Jason Ball, Director of KTAL-TV in Los Angeles
Jason Ball, a native of Trumann and current news director of KTAL-TV in Los Angeles, visited with students as the first speaker in the Professional-in-Residence program offered by the radio-television department.
Ball is a 1992 graduate of ASU and began his news career while still a student in the R-TV department at his hometown newspaper, The Trumann Democrat. An internship before his senior year at WREG-TV in Memphis, Tenn., changed the course of his career and life. He continued to work at the station part-time until graduation when he moved to Memphis and started working as an assignment editor and eventually a newscast producer at WREG-TV.
In 1996, Ball moved to Miami where he worked as a newscast producer and executive producer at WPLG-TV. In five years at WPLG, he covered numerous hurricanes, the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace, and the custody and immigration status of a young Cuban boy Elian Gonzales.
Ball moved west to Los Angeles in 2001 and began working as senior executive producer for the nation’s largest local news organization. He was an integral part of merging two television stations, KCBS-TV and KCAL-TV. Ball oversaw multiple newscasts on both stations, led the successful re-launch of the stations web sites (cbs2.com and kcal9.com) and managed the special projects unit.
In 2008, Ball took on his most challenging and rewarding job, news director at KTLA-TV. Under Ball’s direction, KTLA 5 News expanded from 32 hours of local news a week to 50.5 hours a week. In 2009, the station successfully launched an hour-long newscast at 6 p.m. seven days a week as well as weekday newscasts at 4:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. In 2011, KTLA launched four hours of news on weekend mornings. Additionally, the KTLA 5 Morning News has become the most watched morning news program in Los Angeles in total viewers and key demographics and is the second largest market in the country.
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