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“Our goal is simple,” anchor Raj Mathai told his viewers. “Go beyond the 30-second sound bites and get you better informed on the big stories of the night.”
That was on June 10, day four of Mathai’s assignment as sole anchor of his station’s new 7 p.m. newscast, NBC Bay Area News Tonight. “My hope, my vision for it is pretty simple,” Mathai says. “Just take a genuine conversation, have a few topics and try to connect with the viewers authentically. And I hate using those buzzwords, but really authentically.”
This month, several NBC-owned stations, including NY and Los Angeles, replaced a prime-access syndicated show with a newscast at 7 p.m., coming out of NBC Nightly News. But San Jose-based KNTV, which brands itself as NBC Bay Area, is using the new time period to experiment with a new take on the familiar formula. “Most newscasts are very traditional,” says news director Stephanie Adrouny. “They’re the way they’ve been for years and years and years. So this is our way of trying to engage [viewers] in a different way.”
Adrouny and her boss, general manager Stacy Owen, got the idea for the new format when Mathai, one of their main anchors, started doing Facebook Live segments during the pandemic, focusing on the day’s big stories but in a less formal way. “He’d do these Facebook Lives where he engaged with [regular people] in the Bay Area, and he would get this great response,” Adrouny says. “I’d be at home