Disney’s Television Gamble : Locally, the company’s KCAL is armed with high tech and Jerry Dunphy--but can it find an audience for three hours of prime-time news?

It will have the biggest news staff, the newest cameras, satellite links, trucks and editing systems, and the highest-paid anchor of any television station in town. And it will be the only commercial TV station ever to program all three hours of prime time with news instead of entertainment.

It’s either the dumbest thing anyone has ever tried in the history of local television or another coup for the entertainment conglomerate founded by Walt Disney, which has proven so successful in such diverse endeavors as amusement parks, motion pictures, pay television, TV syndication and the merchandising of toys.

On March 5, the Walt Disney Co.’s first and only television station, KCAL Channel 9, will roll out its once-delayed and much-anticipated three-hour, 8 to 11 p.m. local newscast.

To get it off the ground, Disney reportedly has poured $30 million into upgrading the station’s news department. A big chunk--$5 million--went to Jerry Dunphy, who was lured away from KABC Channel 7 last year with a five-year, million-dollar-a-year contract. The rest went to pay the other 149 news employees--up from the 38 that the previous owner employed--and to equip the station with an impressive arsenal of electronic news hardware.

“We have 18 camera truck units--10 (that can broadcast) live--plus a satellite truck, plus a chopper equipped with a microwave,” said Bob Henry, KCAL’s news director, sounding like an army general bragging about the strength of the unit under his command. “We also have 16 edit suites on site, three vans equipped with editing, a satellite truck equipped with editing and a travel edit package that we can send to remote locations. That’s 21 total editing units.”

They have a new, ultra-modern newsroom and a new set built on a sound stage at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. They will eventually position a camera on the roof of the sound stage that will be capable of shooting a 360-degree panorama of all of Los Angeles. They have sports guys, weathermen, consumer reporters, entertainment reporters, health reporters and business reporters. They have contracts with CNN, the London-based Worldwide Television News and Conus (a conglomerate of about 90 stations equipped with satellite trucks that share feeds with each other) to supply video from all over the world.

They have just about everything, including the assurance from Michael Eisner, chairman of Walt Disney Co., that even if the prime-time newscast struggles for years to draw an audience large enough to make this enterprise even a tiny bit profitable, Disney will not pull the plug.

“We are not kidding ourselves. We are not going to be competitive or financially profitable in the first week or the first month or probably the first year,” Eisner told The Times. “It’s not like putting on ‘The Cosby Show’ or ‘E.T.’ or ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and having it be No. 1 in town in the first or second week. L.A. residents are going to have to learn that KCAL is the place to turn to when events are happenning, to find out what’s going on in sports or the stock market or out there in the streets. It takes years to earn the kind of credibility that we want to get.”

Given the imposing obstacles facing KCAL, competitors contend that it will probably take longer than that. The station has minimal news credibility, is challenging six other strong UHF-TV stations and is trying to lure viewers away from “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne” and a myriad other entertainment programs.

“They are competing in a time period that doesn’t want news,” said Robert Hyland, general manager of KCBS Channel 2. “Unless there is a major story, viewers in prime time want to be entertained. People can get news from radio or CNN any time they want or they can wait for local news at 10 or 11. Viewers want to escape, they want relief for a couple of hours. To shear off enough viewers in prime time to watch news seems like an impossible assignment.”

It’s not as if Southern California is wanting for local TV news. Viewers can watch some sort of local news at 6-7 a.m., noon-12:30 p.m., 4-7 p.m., 8-8:30 p.m., 9-9:30 p.m., 10-11 p.m. and 11-11:30 p.m. KNBC Channel 4 repeats its 11 p.m. newscast at 2 a.m. and again at 4:30 a.m. And that doesn’t include any of the network news programs or the 24-hours a day of CNN or Headline News on cable.

“There are so many places already to get news,” said Rick Feldman, station manager at KCOP Channel 13. “If CNN didn’t exist, I’d say this was a good idea. But if you are a news junkie, you are probably already watching CNN. To me, this newscast seems like it’s for junkies. And they already have a home.”

For Disney, however, news is an identity. When the company purchased the station for $320 million in December, 1988, it acquired Los Angeles’ last-place station, KHJ-TV, which for two decades had been plagued by licensing problems with the Federal Communications Commission and had been underfinanced by its owner, RKO. Disney’s top priority was getting the local audience to take notice of Channel 9.

“It’s like being the third and youngest son,” said Randy Reiss, Disney Studios executive vice president. “Unless you did something different, nobody paid attention to you. It’s the same in this market.”

Reiss said that Disney’s research showed that viewers had neither a positive nor a negative perception of Channel 9. “We had no image, we were just there,” he said. “Which is a better place to start from, actually, because you don’t have to overcome any negatives. So you become something. You change the call letters and you become something new.”

Deciding what to become was pretty straightforward for most hours of the day. Disney produces animated kids programming, so KCAL will carry those programs in the mornings and the afternoons. In between, the station is committed to a heavy dose of women-oriented talk shows featuring the likes of Regis Philbin, Sally Jesse Raphael and Joan Lunden. In the early evening, Disney has chosen to spend heavily on syndicated reruns of network sitcoms such as “Who’s the Boss?,” which is on the air, and, for the future, “ALF,” “The Hogan Family,” “Perfect Strangers,” “The Golden Girls” and “227.”

Prime time wasn’t so easy. Independent stations traditionally have relied on theatrical movies during those hours. Since Disney makes movies, it would seem logical for the company to program those movies on its own television station. But Disney executives balked at the idea. “They looked at the market and decided that there was too much competition in movies, not only from the other three indies (KTLA Channel 5, Fox-owned KTTV Channel 11 and KCOP Channel 13) but also from HBO and Showtime and all the rest,” said Bruce Cheen, senior analyst for Paul Kagen Associates, a media and financial research firm in Carmel. “They said, ‘Why should I join the pack? I’ll carve out a niche in news.’ ”

Explained Richard Frank, president of Walt Disney Studios: “You would have to commit over $100 million before you are even in the movie business, and you don’t start getting those movies for a couple of years. The other way to go was to take similar expenditures and try to carve out our own niche in this market. We think people are looking for a lot more information in their lives, whether it’s CNN or ESPN or Financial News Network. People want to know about things. They want to be kept on top of everything immediately.”

It’s a tenant in broadcasting that creating a credible news operation adds prestige to a station, and even KCAL’s local competitors believe that its three-hour newscast will help polish the station’s image. “It could be a smart thing,” said Channel 13’s Feldman. “It gets them an image, it gets them talked about. If Disney couldn’t compete with something else, news could be the cheapest thing to program.”

“I applaud them for it,” said Jeff Wald, news director at KTLA, the longtime independent leader in news. “Any time any station makes a commitment to news, it puts all of us on our toes to work harder. And I think the viewer wins.”

But skepticism abounds about KCAL’s ability to attract enough of an audience to make this expensive venture profitable. Media analysts say that viewers will watch a station’s newscast only if the station has earned credibility in news. Channel 5 and Hal Fishman dominate the independent news scene because L.A. residents have come to trust him over nearly 20 years.

Both Channel 11 and Channel 13, for example, have made concerted efforts the last few years, although not on this same scale, to upgrade their news presence. After anchor changes, format changes and investments in equipment, neither has been able to significantly improve the rating of its 10 p.m. newscast or make a dent in KTLA’s.

Nabbing Dunphy, perhaps the most recognizable newscaster “from the desert to the sea (in) all of Southern California,” is the one “bright and shining” move Disney has made so far, several competitors agree. But Michael Singer, KCBS Channel 2 news director, predicted it will take a minimum of five years to build a credible news team.

“This is like a 3-year-old fighting an adult,” Singer said. “Who are these people? They have no track record. They haven’t built up a substantial number of ground-breaking, award-winning, aggressive reporters. They haven’t done anything interesting or innovative that I can see. That’s probably why they are bragging so much about all their trucks. But I have to say that having the most satellite uplinks doesn’t make a better news.”

Producing a better news is what Disney and KCAL executives insist will set their news operation apart and, in time, grab enough viewers to contribute heavily to Disney’s huge coffers. They promise to blanket the city with their trucks and crews, providing live coverage from all over Southern California. They also promise to offer more depth, more explanation.

“Now we have to deliver it,” Reiss said. “I’ve heard these buzzwords--doing the hard news harder, staying with it longer, following it up the next day--I’ve heard it all before. We will just have to deliver.”

For his part, Dunphy, 67, the local news icon who will lead the charge for Disney, said that he has never seen such a concerted effort “to produce the best possible news” in his 30 years in broadcasting.

“This is the best topper for my career that I could imagine,” he said. “It’s kind of nice to be back for real like I was back at Channel 2 when ‘The Big News’ made national history. For the first 10 or 12 years, everyone was dedicated to producing a serious news product, and we made everyone take notice. Then, it evaporated or was emasculated.

“Disney has shown that it is committed to provide all the support and the dollars it’s going to take to put together the best-quality news operation possible without all the frivolous froth that we’ve been so accustomed to watching on local news. So this is certainly refreshing to me.”

More than one competitor insists, however, that Disney is trying to buy credibility, believing shiny new equipment will produce quality and ratings. The more cynical charge that the money may be a way to seduce advertisers into saying, “ ‘Look what Disney is doing. This is not a stupid company. They must be on to something here.’ ”

Channel 2’s Hyland points out that in recent years the network-owned stations have been cutting back the number of hours they broadcast news. Not so long ago, his station produced news at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., but it dumped those newscasts because it couldn’t get an audience. KABC-TV Channel 7, the only station airing three full hours of local news in the afternoon, is planning to cut back half an hour this fall. Reruns of sitcoms and “Hunter” have been slicing into the news ratings on the strong and well-equipped network stations, even in these traditional news broadcast periods.

“Kids control the sets in the afternoon and they watch sitcoms on the independents,” Hyland said. “But kids also control the sets at 8 p.m. And during sweeps (the critical ratings periods of February, May and November), when Channels 5, 11 and 13 are all airing their best movies and the networks air their big miniseries, who is going to give that up to watch the news?”

Eisner acknowledged that “it is a lot of gut instinct” that leads his company to believe there is an appetite for news in prime time. The reason news ratings are down in the afternoon, Disney contends, is that many would-be news viewers aren’t home yet.

“There is a great deal of news available in this market, but it’s not available to a lot of people,” said Jim Saunders, KCAL’s station manager. “The freeways are jammed at 6 p.m. with people who can’t get home in time to see one of those early newscasts. And if you get home at 7 or 7:30, you sometimes don’t want to wait until 10 to get the news. We are offering an alternative and providing news when the highest concentration of people are available.

“Yes, we are doing this to provide a service, to break new ground, to create something different, but if we knew it was going to lose money, we would not do it. This is not a philanthropy.”

Dunphy believes CNN has already done much to break traditional news viewing habits simply by being available all the time. “And when you translate this to local markets, I think you’ll find that the same kind of news appetite was there all the time, but the product was never there.”

KCAL currently airs a half-hour newscast at 8 p.m. and another half-hour at 9 p.m. Recent ratings for these two programs are slightly lower than they were a year ago, before Dunphy and Pat Harvey took over the anchor chores. KCAL executives caution, however, that neither the news content nor the ratings should be judged yet because their new facility and staff have not been in place long enough. The newscast has not even moved onto the new set, which has just been completed. (The three-hour newscast was originally scheduled to premiere Jan. 15, but KCAL could not get everything ready in time. At press time last Wednesday, KCAL still had not secured some of the trucks and the helicopter that Henry plans to deploy. The station had also yet to sign the anchorwoman it planned to use on the 10 p.m. broadcast.)

Another problem KCAL faces is that news viewership for hourlong newscasts drops off significantly over the course of the program. Even Channel 5’s well-regarded newscast receives higher ratings for the first 15 or 30 minutes of the show than for the second half, as viewers turn away after seeing the top stories of the day.

Disney officials will not say what sort of rating it will need in order to break even. They simply say that “we are not there yet,” and that they will have to average somewhere between its current rating of about a 3 and KTLA’s usual 5 or 6 mark (each point represents 49,315 households). “We won’t have to redefine new ratings levels to live comfortably,” Reiss said.

On the positive side, KCAL will benefit from the fact that the people who watch TV news are increasingly prized by advertisers, many of whom are willing to pay a premium to reach them, said media analyst Cheen.

But others familiar with the local market predict that KCAL will be hard-pressed to maintain even its current news ratings, let alone rise to a 4. One former Channel 9 news employee said that what will be needed to push the venture into the black is nothing less than “a disaster a day.”

“I don’t expect to see any kind of ratings jump for the first year, and even if it didn’t happen then, I wouldn’t be discouraged,” Frank said. “A lot will depend on whether there is a disaster that happens after 6:30 p.m., and then people will tune in and find us sooner. We want to ultimately become the station that people trust and tune to when something is happening. Right now they go to KTLA and that comes from 40 years of covering little girls falling in wells and the old ‘Jetcopter 5.’ If we do a good job, if we show viewers that if something breaks we will always be there, we can make people comfortable coming to us.”

It’s a lofty and, even Disney’s doubters concede, “noble” goal. And most of KCAL’s competitors want to withhold judgement until they see the product the station puts on the air March 5.

News director Henry remains secretive about the precise content of his newscasts, claiming that many of KCAL’s plans have some competitive value. He said only that the 8 p.m. hour will focus primarily on local news, that the 9 p.m. broadcast will provide a California perspective on national and international news and that the 10 p.m. show, which will face direct competition from news on Channels 5, 11 and 13, will be the station’s newscast of record, covering all the day’s events. The anchors will change for each hour. Dunphy will be handle the 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. broadcasts. Each newscast will feature sports and weather, while money, entertainment and consumer segments will be sprinkled throughout.

Henry said that KCAL will also debut a 5:30 a.m. newscast next Monday, will continue airing a half-hour newscast at noon and will premiere a 10 p.m. weekend newscast on March 10. In all, the station will air 22 hours of local news each week.

While Dunphy and weekend anchor Larry Carroll, also formerly of KABC, are familiar faces, Disney has staffed the station with a whole new cast, most of them from out of town. Henry’s last job was news director at a Grand Rapids, Mich., station. The weathercasters are from Oklahoma City and Seattle. The sports reporters come from Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver. The consumer reporter worked in Indianapolis. New reporters and anchors have migrated from Cincinnati, Miami, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Barbara.

Just about everyone who used to produce the station’s news--including former news director Stephanie Rank Brady and executive producer Bill Northup--is gone. A joke circulating around town is that Disney hired Dunphy not only to read the news on the air but also to read the Thomas Guide street map of Los Angeles to all the out-of-town employees.

“Channel 9 was a fairly lackluster, under-performing kind of news operation,” Henry said when questioned about the housecleaning. “We want people who know how to use six live trucks on a given night. The station only had two before. We want people who can create graphics using the latest technology. We want people who know how to use and dispatch all of our trucks and crews. We want people who know how to take in six feeds at once from all over the country. So we made changes.”

“Live” is the word that Henry uses most to describe why he believes KCAL’s news will eventually surpass all others in the market and to explain why the station needs the helicopter, satellite truck and news vans. Local news in the last decade has turned more and more to putting reporters on the air live from remote locations--at the beach describing an oil slick or down at the Forum just before the start of a Lakers game.

“Television news is best when reporting on a process in real time,” explained Channel 2’s Singer. “No one else can do that and the impact can be extraordinary.”

But Singer and Channel 5’s Wald caution that when a station puts so much emphasis on news hardware, even bragging about it in radio ads, it can be driven more by the technology than news judgment.

They contend that except for a major earthquake, a station would never need 10 live shots in one three-hour period. Most news days, one, two, maybe three live shots is all that’s appropriate and the rest of the stories can be written, thought through and researched better on tape, Wald said.

“The reason news ratings are down in general is because executives have let the tail wag the dog and the hardware has come to outweigh the significance of the story,” Wald theorized. “Many stations end up doing something live just for the sake of live, and it becomes silly.”

Even before it has been able to deploy its new arsenal, KCAL already has been guilty of some questionable news judgment. One night this month, the station spent several minutes at the top of the newscast at 8 showing a live picture of an overturned truck on a freeway in the northern reaches of Los Angeles County. The reporter discussed the rather routine accident and interviewed a Highway Patrol officer on the scene. The story, Disney executives admitted, was inconsequential.

“If all we’re doing is having all these trucks out there covering traffic, then we will fail,” Frank said. “But we will do some good things too. We had the first pictures of that recent plane crash in New York because we happened to be on the air and the cable station in Long Island is part of our Conus network. And our ratings shot up that night.”

“We will make some mistakes,” said Blake Byrne, KCAL’s general manager. “We will experiment and make mistakes and learn from them. I just hope the newscast on March 5 isn’t treated like a Disney movie premiere by those people that have the power to comment on what we are doing. We are not in this for a movie premiere. We’re in this for years.”