Surviving and Thriving in the A.M. News Wars

By rights, “The KTLA Morning News” should have met with a swift execution. Everything was against it.

It had to compete from scratch with the three formidable network news shows and their stars, among them Bryant Gumbel and Joan Lunden.

It tried to do it with little more than a cast of out-of-town nobodies and a helicopter.

And perhaps most fatally of all, it tried to fill two hours of morning television with nothing but straight, ultra-serious reporting about traffic, the ubiquitous L.A. sunshine and recaps of yesterday’s news in a manner so mundane that co-anchor Barbara Beck joked, “It wasn’t a show anyone would bother waking up to watch.”

Yet on Monday, “The KTLA Morning News” celebrated its fifth birthday. For most of that time, the show has been No. 1 in Los Angeles, crushing “Today,” “Good Morning America” and “This Morning,” becoming a cash cow for the station and launching copycat programs in cities all over the country.

Truth is, it survived to do all that only because of a “happy accident” and an act of God.

“The first few months, things were falling apart so bad here and we all thought we were going to get canned, and so we just started having a good time,” said Beck, previously a news anchor in Miami and Biloxi, Miss.

“Everyone was saying, ‘It’s a terrible show. You can’t compete with the networks. It’s a loser. It’s folly.’ And what could we do? We just started laughing about it on the air.”

“We were laughing during commercials one time, moaning, ‘Oh no, we’re doomed,’ and suddenly we were back on the air and we just continued that conversation in plain view,” said Mark Kriski, the show’s weatherman. “And it’s just some fluke luck that we hit on this chemistry between all of us that the audience really seemed to like.”

They still did the traffic, weather and news, but mostly they did conversational shtick, teasing one another, bemoaning their personal lives, trying the occasional pratfall. When Colin Powell came in for an interview during his book tour last year, mixed in with the serious questions about whether he planned to run for president were such doozies as, “Which is better, original recipe or extra crispy?” and “Which of the Three Stooges is your favorite?”

“The one word that is key to the success is the word ‘real,’ ” said Joel Tator, the show’s executive producer, who joined the crew about three months into the show, just as it was about to expire. He said what he discovered was a show in which nothing happened. Although the on-air team wanted to loosen up a bit, their bosses had prohibited it.

A straight, traditional newscast--the most traditional and academic in the market--had kept KTLA’s 10 p.m. newscast on top for decades. The station feared that any fooling around, any deviation from that respected, serious tone in the morning, would rub off and pollute the credibility of the entire news department.

But Tator arrived and messed up the desk with newspapers, food and coffee. He encouraged the anchors to go off script, to make it more like a bunch of people sitting around shooting the topical breeze over breakfast.

“They started talking to each other like regular people, but they aren’t actors putting it on for the people at home,” Tator said. “And I think when they are talking about the news and then talking about how they didn’t have a date last night or they think the boss is a jerk, these are things everyone talks about, and I think the audience can really identify with that. . . .

“I remember when Mark Kriski was up to host a game show, and he didn’t get it, and he came on the air and talked about how depressed and disappointed he was. That is just something you don’t see anywhere else.”

“We aren’t pretending to be anchor people,” said Carlos Amezcua, Beck’s co-anchor. “We’re regular people who do TV and, warts and all, here we are, and people seem to appreciate that fact. They like when we talk about our babies, our kids, our pets, that we are nothing but people similar to all of them.”

But all of that, really, is what has kept the audience watching. It was Mother Nature, not doughnuts on the desk or stories about 2 a.m. feedings, that brought the audience there in the first place.

In January 1992, floods hit Ventura County, and KTLA was the only station on the air with live pictures of the devastation. While the network programs, taped three hours earlier in New York, did their usual thing, the audience flocked to Channel 5 to see the flood. Many viewers discovered right then that the show existed, and it has been on top ever since.

Once, Beck said, they were thrilled at public-service announcements to fill up commercial time that the sales department could hardly give away; now, said Sam Rubin, who left Fox to join the show as its entertainment reporter, “everyone in the sales department is driving a big new car or leasing a Lamborghini.”

Their success has spawned similar shows on local stations in Los Angeles and around the country. KTTV-TV Channel 11 launched its own morning program here, and the network shows have allowed more time for local news cut-ins and helicopter traffic shots. (KNBC-TV Channel 4 had pioneered a successful local news show at 6 a.m. five years earlier against less fierce competition.)

“It almost is amazing it took local stations so long to try this when you see how well we’ve done,” said Kriski, a former radio deejay and then TV weatherman in his native Montreal.

“But I guess the thinking was, how can we go up against the multimillion-dollar Bryant Gumbels with our little local rinky-dink budget? It’s like saying, ‘Hey, let’s do a local show and go against Leno and Letterman.’ It sounds crazy.”

“But the secret weapon that everyone is aware of now is local,” Tator said. “People would rather know what is going on around the corner than around the world. That is just a human reaction. You hear a fire engine, you want to know what it is. I don’t know why it took us so long to figure that out.”

Beck and Amezcua, who were straight local news anchors in other cities before arriving here, admit that it was a leap for them to let their personalities show so much. They did wonder if their news credibility would be tainted.

Not many anchors, for example, would needle a celebrity reporter for saying he thought that during his interview with Vendela, the supermodel seemed to have the hots for him, as they did with Rubin. But the morning hours somehow allow anchors to get away with things they couldn’t do in the evenings, they said.

“It was hard at first because in news it was always, ‘Don’t smile, don’t show too much expression, don’t put yourself in the broadcast,’ ” Beck said. “But I honestly think that we are better at doing the news stories because we are relaxed, and we don’t get into that horrible over-authoritative, overly dramatic, deep-voiced anchor mode.”

Big news events bring the show its highest ratings. Floods in the San Fernando Valley, the 1992 riots, the Malibu and Laguna Beach fires, the Northridge earthquake and the O.J. Simpson trial have helped keep the show on top.

It has remained No. 1 even during this last disaster-free year, but ratings have not been quite as spectacular. In the May ratings sweeps, for example, KTLA averaged more than 211,000 homes tuning in each morning, while runner-up “Good Morning America” on KABC-TV Channel 7 averaged 177,000. The two shows have been running about even during the last month.

Success on KTLA has brought Amezcua, Beck, Rubin and Kriski some of the same public recognition as the celebrities who make their way to the “Morning News.”

“It’s nice, actually, because people, when they recognize me out in the street, don’t treat me like a star but like their best friend, like someone they went to high school with,” said Amezcua, a former reporter for CBS who also worked at local stations in San Diego, New York and Denver.

“They don’t rush up and want my autograph like they would with Tom Cruise maybe, but they want to talk to me about some event we did on the morning news. It’s like they’ve experienced it with us.”

“Well, the only thing I can say is that the show has murdered my social life,” Beck, the lone unmarried one of the bunch, said in the joshing tone that characterizes the two-hour show.

“I’ve heard about all these great people who were going to ask me out, but they didn’t because they think I have to go to bed early because these guys keep telling everyone that on the air. Could you please just say that I can stay up? I sometimes stay up until 10:30!”

* “The KTLA Morning News” celebrates its fifth anniversary with its first broadcast in front of a live audience at a local restaurant on Thursday at 7 a.m.