KCBS Channel 2 Will Begin Airing OCN Reports

KCBS-TV Channel 2 and the Orange County NewsChannel have signed a deal likely to boost Orange County’s visibility throughout Southern California.

The agreement, announced Thursday, will allow the Los Angeles station, which has a daily audience of about 500,000 households, to air OCN news reports on its weekday morning and afternoon “CBS2 News” programs and on other news reports. KCBS also will broadcast OCN sports reports on Sunday and live footage of breaking stories covered by OCN, a 24-hour cable news channel produced out of Santa Ana and owned by the Connecticut-based Century Communications Corp.

In turn, OCN will be offered live footage of Orange County events covered by the KCBS news helicopter.

“The scope of TV news coverage in L.A. is narrow, and we wanted to expand it to include Orange County,” said station Vice President and General Manager John Culliton, noting that OCN’s newsroom employs about 60 staffers.

Added Bill Rosendahl, senior vice president of Century Communications: “This is an opportunity for CBS to get more substantive news about Orange County. The problem with Southern California is that people are not connecting to their local news because there’s such a [spread-out] population here, but the broadcast stations are based in L.A.”