Lance Orozco Title: News director Organization: KCLU at California Lutheran University Born: Glendale, 1958 Personal: Divorced, no children Education: Attended USC, journalism major Most Admired People: Mike Daniels, late news writer and producer at KCBS and adjunct professor at USC; Warren Olney, former KNBC reporter Hobbies: Theater, hiking and USC football games Lance Orozco has evenly split his journalism career between television and radio. Since 2001, he has been the news director at KCLU, the public radio station on the campus of California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks. In the years before that he worked at various television stations throughout California. Most news directors act as anchors at their radio stations, Orozco said, but he insists on being out on in the field covering the news. “I love the job,” said the 60-year-old Southern California native. “If I didn’t love the job, I wouldn’t be doing it.” KCLU provides National Public Radio and local news programming to more than 100,000 weekly listeners in a coverage area from Ventura County to San Luis Obispo County. Orozco has won more than 200 regional journalism awards and has been named the Associated Press Small-Market Reporter of the Year in the western United States 10 times. Last year, he won his fourth national award for excellence in journalism. Orozco met with Business Journal at KCLU’s studios to discuss his coverage of the recent wildfires and bar shooting, his favorite stories and the craziest interview he ever conducted. Question: What motivates you? Answer: Working at an NPR station, especially a small station, really kind of excites me. I worked in Los Angeles. I’ve worked for big television stations. I worked as a television reporter for half my career and it is limited in what you can do. The nice thing about being at a station like this is I am my own boss. We cover a lot of stories, a lot of community stories, that never normally get covered because they are not sexy enough, they are not exciting enough to make a television newscast. What happened in November? When we have the big breaking news stories, we are like everybody else. And in that story (the Borderline bar shooting and Woolsey and Hill wildfires) we were the ones supplying other people. NPR turned to us and I was doing a lot of stuff nationally for NPR on both the shooting and the fires. The same thing happened last year with the Thomas fire and the Montecito mudslides. It is nice to be there as part of a team supplying information to them. How many hours did you work on those stories? For the Thomas Fire, I worked 22 straight days. The shooting and Woolsey and Hill fires, it was so strange. It was an election day. On election night, I was here doing live election returns to around midnight. I came back at 4 a.m. to do election returns the next morning, worked all day and went home and basically fell asleep on the sofa. I woke up when a friend called me about 11:30 p.m., about 15, 20 minutes after the shooting. I got out a little after midnight and was at the shooting. That was Wednesday night. The next time I got home was on Friday. I worked an almost full 24 hour cycle. The shooting was on a Wednesday night and the fires were on Thursday. At one point Thursday I slept for about an hour and half here at the station. What is the role of the station in the community? There are lot of places where you can get NPR programs. In Santa Barbara, for instance, I think there are seven places on the dial where you can listen to Morning Edition. What sets us apart is we are local. In this changing media world where younger people are not reading newspapers the same way, are not watching TV in the same way, are not listening to radio the same way, there is always going to be a need for content. When there’s smoke, people want to know what that smoke is. When it’s raining they want to know what’s going on. We try to be there with the local content to compliment the national and international content you get from NPR. The station’s funding – does it come from NPR, the university or donors? The university does not fund us at all. The university is like our parent, they started the station and have the license. The main source of funding for us is we do two fund drives a year. Each one raises roughly $300,000. That is the bulk of our budget. We also get grants and sell underwriting. We are always in the black and we don’t lose money. How does the station work with the business community? It’s interesting. There are two things that happen. One is we have business partners that support us. We are a nonprofit but there are a lot of corporate folks. Two, I am always looking for stories on interesting businesses in the area that are doing interesting things. There is a company, for instance, in Simi Valley (Entertainment Earth) that has become one of the leading companies in the world for making collectables related to “Star Wars.” I did a story on them. In our coverage area, we have some very interesting companies. We have Amgen in Westlake Village, there are some interesting companies there. It’s fun to be able to tell those stories. Who are KCLU listeners? Our average listener is in their 50s, they probably went to college. They are curious about the world because NPR is more than a headline service. Our audience has grown exponentially. It is 120,000 plus in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. We extend into four different small radio markets. There is a lot of difference between what Thousand Oaks listeners are interested in than maybe Ventura and Oxnard. Santa Barbara is different from Santa Maria in a lot of different ways. There is more agriculture, more oil in one area. It is hard to appeal to everyone. Do you have an online presence? Yes. We have a big online presence. And I am on Twitter. How did you start your career in broadcast journalism? I grew up in Southern California and lived all over the place, went to high school in Victorville because my parents got divorced. Then I went to USC. By the time I went to USC, I knew I wanted to be in journalism, but I didn’t know I wanted to be in broadcasting. I wanted to be a print reporter. When I was there, I took a class by the then-news director at KNX. He liked my writing and he offered me a summer job basically working weekends. That turned into something I did almost my entire college career. I was there for three years working weekends at KNX, learning how to write. Then what? I went off and did radio for two years up in Redding. It was a scary job thing as I had never been to Redding. They made me a deal. They said, “Tell you what, we like your writing a lot. Your voice is terrible, but we can work on that. You come up and no matter how much you hate Redding you promise not to quit for three months; we promise no matter how bad you are we won’t fire you for three months.” I loaded up my beat-up little car and moved to Redding. What was your next move? After two years up there, the CBS station out of Chico said, “Hey, we’ve noticed you have a good reputation as a reporter, you know what’s happening would you like to give TV a shot?” So, I became a TV reporter for two years. Back then you hauled your own gear and shot your own stories. I went from there to KSBY in San Luis Obispo in their Santa Barbara bureau for a year. From there I went to KEYT, the ABC station in Santa Barbara. I was there 11 years. I was a reporter, weekend anchor for a while, and produced a few newscasts, did documentaries, I hosted a telethon for 20 years with Kenny Loggins and a bunch of other people. Eventually I decided it was time to move on and got a job in Sacramento at the Fox station. I was the main weathercaster there for a year. Right when my contract was coming up, I got a call from KCBS in Los Angeles. They were starting a new morning newscast and had seen my tapes over the years and asked, “Are you interested in coming down here?” For two and a half years, I was the morning weathercaster at KCBS. Our ratings weren’t good, and they moved me, and I was a reporter for my last year. My contract didn’t get renewed. It’s a polite way of saying I was fired. What did you do next? I still enjoyed writing. I had friends at KNBC and so I went to KNBC as a news writer. It’s an unusual move to go from-air to writer, but I did that for a year. How did you come to be at KCLU? I literally stumbled across this job (in 2001). I was very hesitant because it was a small station and I didn’t know much about it. And Mary Olson, who is still the general manager here, basically said you have a ton of experience, we’re this little station, you can come in and do what you think needs to be done. That was very attractive to me. When you work at a big place you are very segmented in what you do. This was a blank chalkboard and the opportunity to create and go out and cover the kind of stories that maybe aren’t that exciting. Can you give an example? I did a feature story a couple weeks ago. There is an art museum here, they call it the California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks. They have been trying to build a permanent home. They haven’t been able to get the money or the place to build it. Their home was an old Taco Bell next to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. They would have exhibits come in and they hired a really good executive director who worked for the Getty. They just moved into the Oaks (shopping mall), they took over a space that used to be a clothing store. So, this art museum is in the Oaks mall. It’s an interesting fusion of art and putting it in a really public place. What are some favorite stories that you have covered? There was one that I did a year and a half ago and I’ll call it Ant Dog. The Channel Islands are trying to remove all the non-native species from the islands, including ants. And they teamed up with a company that trains dogs to specifically to sniff out Argentine ants, which were the non-native ants on the islands. People loved it. You can hear the dog sniffing. It won a national Society of Professional Journalists award, so I got a trip out to Washington, D.C. Any others? The other story that got a lot of reaction, and I just did a follow up to it, I had a kidney cancer a couple years ago. As a reporter, I am always sticking my nose in other people’s business and asking them to tell me their stories. I am not a believer in using the word “I” in stories. But I broke the rule on that occasion and told my story. I had the surgery at UCLA and talked with the surgeon and basically, I showed him how to turn on my recorder and he recorded the four-hour surgery. I had audio of it and turned my whole experience into the story. There was a ton of reaction. When we posted it online, I started getting calls from around the country. People were looking up kidney cancer and they wanted to know more about it, what was the process like. It felt like it was a good public service. What challenges have you faced? I think the biggest challenge is saying when. The good thing about a small station is you can do whatever you want as much as you want. The bad thing about a small station is where does it stop? When I go on vacation, I never really go on vacation. I have a laptop with me, I am always looking at stuff and sending stuff back to the station. It’s like I live this job. It’s hard to turn it off. Who are the people in your career you most admire? Mike Daniels worked at KCBS and he was a teacher of mine at USC. I stayed in touch with him all through my career. He was the model for Murray the news writer on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” The other one is Warren Olney, he was at KCRW for many years and was a reporter at KNBC for many years. I had a class with him at USC. It was a television class. I learned more in that class than probably anything else. Any interesting stories about the famous people you’ve met? I have met an incredible number of people over the years as part of the job. I feel so lucky. (Los Angeles Philharmonic musical director) Gustavo Dudamel, just this year, and (NBC Nightly News anchor) Lester Holt at a journalism awards dinner. The craziest interview I ever did was with Jonathan Winters. So Jonathan Winters lived in Santa Barbara and he had a new direct-to-video movie coming out. I was working for the TV station and to get from the lobby to the back part of the newsroom where I had the camera crew set up is maybe 300 feet. It took me 45 minutes to get him across there because he’d stick his head in every office and would start doing all these wild characters. It was the most entertaining thing and I wasn’t going to stop him because it was fun. The journey to get there is stuff you don’t forget.