KRCR, KCVU to split

Fifteen months after they first teamed up to bring Chico a 10 p.m. local newscast, Redding’s KRCR Channel 7 and Chico’s KCVU Channel 30 have decided to part ways and end their joint production.

May 27’s 10 o’clock airing was the last of an odd arrangement that began in February 2004 and featured KRCR anchors reading Chico-based news at 10 o’clock from their Redding studio, giving the perception they were in Chico. At 11 p.m., the same anchors, sitting in front of a different background, would read many of the same stories for Redding-based news, only in a different order.

Doug Holroyd, KCVU’s general manager, said KRCR simply opted to exercise the termination clause in the stations’ contract. He said the station has no plans to reintroduce locally produced news any time soon.

Sarah Smith, KRCR’s general manager, said the two sides simply couldn’t come to an agreement on a new contract.

“I exercised our 90-day out termination of the current contract, but [Holroyd] wanted out of it sooner,” Smith said. “With the 90 days, they could have stayed on until sometime in September. But we just couldn’t figure out a way to get it done in a more equitable arrangement. Business is business.”

Smith said rumors that the station is closing its Chico bureau are not true, and in fact the station is looking to move from its current location on Silverbell Road, close to where Chico’s KHSL, Channel 12, and KNVN, Channel 24, shack up to produce their joint NCN simulcast news. Smith said the station would like to relocate to a higher-profile office closer to the downtown.

When Holroyd became GM at KCVU, he said he wanted to make local news a priority. He told this paper at the time that the new, flashier production would be geared “for someone who wants to get the news and swallow it quickly.”

The style would be “edgy,” he said, avoiding the “witty repartee” between the weather person and anchor between stories. “It’s just bam, bam and on to the next thing.”

Now slated for that time slot on Channel 30 is A Current Affair, a tabloid news show that debuted in 1986 and led to any number of copycat shows like Hard Copy and Dateline.