This is a part of an exclusive series of in-depth reports focused on local television news coverage in Los Angeles of the Palisades, Eaton, and Kenneth Fires, which have transformed portions of Southern California over the last week, leaving thousands homeless and in need. With high winds again forecast to increase early today (1/15), we will continue to monitor the events across the Southland.
Five years ago next week, Janene Drafs will celebrate five years at the helm of Nexstar Media Group‘s flagship home for The CW Network. It’s a station with a rich heritage in Southern California, from its coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade to its local news coverage, which starts each weekday at 4am.
For Drafs, a fete may come at a later date, as she and her team at KTLA-5 enter their second week squarely focused on keeping viewers alert and informed on what’s next with the devastating Palisades and Eaton Fires — and any potential new threats.
Yet, celebrating a relocation from Seattle to take the helm at KTLA may have also been a bit tempered. That was just days before a novel coronavirus, impacting cruise ships passengers in Asia, would spread to become a global pandemic.
“In the five years that I’ve been here, within one month of my arrival, the entire city shut down and we went through a global pandemic that was obviously not in any of our purview as the beginning of 2020 started,” Drafs said from KTLA’s Hollywood home, within eyesight of the 101 Freeway.
Yet, the pandemic had a silver lining for KTLA, as it provided a new blueprint for how to run the station during the next emergency. “We learned so much coming through that in terms of being able to very quickly get our teams into the field,” Drafs recalled, noting that changes to how it went about producing the news and how all of its different departments operated were implemented in the weeks after COVID-19 placed Los Angeles in a lockdown situation from March 16, 2020.
First, meetings that would be held every day at the station went remote. That continues today, allowing KTLA to “quickly scuttle” its crews in different directions. “When you’re in a DMA as big as Los Angeles, that’s really important,” Drafs said. “We learned a lot during COVID that we have now put in to place, again, during these unprecedented wildfires that are impacting so many communities. From a personal standpoint, I started at a time when there was crisis. Now, on my five-year anniversary, it is just a different crisis.”
“I started at a time when there was crisis. Now, on my five-year anniversary, it is just a different crisis.” — Janene Drafs, KTLA-5 in Los Angeles
As a GM, the first thing Drafs did during the 2020 pandemic and, again today, is to make sure the teams have the support they need, to be effective and “to do what we do best, which is our highest calling as broadcasters and journalists, and that is to do exactly what we are doing now, which is to give people information to keep them safe, to help them understand who and when people should be evacuating and how they can receive help.”
With reporters in the field, and non-news staff also to consider, Drafs said there’s another important dynamic to leadership in a crisis situation. “I need to pay very, very close attention to the mental health of my employees,” she said. “We saw that during COVID, and we’re seeing that now. We got out of a period of almost 90 hours of wall-to-wall coverage, from the moment these [fires] broke out on Tuesday [January 7]. It wasn’t until late, late Saturday that we we even gave a breather to our teams. We were on 24/7 and that’s what news people do best — they rise to the challenge when things happen like this. After that many hours, you cannot run on adrenaline forever. You have to have a break. That’s one of the things I’ve paid attention to from the very beginning but now it is probably my highest concern right now. The people telling these stories need to get the support they need so they can continue, because this is a marathon and not a sprint.”
While there’s never a concrete plan for what a TV station should do when the need for wall-to-wall coverage for an undetermined amount of time arises, Drafs believes KTLA is a bit unique compared to its peers in Los Angeles.
“We produce over 100 hours of local programming every week on a regularly scheduled basis,” she said. “As such, we are uniquely positioned if we do need to go 24/7 to be able to do that. I have heard from some of my colleagues in the industry that their people are in a much worse position than mine in that we’ve already got wheels and blocks of programming and schedules set where we are hopping and leap-frogging production people from one shift to the next. We’re doing that so much of the time that it is an easier flip to switch. That doesn’t mean that it is any easier on my people as you start adding overtime and back-to-back shifts. It shows that have the means and functionality to do that very quickly.”
Making the call to go non-stop news on KTLA came after a call between Drafts and KTLA’s News Director, Erica Hill-Rodriguez, as they heard from a station meteorologist that a very serious wind event was on the way. “Thus we had already discussed the possibility [of emergency coverage] prior to Tuesday,” Drafts said. Schedules were built, and a sketch of what could come was drawn.
Now that non-stop coverage of the fires has ceased, Drafts says “a three-pronged approach” is being put into place. While regular news coverage has resumed, KTLA’s two lifestyle shows have been placed on hiatus, using those resources and those timeslots to tell different stories “with the right tenor and the necessary focus the community needs right now.”
A POTENTIAL THREAT, DOWN THE STREET
When word came that flames were erupting in Runyon Canyon, just north of Hollywood Blvd., last week, this placed a big part of Hollywood — and potentially KTLA, given its Sunset Blvd. address — in a possible danger zone.
“It was interesting because we were immediately reading the new evacuation zone and my News Director and I were hearing it from our news anchor [Samantha Cortese] at the same time the general public was hearing it, understanding that we were one block away from the evacuation zone,” Drafs said.
She immediately picked up the phone and talked to Hill-Rodriguez to discuss just how close KTLA was to the evacuation zone. If everyone needed to leave at a moment’s notice, a contingency plan is in place. A mobile production unit is on standby. Master Control is handed off to a remote operation. An anchor hosts live as long as they need, with the signal bounced to a remote truck. “At that moment I got my main stakeholders together immediately and said we’re scuttling the production truck right now,” she said, explaining that it may not used but the need could arise at a moment’s notice. An approved skeleton crew approved through emergency response was told of what could come.
Thankfully, this fire was quickly put out. This not only allowed KTLA to maintain regular operations, but serve as a shelter for employees in need. “We have cots,” she said. “We have emergency water, and we have food here. I’ve had employees who not only had to report on their community going up in flames, but I actually had a reporter who put a fire out, saving a home while he was on the air.”
That would be John Fenoglio, a former EMT and volunteer firefighter. He was reporting live from the Eaton Fire on January 7 when he quickly picked up a garden hose, turned the spigot and walked around to the side of a home to douse two areas that were on fire.
Footage of Fenoglio’s heroics will be taken to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., by Drafs when she goes to speak with California Congressional leaders about the firestorm and how important broadcasters are. “While I appreciate all of the internet coverage and TikTok people who are doing what they are doing, they are not doing this. John knows well how to cover fires.”
Speaking of Fenoglio’s live-on-the-air house saving, Drafs commented, “It was unbelievable. We don’t expect all of our reporters to have that presence of mind and to do that but what we expect our reporters to do is to have empathy, understanding, the critical skills it takes to be in a community and to really be that emergency partner with them that I’m required by having my [FCC] license to be.”
Meanwhile, employees who were evacuated that were not required to come in to work wanted to, Drafs said. “I had to not only worry about how to keep KTLA on the air, but I had to worry about how to care for and manage the additional load of employees that were here at the station.”
While KTLA focused on delivery accurate, relevant and timely news to Southern California, Nexstar sibling NewsNation, the nationally distributed cable TV news network, offered a platform to America for Drafs’ team ahead of joining them in L.A. She speaks with Sean Compton, President of NewsNation and Nexstar’s Networks division, daily.
“We immediately began sharing coverage with them, which I think is what really the Nexstar executive leadership envisioned when they first launched NewsNation — that the local stations would be a huge resource,” Drafs said. “With our initial reports, they took us live a lot of the time as we were feeding our initial reports.” Since then, NewsNation reporters were sent to L.A. An embedded producer from News Nation is now present at KTLA in Hollywood, working on stories in the days and weeks to come.
KEEPING IT REAL
The “fake news” is already emerging across various social media platforms. How is KTLA helping to squelch those phony reports, across the platforms its content can be found in?
“What you are seeing right now is going to continue to play out,” Drafs said, noting that as a California Broadcasters Association member, she’s had high-level discussions about the problem with federal and state leaders. “The responsibility that now lies with the local stations is now greater than ever, and at times it feels like we are the only ones left standing, and it is really, really challenging.”
“The responsibility that now lies with the local stations is now greater than ever, and at times it feels like we are the only ones left standing, and it is really, really challenging.” — Janene Drafs, KTLA-5 in Los Angeles
For Drafs, the wildfires only sharpen a conversation that has been happening for quite some time, that in times like these, the fakery is going beyond falsified news reporting. One news story in the works delves into the rise of fake GoFundMe pages, as thousands of real ones have emerged in the last week in response to those who have lost nearly everything in the Eaton and Palisades Fires.
“How horrible is that?” Drafs said. “As we tell real stories of people who have lost their homes, we are connecting [viewers] with actual community resources. Then you have bad actors on the other side who are producing AI photos of the Hollywood sign burning. It is becoming more and more challenging and we live by our journalistic ethics. We fact-check. We do the things that journalists do. With the Meta announcement that it is going with ‘crowd-sourced fact checking,’ how is that going to work when things like this happen? I have my doubts. But, we take the responsibility very seriously and it is one of the things we are most proud of. And, I think it is one of the reasons broadcast journalism is so desperately important.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Across the week of January 6, RBR+TVBR Editor-in-Chief Adam R Jacobson has kept a watchful eye on Southern California, his former home. A close friend lost her home in Pacific Palisades. Family members were placed on alert.
A host of charities are accepting donations for Los Angeles Wildfire Relief, including the American Red Cross, Baby2Baby, California Community Foundation, California Fire Foundation, Center for Disaster Philanthropy, Convoy of Hope, Community Organized Relief Effort, Direct Relief, Entertainment Industry Foundation, Global Empowerment Mission Inc., GlobalGiving, Los Angeles County Animal Care Foundation, Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, Pasadena Humane, United Way of Ventura County, and Ventura County Community Foundation.
Veteran media and marketing consultant Shelly Palmer offers a convenient webpage with further information on these charities.
