With Help From Rosie, KNBC Takes the Lead at 4

For 10 years it was a lost cause, bludgeoned by arch rival KABC-TV Channel 7, ignored and neglected by its own managers.

But since last fall--with boosts from the Olympics and Rosie O’Donnell--everything has changed for KNBC-TV Channel 4’s newscast at 4 p.m. Armed with a new lead-in and a new station strategy that has made the broadcast a top priority, the show has moved to the top of the ratings.

“Under the previous regime, we were told we never were going to win, and it wasn’t a happy place to be,” said Chuck Henry, the former KABC broadcaster who was hired by Channel 4 and teamed with Kelly Lange three and a half years ago. “We were just filling time waiting for the 5. We were the warmup act.”

Lange also found the attitude demoralizing. “The priority was on the 5 p.m. news, and everything good was held for that show. They thought our show should be soft and feature-ish.”

Things were so bad that Nancy Bauer, formerly the executive producer of the 4 p.m. news and now the station’s assistant news director, used to steal hard-news tape that was being saved for later broadcast and sneak it on her show.

“I was so filled with anger every day,” Bauer said. “But they had decided to pick their battles and they decided it was going to be with the 5 p.m. news. But the problem was that you can’t build a show at 5 out of the ashes. It makes a lot more sense to give viewers the greatest newscast every time you are on the air. And once the new management realized we were selling the 4 p.m. down the river, everything changed.”

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Surrendering the 4 o’clock hour over the years was not as illogical as it sounds, considering the tremendous advantage KABC enjoyed because of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” As the 3 p.m. lead-in to the afternoon news block, the popular “Oprah” perennially delivered triple the audience that Channel 4 was getting from its talk-show lead-ins, primarily “Sally Jessy Raphael.” KNBC also had laid out millions to lure Paul Moyer away from Channel 7 and so focused its promotional efforts on his newscasts at 5 and 11 p.m.

But even as NBC’s strong prime-time ratings helped boost Channel 4 out front at 11 p.m. three years ago, KABC continued to win in the late afternoon and early evening.

“We decided that we couldn’t wait for the right lead-in,” said Carole Black, KNBC’s general manager since August 1994. “The concentration had always been on the 5 p.m. news, which did well but never won. It made a great deal of strategic sense that if we had a bigger lead-in at 4, then the 5 would win.”

Black and her news director, Bill Lord, hired a new producer for the show in late 1995, Steve Holzer, who had managed at top-rated 4 p.m. news program in Denver. While the newscast no longer holds back on hard news, Holzer’s show emphasizes “useful features” on health, medicine, fashion, family life, the Hollywood scene, weatherman Fritz Coleman’s daily tidbits on the odd and kooky, and Fred Roggin’s profiles of unusual athletes. The aim is to appeal to a predominantly female daytime audience.

“It’s a different demographic than the other newscasts and you have to give the people what they want to see,” Holzer explained. “They don’t want to be bombarded with the heavy. We have to report the murders, but we also have to do other stuff. It’s a news-and-lifestyles newscast. I like the hard news, but it’s not all I like. I also want to know about things that will improve my health or help me live longer. I love to know what’s going on in Hollywood. The fact that the ‘Seinfeld’ cast is in a contract battle is interesting to me and to our viewers.”

Lange said that Holzer is also constantly in her and Henry’s earpieces during the show, cajoling “no chitchat, no chitchat.” The show is designed to move rapidly with lots of short, fast stories, providing an hour that they say is crammed with more information than before.

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But what really turned things around was the debut of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” against “Oprah” last June. It immediately brought new viewers to Channel 4, many of whom stuck around to sample the revamped 4 p.m. newscast. The Olympics in July lured even more viewers to the station. And by the November sweeps, the newscast had made up a 100,000-viewer deficit from the previous year to eke out its first victory in more than a decade. KNBC’s 5 p.m. news rode that wave to the top as well. (KABC has continued to win at 6 p.m.)

Then last February, as “Rosie” beat “Oprah” here at 3 p.m., KNBC’s 4 p.m. news took command, averaging 345,000 homes a day to KABC’s 285,000.

The “Rosie” audience is apparently a more natural match for news than what Lange called “the dysfunctional talk-show” fans who watched “Sally.” Those viewers, according to Lange and Bauer, were more likely to switch channels at 4 p.m. to find another talk show.

“ ‘Rosie’ has now become the show where it’s the place to be, the cool place to be,” Bauer said. “And Kelly and Chuck kind of take that and carry it forward. With Fritz and Fred, this newscast is a fun place to be now for our viewers, as opposed to many other places where they are just spitting out the news.”

Morale has soared at the station, according to Lange and Henry, but so has the strain of increased responsibility.

“It was demoralizing for me when I first came here because I used to getting such high ratings in Denver for my newscast,” producer Holzer said. “So making it to the top is a great validation for our ideas and our talent teams and all the hard work. It’s terrific, but it’s more pressure now than ever because so many more people are watching. We can’t just relax and take it for granted or we’ll fall right back down. Even on days when it’s lazy and slow out there in the news world, we have to somehow find a way to put on something great.”