Fred Roggin trading Los Angeles sports for a new kind of newscast in the desert

When Fred Roggin left KNBC television in Los Angeles last January after 42 years as the station’s lead sports anchor, it was the retirement of a Southern California television icon who had also become known nationally.

So why is Roggin returning to television just one year later, only this time in the Coachella Valley?

“I love the desert. I love the valley. And I wanted to come out here,” Roggin said. “And a lot of people come out here to play golf. I plan to play a little golf, but I also am going to play TV in my retirement.”

That Roggin is returning to television with a show on NBC Palm Springs may not be a surprise. That the show is not focused on sports may surprise Roggin’s fans. Instead of highlights and features on the Los Angeles Lakers or the Los Angeles Dodgers or even Coachella Valley sports, Roggin and NBC Palm Springs news director Dave Reese are taking on the task of reimagining how local news, particularly on television, is consumed.

“This gives me an opportunity to do the kinds of things I love to do,” Roggin said. “I would think it is safe to say I am intimately involved in all the things the station is doing. This is more than just me being on TV.”

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Known for being an on-air personality, Roggin embraces his role as a producer — he produced numerous shows while in Los Angeles — as well as a creative force behind the new show.

“I made a very good living on TV, and believe me, I am the luckiest guy you are ever going to meet in your life, and I know that,” Roggin said. “But my craft is production. It is sales. I started in radio when I was 18 years old, and you had to sell your own radio show. That’s how I got started in the business.”

That first job, as a top-40 radio deejay and high school play-by-play announcer in Globe, Arizona, was followed by radio and television jobs in Yuma, Arizona, then television stops in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix before Roggin moved to Los Angeles and KNBC in 1980.

Covering the greats

A 2019 inductee to the Southern California Sports Hall of Fame, Roggin’s time in Los Angeles stretched from Magic Johnson to Kobe Bryant to LeBron James with the Lakers, Tommy Lasorda to Clayton Kershaw with the Dodgers and a time when the city had no NFL teams to a time when both the Rams and the Chargers play games in Inglewood.

“Some say the ‘80s was the greatest sport era in the history of Los Angeles,” said Roggin, now 66. “I was there for that.”

It was while working at KNBC, where Reese was also working as an assignment editor, that the twosome talked about how a newscast could change from the traditional format.

“This is a model we developed in Los Angeles 15 years ago. In its infancy it was called the Filter,” Roggin said. “And the Filter ran on one of our digital platforms and actually performed well. We have always tried to innovate in what we do.

“Back then, there was no Zoom or Facetime. It was an app called Skype,” Roggin added. “We were the first people to bring people in on Skype. We were the first ones to do that on this show on the digital channel.”

For Reese, Roggin’s show can completely change what a newscast can be.

“My vision was and is to stop covering all the Circle K robberies and the small petty crimes and the things that don’t really have anything to do with anything, DUIs and car crashes,” Reese said. “Crime is the crack cocaine of TV news. It’s low hanging fruit. It’s easy, it’s cheap and it is bad for you. We have got to stop doing it. And we have rendered ourselves so irrelevant to the audience that they stopped watching.”

Indeed, viewership of local television news is down, according to the Pew Research Center. Local evening newscasts for network-affiliated stations (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox) drew 4.1 million viewers a night across the country in 2016. In 2022, the number was down to 3.1 million.

Roggin’s show will be broadcast starting Jan. 2 at 6:30 p.m. weeknights on NBC Palm Springs after traditional newscasts at 5 and 6 p.m. But Roggin and Reese say the show isn’t really about broadcast television. Instead, the show will be filled with what Roggin calls snackables, short bits of information that can be used on digital platforms like Facebook and X as well as pieced together as a 30-minute show for television.

“It is topically driving news content of the day with a kind of comedy element in there,” Roggin said, adding the Roggin Report should be a cross between cable news and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

“Fred’s broadcast is a news product, it is not a newscast,” Reese said.

The question for Roggin, who will still do a three-hour sports talk radio show for KLAC in Los Angeles from his desert home, and Reese is not their own devotion to changing a news broadcast. It is how to get viewers to buy into a new concept. They have faith, but also know the audience can be fickle and comfortable with the familiar traditional newscasts.

“If we are to be honest, if it doesn’t work, we failed,” Roggin said. “But in our business, the cost of failure has never been less. You aren’t losing anything. But just being honest, and I don’t mean it in an arrogant way, we are not going to fail. Pretty simple.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Fred Roggin trading Los Angeles sports for new kind of newscast at NBC Palm Springs