Saturday, July 17, 2004 7:44 PM
BY BOB BAKER
You may make more money than Lance Orozco, but he knows what counts: He runs a one-reporter opera- tion, wears blue jeans to work, doesn’t put on a tie, covers the stories he wants to—and is the newly crowned Los Angeles Press Club Radio Journalist of the Year.
“We’ve all worked for big news entities and we’ve all said, ‘Boy, if I were covering the news, I know what I’d do,’” says Orozco, 46, the reporter/news director of KCLU-FM, the public-radio station heard over separate stations in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. “And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple years.”
Orozco’s recognition was one of many feel-good moments at the club’s annual awards banquet in June. It took note of a 1980 USC grad who worked in radio for a couple of years, then spent nearly two decades as a TV reporter and weathercaster in Sacramento, Los Angeles (KCBS-2) and Santa Barbara (KEYT). He left TV for radio in 2001 and came to KCLU, based at listener-supported Cal Lutheran University and broadcasting on 88.3 FM in Ventura College and 102.3 FM in Santa Barbara County. The tiny station has a budget of $578,000, and 70% of that comes from listener donations. Free to run his own show—there’s no one to boss,
or to boss him—Orozco does a daily five- to six-minute report each morning on local issues like the plan to develop of the Ahmanson Ranch. That gives his broadcast a depth that commercial sta- tions can’t make, but it demands a level of discipline and planning to stay on schedule. “You’re always planning one day ahead.”
Orozco, who lives in Sherman Oaks, still works one day a week in TV, traveling to Orange County to work for public-television station KCOE.
People who remember him from his earlier TV stints, particularly as the weatherman on KCBS in Los Angeles, sometimes get confused when he approaches them with his tape recorder: “They say, ‘Shouldn’t there be a camera with you?’”
