KPCC Fills a Hunger for Local News

In his May 27 Sunday Calendar cover story on public radio in Los Angeles (“Public Radio, Under the Influence”), Sean Mitchell has mainly unkind words for KPCC-FM (89.3). Our sin? Covering local news. Mitchell lets the comments of local journalist Marc Cooper go unchallenged: “Local news doesn’t mean a damn thing to the average listener. . . . When you tell me you’re putting your focus on local news, I’ll tell you you’re from out of town.”

Of course! How could we have been so naive? L.A. isn’t a place, it’s a concept. It’s a balkanized collection of disparate communities living in ignorant isolation from one another, filled with people wholly uninterested in what’s going on in their own neighborhoods, let alone a few miles down the freeway.

This may be the view of certain L.A. journalists, but it has more to do with their biases than with reality. In the KPCC newsroom--which, by the way, is staffed entirely by Southern Californians--we think that those who dismiss local news are missing the best story of all: a massive, roiling megalopolis of millions, with an economy larger than those of many countries, the hub (for better or worse) of global pop culture, a place where perhaps the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet is juxtaposed with widespread poverty.

Southern California is the face of 21st century America: Where else are the No. 1 TV and radio stations Spanish-language? Everywhere you turn, you run into large communities of Armenians, Israelis, Iranians, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Cambodians, Vietnamese.

There is so much local news, it’s hard to know where to begin: Hollywood, the schools, the transit mess, Rampart, chromium in the water, suburban sprawl, urban infill. We cover these issues every day because they’re the things people care about: our work, our kids, our health, our environment.

It’s amusing to hear Cooper, et al, deride the concept of covering local news; what they don’t seem to realize is that, until KPCC stepped into the breach, Los Angeles was practically the only major media market in the United States that did not have a public radio station devoted to covering local news.

Ah, they say, but L.A. is different. L.A. is too big, it’s too spread out. There’s no central gathering place. I’m not suggesting that what we’re trying to do is easy. But does that mean we should shrug our shoulders and turn our back on what’s going on in our own communities?

At KPCC, local news is not the murder or car chase of the day. We strive to link the region’s diverse communities, taking our listeners on journeys into worlds they might otherwise never know--often right down the freeway. For example:

* They’ve visited with 75-year-old Momo Nagano, who’s woven a tapestry commemorating her previously Japanese American neighborhood in downtown L.A. and the many families who were sent to internment camps during World War II.

* They’ve toured jammed local clubs where the children and grandchildren of Latin American immigrants are grooving to rock en espanol.

* They’ve been to the top of a cliff on Catalina Island, as a biologist dangling from a helicopter places an 8-day-old bald eagle chick into a nest as part of a program to save Southern California’s only population of the national bird.

* They’ve traveled by bus to Central California with 20 inner-city kids as they visit their moms in the Chowchilla Women’s Prison.

Our morning talk show “AirTalk,” with Larry Mantle, is in the midst of a five-part series on the Native Americans of Southern California. Our afternoon talk show “Talk of the City,” with Kitty Felde, recently broadcast a town hall meeting in southeast L.A. on gangs and violence, and is planning another town hall that will seek solutions to the region’s airport troubles.

Some of the stories we’ve done have been suggested by listeners via our “newstips” e-mail. In fact, we’ve been deluged with dozens of excellent story ideas from people living all over Southern California. It’s just further confirmation that we’ve touched a chord.

KPCC’s audience is rapidly expanding because we’re filling a need; there’s a great hunger among many Southern Californians for local news, and with it, for a greater sense of community. While some in the media can’t be bothered to confront the challenge of covering an area as geographically diffuse as Los Angeles, at KPCC, we embrace it.