KCAL News Format Draws Low Ratings

KCAL Channel 9’s three-hour prime-time newscast, the first broadcast of its kind in the country, attracted only 4% of the audience during its first month on the air, drawing lower ratings than its half-hour newscasts were getting a year ago.

KCAL executives said that they are not discouraged and continue to believe audience growth will occur over a long time.

The Disney-owned station, which reportedly spent $30 million on personnel and equipment to launch the novel news experiment, averaged a 2.3 rating for the first four weeks of prime-time news, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co.--about 113,000 households a night out of the total 4.9 million television households in the Los Angeles area.

A year ago, with a small staff and bare-bones technical resources, Channel 9 was drawing 159,000 households a night for each of two half-hour newscasts it was offering in prime time.

Local news analysts have estimated that the three-hour newscast will have to average between 200,000 and 300,000 homes every night to break even.

“I’m not going to talk about the ratings,” Jim Saunders, KCAL’s station manager, said in an interview Tuesday. “It takes years to build real ratings results. Anyone who thinks it can be done in a month is a damn fool. No news product is ever a failure or a success at four weeks. It’s not like a game show. ‘Wheel of Fortune’ was a success after 90 days. No news show can do that.”

“So far there are no surprises,” said Randy Reiss, executive vice president of Walt Disney Studios. “I can say unequivocally that there is no panic over here, no second thoughts. That’s the beauty of working for a company like ours. You can afford to do things that you believe in and not look for results the next day. We’re on track. We’re not ecstatic.”

Ratings since the prime-time news debuted March 5 do not indicate that KCAL has begun to build a following. After a relatively strong first week, when curiousity and a sizable advertising push helped bring viewers to the station, audience levels for the three newscasts at 8, 9 and 10 p.m. dropped to a very low plateau.

On average, only 4% of the available audience chose to tune in. By contrast, movies on independent competitors KTLA Channel 5, KTTV Channel 11 and KCOP Channel 13 each grabbed 7% of the audience, while network programming on KABC Channel 7 and KNBC Channel 4 each garnered 21% of the local viewership, and KCBS Channel 2 received 15%. The remaining 18% of the audience watched UHF stations or cable channels.

KCAL’s news audience also dropped off significantly as each newscast wore on. The 8 p.m. hour, anchored by Jerry Dunphy and Jane Velez-Mitchell, was seen in nearly 150,000 homes a night. The 9 p.m. newscast, featuring David Jackson and Pat Harvey, lost nearly one-third of those viewers, and the 10 p.m. broadcast, which is anchored by Dunphy and Harvey and faces direct news competition from Channels 5, 11 and 13, lost another 30,000, slipping to a 1.6 rating, or about 79,000 homes each night.

That 10 p.m. broadcast finished last among the four independent stations’ competing newscasts, some 143,000 homes a night behind top-ranked KTLA.

Reiss said that because KCAL’s three-hour news is so new, the station has “to shout” to attract attention to itself and that Disney plans to launch another major promotion for the May ratings sweeps.

Although they said that the station has experienced too many technical glitches and has yet to distinguish itself from the news products available on the other stations, Reiss and Saunders expressed satisfaction that KCAL is producing a “competent news” and plans to do better.

“It has been in no way embarrassing,” Saunders said. “The worst thing is that we haven’t been as aggressive or innovative as we need to be to make sure that within each program we have something that is truly unique to us. We obviously need to run a few more risks, and over time we will. The thing it needs most is time.”