New hires, impressive coverage of Colorado’s recent wildfires and improved ratings in the morning…Fox31 is making some noise.
Viewers, as well as those who hand out broadcast awards, are taking notice.
During breakfast, KDVR in March claimed the No. 2 spot behind longtime champ KUSA, for the 5-7 a.m. block among adults 25-54, the primary news audience. That’s an 80 percent increase from a year ago.
At night, Jeremy Hubbard is a draw. Hubbard, the up-and-comer hand picked by Ron Zappolo to be his eventual successor, is the standout on the 9 p.m. program which the Colorado Broadcasters Association recently honored as the market’s “best newscast.” Back in Denver after a stint at ABC News in New York, Hubbard is a big part of that show’s success.
Morning anchor Mike Headrick is leaving for Salt Lake City, to be replaced as co-anchor of “Good Day Colorado” by Nick Emmons, from Monterey, CA. Meanwhile Hema Mullur has joined the staff (from Fox in El Paso), currently teaming with Hubbard at 10 p.m. in an ongoing co-anchor experiment. Other staff additions: Nick Griffith (former sports director at the Kansas City ABC affiliate), sportscaster Kami Carmann (from Channel 7), and Mark Meredith (from the NBC affiliate in South Carolina, who looks seriously underage but whose reporting is sharp).
Of course Fox31 isn’t everyone’s cup of java, with its emphasis on speed and youth.
Nearly four years ago, when KDVR and KWGN merged, the station endured rounds of layoffs, management was undisiplined and morale hit bottom. New management set new priorities.
Now, “we’re where we said we wanted to be,” said General Manager Peter Marone.
The next big competition is the May sweeps, when the networks goose audiences via “specials,” series finales and stunt casting. Expect the local TV newsrooms to hype special reports, too. The sweeps measure local ratings in order to set future advertsing rates.
“As of the February rating book, the newscasts on KDVR are the fastest-growing in the Denver market, morning to evening to late night,” says Ed Kosowski, VP for news and digital content on KDVR and sister station KWGN. The goal is “not tabloid but high-energy, high-impact news.”
Kosowski claims a newly aggressive newsroom culture is oriented to breaking news.
During the recent wildfires, Fox31 was the first to air cellphone video of a father and son escaping the blaze that became a national story, and the first to speak with friends of the elderly couple who perished. Using its duopoly, the station mounted one-hour specials at 7 p.m. on Channel 2, Tuesday through Friday that week.
The little things add up. “We know our competitors notice. We hope viewers will, too,” Kosowski said.
The late-news ratings are less clear, with newscasts not airing head-to-head. Frontrunner 9News had nearly double the late-news ratings of Fox31 last year at this time (a 4.1 rating to KDVR’s 2.2 rating); Fox31 was flat this March while KUSA dropped by 26 percent. Now the two stations are 1.2 rating points apart.
“If KUSA continues losing ground,” Marone said, “someday the twain will meet.”
9News predictably takes the long view and stresses its digital reach. “This is a marathon, not a sprint,” said KUSA-KTVD chief Mark Cornetta.
“Really, the story is that more people are watching morning news than a year ago,” Cornetta said. For the first three months of 2012, he noted, local morning viewership overall was up 25 percent compared to a year earlier, while total late-news ratings declined by 18 percent.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
