Newscast

KNBC-TV Channel 4 captured seven trophies at the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards, including all three handed out for regularly scheduled daily newscasts. KABC-TV Channel 7 and KTLA-TV Channel 5 also picked up seven awards each in the ceremonies Saturday night at the headquarters of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood. Fox Sports West collected four. KNBC's honors included best daily morning newscast for "Today in L.A. at 6 a.m.," best daily daytime newscast for "NBC4 News at 6 p.m. " and best daily evening newscast for "NBC4 News at 11 p.m. " It also won best news special for "NBC4 News at 11: The Death of Osama Bin Laden" and best live coverage of an unscheduled news event for "Seal Beach Massacre.

KNBC-TV Channel 4 captured seven trophies at the Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards, including all three handed out for regularly scheduled daily newscasts. KABC-TV Channel 7 and KTLA-TV Channel 5 also picked up seven awards each in the ceremonies Saturday night at the headquarters of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood. Fox Sports West collected four. KNBC's honors included best daily morning newscast for "Today in L.A. at 6 a.m.," best daily daytime newscast for "NBC4 News at 6 p.m. " and best daily evening newscast for "NBC4 News at 11 p.m. " It also won best news special for "NBC4 News at 11: The Death of Osama Bin Laden" and best live coverage of an unscheduled news event for "Seal Beach Massacre.

KTTV-TV Channel 11, which already offers weekday newscasts at 5 a.m., 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., is adding another at noon, beginning Monday. It will feature the same anchor team as the three morning news shows: Tony McEwing and Jean Martirez. The newscast will be followed at 12:30 p.m. by a rerun of "Cops," with "Tyra Banks" moving from noon to 1 p.m. -- Lee Margulies

Hey, Kardashians! Make room for the Jonas Brothers and Tim Tebow.E! Entertainment is getting a makeover. Since it launched more than two decades ago, the sassy, celebrity-obsessed cable channel has basked in the glow of Hollywood glitz. For the last five years it has specialized in the high-profile exploits of Kim, Khloe, Kourtney and their mom, Kris. Now the channel that once featured a reality show about tabloid train wreck Anna Nicole Smith is widening its lens and trying to leave its trashy elements behind.

Maybe Greg Braxton, who reported on Paul Moyer's retirement ["KNBC Anchor Moyer Retires," April 2], could explore why, in the face of declining viewership, the local newscasts insist on greatly annoying the few viewers they still have remaining. There is that extremely overused and misused riff for "breaking news": If it is the evening newscast and the event happened in the morning, it is not "breaking news." "Coming up next" means next (first story after the commercial break), and not much later in the newscast with additional teasers for it. Why would Chuck Henry think that "you will not believe" that burning popcorn in the office microwave oven would set off the sprinklers?

In an effort to jump-start the credibility of its low-rated newscast and lure viewers searching for a familiar and trusted face, KCOP-TV Channel 13 has hired veteran Los Angeles television reporter Warren Olney to anchor its nightly newscast. Olney, 51, who dropped out of the television news business last January when he left his position as weekend anchor and political reporter at KCBS-TV Channel 2, will jump back into the fray Monday on KCOP's 10 p.m. news. "I was looking at some other possibilities and thinking seriously of staying out of local news," Olney said Thursday of his four months away from the rigors of TV news reporting--the first significant break he's had since coming to this market in 1969.

With a 14-minute report on the death of Loyola Marymount basketball star Hank Gathers leading the charge, KCAL Channel 9 launched the first regularly scheduled, three-hour, prime-time local newscast in television history Monday night, and viewers tuned in for it in respectable numbers. At least for the first two hours. The three-hour broadcast averaged a 4 rating (each point represents 49,315 homes) and attracted 6% of the available audience, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co.

Nielsen's recount for ABC's "World News" last week has boosted the show's audience by about 800,000 viewers. Nielsen had originally said Tuesday that ABC's newscast averaged 6.2 million viewers. But the company did a recount after ABC disputed the original figures and said Wednesday that "World News" averaged 6.99 million viewers for the week of June 8. It was the runner-up to NBC's "Nightly News," which had 8.27 million viewers. "CBS Evening News," with 5.4 million viewers, was third.

All the news that's fit to air? Shame on KABC-TV Channel 7 and KNBC Channel 4--one for reporting non-news, the other for non-reporting. Through the years, Channel 7 has taken a back seat to no Los Angeles TV station when it comes to blatantly using its news programs to promote its entertainment programs, especially in such ratings sweeps months as May. Tradition was again served Sunday when Channel 7 carved out a chunk of its 6 p.m....

KCAL news anchor Pat Harvey can still recall her edgy excitement generated decades ago by not only the imminent launch of an ambitious and historic broadcast but also by widespread predictions of failure. It was March 5, 1990, as the now veteran broadcaster positioned herself behind the anchor desk, the focus of a sparkling new set on a Paramount Studios sound stage. After months of planning, a rash of hirings and upgrades that cost more than $30 million, she was on the front lines of an unprecedented experiment -- a nightly three-hour newscast.

Bassem Youssef is barefoot, pacing around the dining room of his apartment in the tony Maadi neighborhood where he has assembled a crack team of twentysomething bloggers and activists. They are hunched over their laptops in Conan O'Brien and "Family Guy" T-shirts, plotting Egypt's comedy revolution. To Youssef, 37, the actual revolution was hilarious. Much of the January uprising that unseated Egypt's longtime president was fueled by online media: social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter , but also clips posted on YouTube — images of Tahrir Square, of protesters and security forces and former President Hosni Mubarak addressing the nation on state television.

An apt title for the typical TV newscast of the 1950s might have been: "Inaction News!" There simply wasn't much of it on the tube back in those pre-Lindsay Lohan days. In Southern California, for instance, the nightly fare on KNXT-TV (Channel 2) in 1959 consisted of a network newscast from 7:15 to 7:30, and two local newscasts from 7 to 7:15 and 11 to 11:15. Yup, 30 minutes of local news nightly, two-thirds of which was devoted to sports and weather. TV anchors would sometimes introduce stories by holding up the morning's newspaper headlines.

Katie Couric has poise, good looks, smarts and the kind of warmth on camera that a lot of other news people would love to duplicate. She also had the distinction of serving as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" as it became stubbornly locked into its position as least favored of the three nightly network newscasts. As Couric prepares to sign off Thursday night for the final time, one can't help but wonder what went wrong. Nothing more, it appears, than misplaced priorities, unrealistic expectations and an underestimation of how dangerous it can be to remake a venerable franchise.

After luring Katie Couric away from NBC's "Today" show in an attempt to revamp the evening news with star power and broad appeal, CBS News has made a more traditional choice in tapping "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley to succeed Couric. He will take up the anchor role on "CBS Evening News" starting June 6, the network announced on Tuesday. As an internal hire and a veteran newsmagazine reporter, Pelley is many things that Couric was not. Where Couric brought a conversational, accessible style from her morning show background, he represents the network's return to a more sober, direct approach.

The political crisis in Egypt and a sprawling winter storm helped the network evening newscasts to some of their biggest audiences in years. NBC's top-rated "Nightly News" averaged 11.3 million viewers last week, its largest weekly audience in six years, the Nielsen Co. said Tuesday. Brian Williams traveled to Cairo to anchor the newscast amid the political unrest. To give that number some perspective, NBC's evening newscast had more viewers last week, on average, than any of that network's prime-time shows.

After three decades of writing about the media for the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz is taking a new gig at Tina Brown's website, the Daily Beast. "After a lifetime in newspapers, I'm ready for the challenge of fast-paced online journalism," Kurtz said Tuesday. The Daily Beast describes his beat as "politics, media, and the intersection of the two. " Kurtz will continue his "Reliable Sources" show on CNN. Last month, Newsweek's Howard Fineman and the New York Times' Peter Goodman both signed on with the Beast's competitor, the Huffington Post.

An apt title for the typical TV newscast of the 1950s might have been: "Inaction News!" There simply wasn't much of it on the tube back in those pre-Lindsay Lohan days. In Southern California, for instance, the nightly fare on KNXT-TV (Channel 2) in 1959 consisted of a network newscast from 7:15 to 7:30, and two local newscasts from 7 to 7:15 and 11 to 11:15. Yup, 30 minutes of local news nightly, two-thirds of which was devoted to sports and weather. TV anchors would sometimes introduce stories by holding up the morning's newspaper headlines.

KTLA-TV Channel 5 is expanding its news operation and is adding more than eight hours of news programming each week, station officials announced Tuesday. The increase, which primarily affects early morning and midday newscasts, is part of a larger strategy begun this year to broaden the station's local news coverage. KTLA, which like the Los Angeles Times is owned by Tribune Co., began a 6:30 p.m. weekday newscast in January.

The Venice Film Festival on Friday honored Hong Kong director John Woo, one of the few Asian filmmakers to enjoy box office success in Hollywood as well as at home. Woo was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion at the world's oldest film festival on the same day it showcased his latest movie, "Reign of Assassins," which he co-directed with Su Chao-Pin and also produced. Woo, 64, has directed more than 26 films in nearly 30 years, beginning his career in Hong Kong in the 1970s before moving to Hollywood in the 1990s.

Katie Couric and the "CBS Evening News" team did some striking work during a two-day trip to Afghanistan last week, only to see some record-setting low ratings in return. The CBS newscast averaged 4.89 million viewers last week, the lowest for evening newscasts in the nearly 20 years in which compatible Nielsen Co. records exist and most likely the lowest for at least a couple of decades before that into the early days of television. CBS also dipped below 5 million for one week in late July, during the normally slow summer months.