Ktla Television Station

Local television newscasts landed at both the top and bottom of the scale in terms of quality, according to a major study released Thursday by a group affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Evening newscasts were generally of higher quality, with KCBS Channel 2 outranking its network competitors, concluded a study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is funded by the Pew Charitable Funds.

"Synergy." If you don't spend hours wading through entertainment industry press releases, you may be relatively unfamiliar with the term, which has become as common in Hollywood as inflated box-office estimates. Synergy refers to the way huge companies use one asset to promote and support another, theoretically making the sum of their assets greater than the various parts. There's synergy, for example, between Walt Disney Co.'

A proposal by the Los Angeles Police Department to take charge of a media helicopter for shooting videotape of protests and other events downtown during the Democratic National Convention is raising questions of press independence and police tactics. Some fear it will make local television a branch of the LAPD. Others say it is the only way to provide vital images to the public.

Tribune Co.'s merger with Times Mirror Co. is reminiscent of another major acquisition by the Chicago-based media company nearly 15 years ago: the purchase of KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles. Tribune bought the television station in 1986 for a then-unprecedented $510 million from Golden West Broadcasting, which had bought it for $245 million just three years earlier from cowboy star Gene Autry.

When Marcia Brandwynne took the reins of "The KTLA Morning News" as executive producer last January, the show's ratings had slipped and morale was low among an anchor team known for its cheeky camaraderie. The staff had been through a rocky few months with an interim steward following the departure of longtime executive producer Joel Tator in October 1998.

A bubbly Claudia Trejos is describing her first nights as KTLA-TV's weekend sports anchor. "I held on to the desk and said, 'Help me, God. I know I've been a bad girl, but you got to let me hang in here,' " she says, giggling. Trejos is more lighthearted than one would expect right now. As a transplant from the Spanish-language sports scene, Trejos' appearance on KTLA a month ago had a cold reception from some English-language media critics.

They came out in the rain on Sunday to remember a little girl who died 50 years ago--a little girl whose ordeal transfixed a nation and helped give shape to the infant medium of television. Her name was Kathy Fiscus. She was 3 years old, and she had fallen more than 90 feet down an abandoned well on April 9, 1949, while playing with her older sister and two cousins in a San Marino field overgrown with weeds.

Buffy. Felicity. Hal Fishman? It's the oddest of alliances--given that Fishman has been anchoring the news in Los Angeles for more years than just about any viewer of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Felicity," two of the hit dramas on the still toddling WB network, have been alive. But it's an incongruous marriage of new and hip and old and traditional that the veteran anchorman predicts will in the coming months push KTLA-TV Channel 5 back to the top of the 10 p.m. news heap.

Many small businesses don't survive to see their ninth birthday, much less a television program that chronicles their strivings. So there will be plenty to celebrate next week when KTLA-TV Channel 5 broadcasts the 300th episode of "Making It! Minority Success Stories." The Emmy-winning program has profiled more than 600 minority entrepreneurs over its nine-year run, featuring every type of enterprise from mom and pops to multi-million-dollar corporations.

Veteran Los Angeles sportscaster Tony Hernandez has been hired by Channel 5 as Stu Nahan's replacement. Hernandez, who has been working at Channel 13 in recent years, will do the weeknight sports reports on Channel 5's 10 o'clock news, beginning Jan. 6, the news staff at Channel 5 was told Wednesday by news director Jeff Wald. Since Nahan's retirement from full-time duty in September, Ed Arnold has been doing the weeknight sports. Arnold will go back to doing weekends and mid-week features.