on-air person just roaming in the middle of the night, and I’m just out there roaming. I’m crazy. I sleep in the truck sometimes and just find stuff.”

This approach takes time, the kind of time rarely available in the shoot-and-throw-it-on-the-air world of local news. Blatchford, who does all the formal interviewing, writing and editing while Leighton roams, can spend up to two months on a project, and KTTV news director Jose Rios often gives him up to 20 minutes over several nights to tell the entire story.

“Most people in most newsrooms are doing all they can now just to fill their daily news hole,” Rios said. “But we’re all sick of television and the way it’s done in most places in L.A., because it really is such a rushed thing that includes so little thought and it’s boring. And it’s boring because the time and intelligence that should be brought to bear on it just isn’t. Some spot news is always going to be that way, but there’s room in everyone’s broadcast for something special.”

Blatchford wishes sometimes that he could expand his investigative reports into a regular show on Fox. But to crank it out once a week, he’d have to give up control to other producers and reporters. That’s also the problem with working for one of the network prime-time magazines, he said. Although they do some similar kinds of work, it is producers rather than the reporters who control the story and editing processes.

As for the larger, network-owned stations, Blatchford worked for eight years at KCBS-TV Channel 2 on similar projects. But then came a new news director who didn’t want anything but breaking news and was mandated to cut the budget. Blatchford and his hefty salary--he’s worked in news for 25 years, from Peoria to Kansas City to Miami--were expendable.

“TV in most places doesn’t get what I do,” Blatchford said. “They make you an investigative reporter, but they don’t understand what that means. They say, ‘You’re our investigative reporter--can you do something every day?’ But you can’t. It takes time to do these things. But they pay you so much money that they want you on TV every day, so you end up getting fired.

“I’d love to do nothing but this. I’d love a bigger stage. I’m sick of daily news. I think it’s vacuous crap. Daily stuff is fun when you’re young and learning, but I feel like I know something now. I’d like to teach a little bit more with what I do. I have more to offer than a minute and a half. And I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t let me do that at Channels 2, 4 or 7.”