Posts Tagged ‘Stan Chambers’

For SoCal TV news reporters and anchors, it’s always a cherished honor to be associated with the legacy of retired KTLA legend Stan Chambers. At this year’s Associated Press Television-Radio Association (APTRA) Mark Twain Awards banquet in Pasadena June 22, the Extraordinary Achievement award bearing Chambers’ name will go to KTTV’s Hal Eisner.

From today’s announcement:

In addition to his 32-year career in Los Angeles TV, Eisner is also the dean of the APTRA Academy, an annual boot camp for aspiring broadcast journalists.

“Hal’s accomplishments to journalism go beyond his ability to tell compelling stories on a wide range of topics,” said APTRA board president Robby Messer. “Hal also helps set up young journalists for a lifetime of achievement by mentoring them at the various APTRA academies he plans.”

Read more

In honor of this weekend’s doubly momentous anniversary date of July 29, which is both the article author’s birthday and the date his beloved former boss Tom Snyder passed away in 2007, Michael Horowicz has penned a wonderful remembrance at tvweek.com. As the reader comments bear witness, Snyder left an indelible mark.

From 1993 to 1998, Horowicz worked with Snyder in LA for CNBC and CBS. There’s a funny story in the article about how he would accompany the talk show host to the Bel Air Country Club every Thursday night for dinner, but only so Snyder could meet his monthly required minimum member spending limit. We thought it would be fun to hear a few more anecdotes about the legendary media figure’s wide-ranging LA career.

“In 1960, Snyder was fired from his reporter’s job at KTLA,” Horowicz, who recently left WNBC in New York to pursue his own projects with business partner Susan Winston, tells FishbowlLA. “He was crushed and out for revenge. There was only one thing he could do, which was place a curse on the Los Angeles Angels, set to premiere a few months later in the American League. Both the Angels and KTLA were owned by Gene Autry.”

Horowicz says he learned about the curse many years later, in 1995, while watching an Angels game in the CBS conference room with colleagues. Snyder noticed and mentioned the curse that night during his monologue.

Read more

At this weekend’s Associated Press Television and Radio Association (APTRA) awards gala in Pasadena, the 2012 Stan Chambers Award for Extraordinary Achievement will be presented to retired TV reporter Hank Plante.

One of the first openly gay TV journalists in the country, Plante blazed a trail in more than a half-dozen markets. As political editor for San Francisco’s CBS affiliate Channel 5, where he retired in the spring of 2010, he made a penultimate splash in the fall of 2009 with his interview of Gavin Newsom. At the end of the conversation, the mayor uttered his “off the record” disgust.

Plante continues to contribute to examiner.com, the Desert Sun and calbuzz.com. In this great career highlights reel, he poses at one point as a Secret Service agent escorting a Nancy Reagan lookalike down Rodeo Drive:

Read more

Stan Chambers has announced he’s retiring after 63 years at KTLA. Keith Olbermann who worked with Chambers at KTLA back in the 1980′s mentioned the 87 year old journalist on Countdown last night. We were going to post the video of that but it was strangely cut out of the web version. We asked Olbermann via Twitter why that was and he quickly responded, “The website operates independently and idiosyncratically.” Hm. Mavericky.

Anyway, KTLA did a great job of sending off an LA local news staple.

All the best Mr. Chambers!