“Local News Is Still Vital”

Last night, during his show’s opening monologue, Jimmy Kimmel praised LA’s local news media for their tireless and vital coverage of the devastating fires. “I want to thank our local news reporters,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion, “who reminded us how important local television and radio and newspapers are.”

Never has there been stronger proof of how badly we need to preserve local news teams—not only as a city, but as a nation. This past Wednesday, Chris Cristi, an AIR7 helicopter reporter for ABC7 Eyewitness News, became another shining example of this when he spotted the Sunset Fire as it began in the Hollywood hills.

The day before, at around 10.30am, when the Palisades fire broke out, all news helicopters were grounded—and not just due to the extreme high winds. “President Biden was in town,” says Cristi, “so, there was a temporary flight restriction that prevented us from taking off to fly over the fires. When the President’s in town, there’s a 30-mile TFR, and nobody could fly unless you’re police or rescue.” Cristi felt the frustration of this, as he says, “viewers rely on that instant information and that live picture.” Residents—and then, as the crisis expanded, the world—saw just how badly we need local reporters on the scene as we turned to them for answers.

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By Tuesday evening, ABC7 had managed to get flight clearance, which was “something that’s never been done, as far as I know,” Cristi says. “Essentially, we reached out to our White House people, and they connected us with the Secret Service and eventually gave us a waiver to fly.” But by then the winds were impossible anyway. “For me as a reporter, it was really heart-wrenching because we couldn’t do our jobs.”

On Wednesday night, Cristi, who works the evening shift on one of the few remaining three-person air crews left in LA local news, was flying over the Palisades fire when he spotted something alarming to the East around Hollywood—something he describes as “a little speck up in the hills.” The team had heard no reports of fire in that area but flew toward it anyway to check it out.

In the less-than-five minutes it took them to reach Runyon Canyon, a beloved hiking area just above Hollywood, “It turned from a speck into a 20-acre brush fire,” says Cristi. “I’m sure people in Runyon Canyon off of Franklin [Avenue] and those streets were probably calling 911 because they must’ve seen what was going on.” The news crew were so close and so fast, Cristi says they arrived on the scene first, and were then able to share imagery of what was happening.

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Marc Sternfield, director of digital at KTLA 5, was at his desk on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood when the flames of the Sunset fire took hold. “We could see the fire from our property in the Hollywood Hills, and thankfully firefighters were able to limit the evacuation zone, limit the evacuation orders, and get that fire contained, but it was very close,” he says. The KTLA 5 building lies just one block east and a city block south of the evacuation zone put in place that night. Sternfield, who works at the news desk “at the nexus of all communication that comes in” credits the station’s “amazing professionals in the field who are very much empathetic to what the audience is going through and know how to approach these topics with sensitivity and with professionalism.”

This is what lies at the heart of local news: true empathy and personal connection. Not only are these reporters immediately on the spot, but they themselves are a part of the community, and during the horrifying events of this past week, they are reporting on events that are also happening to them and their own families.

Given Cristi’s vantage point in the sky, he was inundated with requests from evacuees to fly over their homes and tell them what was left. And so, it fell to him personally to let many people know their homes and everything they owned had been turned to rubble and ash. I ask how he handled telling them and he pauses for a second. “That was hard,” he says.

Says Sternfield, “These are times when local news media is at its best. There’s no question that local news media is the best equipped to provide critical real-time coverage during emergencies and natural disasters, like the horrific wildfires we’ve seen in Los Angeles County over the past week. That’s because we not only cover the communities we serve, but we also live in them. These are our family members, our neighbors, our coworkers, our teachers, members of our churches and synagogues. Local journalists have the knowledge, the empathy, to understand what the audience needs when disasters like this strike.”

But cutbacks to local news have been brutal in recent years. With people turning to online viewing, revenue is shifting and broadcast teams are being thinned and local papers folded. “It’s changed a lot,” says Cristi, who has been a helicopter reporter in LA for a decade. “It’s been eye-opening to me, how many people are not watching this on TV at all. A lot of people I talk to are relying on YouTube to watch ABC7 and other stations. It’s changing in real-time. We encourage our viewers to download our ABC7 app where you get the latest streams over breaking news during emergencies and during breaking news. User engagement is vital to keeping it alive until we figure out how to get the revenues back up.”

He is, he says, fortunate to have a three-person air team, and he asserts that many other helicopter reporters now have to do double-duty, juggling a camera and all reporting duties simultaneously.

The Skymap technology Cristi’s team uses to accurately determine the scope of the fires “requires a lot of attention”, he says. The photographer on board their helicopter also works to establish the signal with the station, allowing Cristi and the pilot to focus on their own tasks. “We’re navigating with the pilot who is doing nothing but concentrating on flying the helicopter safely. And then I’m in the front gathering information. Since my hands aren’t tied to the camera, I’m online as I’m reporting, I’m on social media as I’m reporting. I’m getting the word out across my different platforms. On TikTok, on Instagram, on X. There’s a lot of multitasking that we’re doing up there.”

Perhaps it was the fact that he was able to focus solely on reporting that allowed him that crucial second to spot the Sunset fire early on.

“The news industry gets a bad rap,” Cristi continues, “especially in the last 5 to 10 years, where people don’t trust television news the way they used to. Local news is still vital and people do turn to local news for lifesaving information during emergencies, during COVID, during fires, during storms. This is the way people get sometimes lifesaving information.”

KTLA’s Sternfield adds, “We can deliver granular information about which streets are evacuated, where the fires are now, where they’re headed, where these evacuees can go. And the reach of all these different channels combined is really critical because people are consuming their news in a lot of different ways, not just watching a linear broadcast, but across social media and all these streaming channels. And so our goal and the goal of our counterparts in news media is to really just deliver that critical information and reach audiences in as many ways as possible, to integrate really closely with the local first responders, to get the word out and make sure that we are seen as the main source for really reliable local information that is going to help protect people’s lives and property.”

Cristi says he has been “flooded with emails and messages” from viewers. “It’s been really touching,” he says. “Our team at ABC7 has just done an incredible job. Not just from the helicopter, but we have a team of ground reporters and anchors that have been just so responsible and so articulate in trying to deliver this information live on television and across the internet. And our viewers hang on every word during times like this. It’s a nice reminder that even though there’s a lack of trust in our industry, that people still appreciate what we do.”