After 20 years at the helm of “Good Day LA” on KTTV (Channel 11) and a total of 37 years on local TV screens, veteran anchorman Steve Edwards admits the news business is more dominated by entertainment and trivia than ever before.
“The biggest change I’ve seen in my time doing this is the switch from TV news being about what’s important to what’s trending,” he said. “Now it’s not about what people should know but what they want to see, and that isn’t Ukraine or the Middle East – it’s Bruce Jenner.”
That makes planning each day’s news agenda a balancing act between the need to inform and the need to entertain, though ratings remain the driving factor in content.
“The recent voter turnout here of around 12 percent is pathetic but there’s a large lack of interest in local politics in L.A. and if you cover it too much there’s a risk your viewers aren’t going to watch,” he said. “The art is how you get information over in a way that’s palatable to the audience available to you, and I juggle with that all the time.”
Edwards said he and the “Good Day LA” producers have daily debates about which stories the audience really wants to know about.
“There’s always some creative tension about why are we doing this story,” he said. “But it’s all positive. If I’m honest, my hardest task at work is not getting an asthma attack from all the hairspray flying around the makeup room after my female co-hosts have bombarded themselves with it each morning.”
The juggling act seems to be working for “Good Day LA,” as viewership for the show’s 7-9 a.m. run is up 23 percent from a year ago to 76,000 viewers, according to Nielsen ratings.
“There are a lot of choices out there, but, happily, we’re a show people want to wake up to and one with ratings heat,” Edwards said.
Back story
Born in New York, Edwards earned a history degree from the University of Miami and started studying for a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of Houston. He was paying his way through grad school with radio gigs around Texas but dropped out when that work led to TV hosting offers.
“I was set on being a psychologist but found I preferred the emotionally and mentally stable world of broadcasting,” he joked.
He started out as a local news anchor in Houston and then hosted a talk show in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles in 1978 to co-host “Two on the Town” with rising news star Connie Chung.
He went on to become entertainment editor at L.A.’s KCBS-TV and the host of “Entertainment Tonight.” From there, he went on to front a variety of TV and radio shows that would make him a fixture on the L.A. media scene.
“The people of this city have nurtured me, been kind, feel comfortable with me and I feel I’ve shared a lot with them,” he said. “I was on the air during 9/11, the riots of 1992 and the 1994 earthquake. I do not diminish how important it was for me to go through those things with them. Our city is so spread out that the only shared experiences that bring people together here are quakes, floods, the Dodgers and, at times, the Lakers.”
Edwards admires many of his fellow news professionals but reserves special praise for his friend Harvey Levin for changing the media landscape by founding TMZ.
“I tease Harvey that he single-handedly destroyed the culture of America with TMZ,” he said. “But he really had his finger on something and was able to take these different strands that were coming together in technology and celebrity and fashion and sports and put them all together successfully, and with a sense of humor.”
The admiration is mutual. Levin called Edwards one of the best local broadcasters in the city’s history.
“He can make anything interesting, direct any conversation and he knows something about everything,” Levin said.
Though he’s 66 and has been on the air for four decades, Edwards said he has no plans to step aside anytime soon. He still has a voracious appetite for news and pop culture, and he’s active on social media, with 17,000 Twitter followers.
“It’s as fun and fresh as it’s ever been and I find new joy all the time in what I do,” he said.
