36:59
we begin at 6 with breaking news start with that breaking news this morning let's uh start this morning with breaking news with social media and the Internet it's easier than ever to stay informed of what's happening around the world but local news is a beast of its own only local stations with their daily boots on the ground coverage can provide the facts on what's happening in your neighborhood beyond the national headlines and weather forecasts that's why millions of people around the world still tune in every day to the Morning News the LAPD is looking for a suspect who threw a rock at a restaurant window in the San Fernando Valley chaos in a Mission Hills neighborhood early this
morning as a truck crashes through the wall of a home and winds up in the backyard four people are in the hospital this morning after being ejected from a vehicle during a Pursuit overnight Fighters battle an overnight fire in Burlington County Flames broke out just before 2:30 this morning yet viewership has declined for traditional news media and in turn so have profits with local news stations having been hit the hardest whatever budget left is invested in the daytime news cycle but new newsworthy incidents also happen at night and since the usual anchors reporters and cameramen all need to sleep and these stations have no budget for a nighttime crew who's covering these breaking stories at night the
answer is Nightcrawlers while new stations capture the stories of the day nightcrawlers hunt for the stories of the night you see their footage on broadcast and across social media but never their faces voices or names Beyond a tiny Watermark they get no Public Credit or recognition they show up film and disappear and the best nightcrawlers make 6 to eight figures a year every city has its nightcrawlers and Los Angeles is the second biggest media Market in the country in this modern NBA original we're diving into the secret world and riding alongside LA's leading nightcrawlers to understand firsthand what it takes to succeed in this invisible profession what does the future hold in
business ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers analysts will say that we're in a bull market this month and then a bare Market the next could someone please invent a crystal ball until then over 40,000 businesses have future proofed their business with netw site by Oracle the number one Cloud Erp bringing accounting Finance inventory and HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management Suite there's one source of Truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real-time insights and forecasting you're peering into the future with actionable data when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking
backwards and more time on what's next modern MBA is small at the moment but as soon as we scale we will need and use netsuite today we're stitching things together manually and it's gotten harder to assess our business Health as we've expanded we need to track production costs to run payroll compliant with states and countries and to evaluate profit and loss by team and project as a corporation we pay tax throughout the year and it's a nightmare jumping from system to system just to get one answer these are capabilities that only netw weite provides and it's a platform that we intend to take every advantage of whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of Millions netsuite
helps you respond to immediate challenges and Seize Your Biggest opportunities speaking of opportunity download the cfo's guide to Ai and machine learning at net.com MBA the guide is free to you at netsuite.com modm netsuite.com modern MBA it's 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday in Los Angeles and while the rest of the city is getting ready to sleep the team at Key News Network is getting ready to work suspect is a male unknown wearing a cream colored cor jacket and pant his armed with a gun of the hundreds of 911 calls that are phoned in across La every night only a few of them are real being a Nightcrawler is a game of patience and skill Zach and his team are not mindlessly cruising around but instead
they wait under highway bridges to conserve their strength as they work until 4:00 a.m. all night long they're listening for specific codes across four dedicated radios police fire medical and Highway Patrol to catch the latest breaking story code 2 incident 00216 vehicle is a two possible Toyota sedan par in front of a white sedan possy to take s LIC the vehicle possible Manch and town Manchester and town re11 it's feast or famine nightcrawlers live and die by the calls some nights are dead and some are non-stop 455 David's going to be in route to the uh reported structure fire uh up off of Huntington Drive I'm going to try to get up over there what's our best all right we'll try for it's a tough spot I was hearing uh the chlorine leak
which I assume is the Hazmat thing USC yeah no confirmed leak yet but yeah affirmative I'm in route on the El Centro fire so if you want to stay 108 or go to the leak or just keep it here on the leak if it's confirmed go there if it's not then let it go 4342 Al engine 47 on Elementary School Smell Smoke in mode all right they found it's somebody's fire pitting they back here good job guys burn some cleaner firewood next time holy cow all right we're going to be uh looking for another call at this point 911t confirmed cpal 536 you copy on ramp part it's going to be confirmed ambulance cutting and ra 11 is going to be transporting negative on the sh lfd got there they communicated with LAPD it's actually a cutting and they're
transporting the victim already uh it's not critical injuries or anything like that it's going to be minor injuries so just like that it went from hey this is a possible story to not something for us sorry continuing 455 David's going to be in route to 1212 sandborn on reports of uh possible victims down in a car involving a 12 gauge 7 there's no confirmation on victims down at this point but there's a reporting party stating that they heard a uh a shotgun blast and two people in a car uh and a woman screaming and that's what they're that's what we're reporting right now this could very well be nothing but um we're still going to head that way keep an ear on it and see if this turns into
something show code trouble code four no evidence of trouble they're going to call back 12 Avenue no I got you brother it's uh Code 4 no evidence of trouble we're code six in the area investigating but we'll uh we'll we'll be clearing more than likely here we'll wait for a call back on the RP and that'll be it 147 no blue no evidence of crime that's it just like that no evidence of crime listening to the radio in the city it's overwhelming we've got just in our car we have five radios going plus our comms where we're talking to each other about what's happening in other places so if you were to listen to like all like every area that we have photographers in Los Angeles and you were to put that on a bunch of different radios and hit play it would
just sound like white noise I mean it's that much information so we're constantly shoveling through we're almost like gold mining right you're like going through all the silt and all the dirt and you're looking for those little nuggets and you're trying to pick those out of just a background of nothing here in Los Angeles the news Market there is a standard and a threshold that we have to meet for that news story to make it on TV when you've been in this line of work as long as Zach and his team you can assess problems faster than even the first responders and when a promising call comes in things go from 0 to 100 in an instant the ra for lfd just showed up they're going to be transporting this
victim Gabe's going to be primary on this one so he's handling uh the transport and all the footage here but it does appear to be vehicle versus a bicycle yeah he's not looking too good here not moving I don't see him breathing I 455 David's going to be clear from the h run felony at first in Broadway 536 is still wrapping up the unit that was here was a central LAPD unit they're going to go with ra to the hospital and they're going to determine the condition on that person and that's going to dictate the level like the severity and involvement with the officers that came out here so once they figure that out then you know then we have information from them he'll call he'll get the details of
the story but for right now we're not going to have anything much more than it was a hit and run felony and uh and somebody was transported to the hospital in unknown condition right and LAPD is going to confirm that of course la can confirm it as well but we deal with our LAPD contacts on that they'll confirm it once we have that information then he'll run the story and then add details as time goes on for an autoed out of Los Angeles where there's really not a lot of information we're at the mercy of the news cycle we think it's interesting but at the end of the day it's really up to our clients what they want to do Hollywood and Netflix in recent years have brought the profession
into the spotlight but for entertainment purposes they portray nightcrawlers as unskilled immoral opportunists who prey on tragedy they push a stereotype that it's all about doing whatever it takes to be first on scene and that the more disturbing and gory the footage the higher the payout if you're looking at a featurelength film Jake Jon Hall with the Nightcrawler movie from a writing standpoint from a movie in general standpoint is fantastic but when you actually look at it from our perspective it's terrible because that's the farthest from how reality is the movie obviously a lot of creative licensing as far as the TV show Netflix did an incredible job I'm very grateful however
that's still kind of in the same ballpark where you're doing it for Netflix and made for TV 99 of the rest of the time were out there worried about the story worried about telling that story accurately capturing those images being ethical in our reporting our whole point is to see what's occurring of course we have a lot of information coming in but to get the facts right getting the facts and doing it as quickly as possible is extremely difficult because a lot of times you know law enforcement doesn't always want to tell us what's going on they don't want to jeopardize their investigation which I totally understand of course but at the end of the day that information can make the difference between it being
true and false we train with this constantly with the crew you got to pump those breaks take a breath take a step back hey what did I miss what contact can I reach out to how can I really cut through what I'm looking at and get the information that I'm looking for two people have been hospitalized after a crash in the Angeles National Forest one of the victims had to be airlifted to a Trauma Center authorities say a car plunged 40 ft down the side of North San Gabriel Canyon Road just before midnight night last night I think people forget that the news cycle is based on what they want if we put up a story where someone gets rescued and nobody watches it and nobody wants to see that and we
put up a story where there's a horrific incident occurring and that's the top story because people are looking at it's the public that drives the attention on that right so it's it's not me sitting there as the Director or quarterbacking for the night where we're running stories and the guys are going and I go no only go to rescues only do this or that and we love happy stories you see rescues where people are getting saved and pulled from burning buildings and the firefighters and cops are being Heroes we're like hey this is incredible that's not how it is in real life there's two factors there of course the public interest and what they want to see and then you have what
analytically is going to work and what's going to sell working in the top two news Market we can sit here for a couple hours and something's going to happen it's not whether we want it to or not it's when the only thing that matters to me and my team is making sure that we're the right person at the right place at the right time because it needs to be key news that's covering that incident we take a lot of pride in making sure our footage is not graphic if there is blood it's on the sidewalk it's not a person bleeding to death on camera that's something that you will not see on our publication and developing right now in Irwindale a bicyclist is dead you can see the bike right here and a driver
is in custody after a late night police pursuit while the public are the end consumers it's the new stations who are actually Zach's customers they're the ones who pay nightcrawlers for their work and decide what is a story and what isn't it's pay per use the media buy these stories from nightcrawlers and pay them every time they use their footage in a broadcast while the footage is the primary deliverable nightcrawlers are really selling information news rooms these days are shrinking not growing and there's a greater Reliance on Freelancers like these nightcrawlers Long Beach Police and Fire were called here after a woman called 911 to report that a man had walked out of a home on the street and opened fire in her
Direction there are only 1,500 TV stations in the country 111 of which do regular business with Zach's company and travels fast in the old school industry of mainstream media the information that we provide goes to our clients they base their story off of it they confirm what we're talking about the information that we find in the field can determine whether that becomes a news story or something that gets cut and nobody ever hears about so it's extremely important that we're accurate with not just the footage not just how we visually tell these stories but how we actually editorially present them to our clients it's so imperative that we're accurate because you can and it has happened
photographers in the industry not just here in LA but all around the country probably around the world get blacklisted by misreporting something and it could be look it could be an honest mistake it could be something repetitive it could be a malicious thing right the stations our clients they don't know they have no idea where that's coming from so most times more often than not if we have something that is either unconfirmed or speculative we'll end up actually saying hey you know per possible information at seen or you know per Witnesses or what we're hearing per radio traffic whatever it is we have clients all over the world if we're producing non-factual information speculative information even
speculative being portrayed as factual that's a huge problem and we you can lose your job you can lose everything just because you wanted to be the first guy to say that the sky is falling and it's like maybe it's not a man shot and left fighting for his life in an attempted carjacking has this Highland Park neighborhood very concerned the LAPD says a 69-year-old man was shot when he refused to give up his Chevy pickup truck just after midnight with so much investment in daytime news stations don't have the resources inhouse to chase these stories overnight especially given that every night is a gamble it's a specialized trade that requires not just knowledge of law enforcement fire medical signal codes dispatch Tendencies
but also of the city neighborhood and cross streets you need to know the fastest route to get in and out of a scene without getting trapped how to work it without disrupting First Responders and how to get the best shots with what you have it's all Run and Gun and there's no time for Google Maps in short it's cheaper for news stations to Outsource and buy stories from freelance nightcrawlers every morning all packaged up and ready for broadcast but it's not a market where the lowest bidder wins news stations won't risk their production standards and reputation just to save a few bucks they can't use vertical videos filmed on smartphones or random submissions from strangers like any B2B relationship news directors want
long-term partners and Zach and his team are not lone wolves key news network is an established company that competes in not just speed but also reliability and accountability nightcrawlers are at the whims of the news stations routine incidents like DUIs car crashes and hidden runs are not considered stories unless there's fatalities or catastrophic damage the bigger the incident the stronger the story and the greater the payout the more stations that pick up the stories the more customers there are buying the same piece of footage for broadcast the more money in the bank for Zach and his team but it's all luck of the draw there's no fixed rates a DUI fire home invasion or shooting may be worth something today
more tomorrow and then nothing the day after the dollar value of a story is dynamic and it goes up and down every day all based on the news cycles and The Newsroom priorities at the local Regional and National level that terrifying standoff in the heart of downtown LA is now over the LAPD saying one passenger was reportedly shot multiple times died at an area Hospital the suspected hijacker has been arrested and the driver and another passenger have been rested you can see them being pulled out of that bus here in the middle of the night La is literally a GTA server and that's the most accurate thing that you could ever say it's that crazy on a daily basis a good example is like everything's in the bag you got the
footage you got the story everything's looking great and you go man this is fantastic this is a great story it's definitely going to sell I'm passionate about this story right but for some reason it doesn't meet the threshold from a news director's perspective you have to keep in mind also that we're affected by the global news cycle any type of big national news is going to completely derail the news cycle for us in our microcosm so any outside force is going to completely derail what we have going on so even though we have like a huge story we're like man this is crazy or even like a moderate story right for the news cycle for us because of the election cycle like everything
that was going on what 3 4 days it's just that's all they're talking about in the last 17 years yeah we've I've seen quite a few National Global stories that have just completely tanked the market sometimes for weeks if that is something that we take into account we'll say to the guys you everyone comes out we go hey just everyone heads up we have this going on so make sure your stories are just a little bit higher on the bar but at the end of the day we're just a leaf in the wind man we can't sit there and go you what am I going to do with the election cycle like how are we going to affect that but at the same time if it's a story we can tie into Los Angeles then we'll go do that the Dodgers victory of course it is a
Los Angeles story but covering that then goes the other way CU that then goes into the national cycle so somebody else in Texas or Phoenix or Chicago or whatever they're looking at it and they're like God damn the LA guys they've got this story it's completely derailed our thing so it goes back and forth the trick is just how can you integrate that into your overnight coverage or your daytime coverage and are you going to find a story that's big enough to be on par with that to compete with that story or take a couple days off and enjoy some uh some rest and relaxation it was a party just outside Dodger Stadium last night after that last out fans cheering waving flags blocking the streets and lighting fireworks sell celebrating after the
boys in blue captured their eighth world series title in franchise history several cars were seen doing donuts near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and vinc Avenue kicking up heavy smoke as crowds of onlookers cheered the LAPD ruling the Gathering unlawful and ordering the crowd to disperse just before 10 p.m. even though it's all luck of the draw there are some factors that Zack and his team can control to make their stories more enticing if they get footage of an incident and sound meaning an interview with an eyewitness or family that can bring up the value of the story if they get an exclusive meaning that no one else has footage of this incident and that gives them pricing power this is where speed and
scale matters and key network isn't the only game in town There's competition everywhere from social media amateurs to other Nightcrawler companies 99% of the value lies in the visuals and Zach has pushed K&N to compete on framing Clarity cinematography and composition every Nightcrawler on his team uses custom mounted rigs that can grab shots in low light and at a distance that would be impossible to pull off with handheld Sony's and smartphones by Zach's own estimations 85% of the job is just sitting waiting and listening 10% is chasing calls that go nowhere and just 5% is actually filming editing and packaging something deliverable when the big calls do come in all of these elements come to life uh double shooting
Cliff 1416 Cliff it's in the hills in Northeast Mount Washington five off at uh fig and then Avenue 26 North San Fernando over to Cliff 1416 Cliff CLI I FF copy that take primary put it drive that guy is not doing well that guy is not doing well I got a black Air got it left hill possible suspect and 536 uh they do they're trying to clear FD to enter I never heard the FD dispatch but they are clear to enter so let's if you want to come from the East side and I'll go to the west side uh through the hills over there but it's going to be it's going to be Canyon access all right so right now uh we're heading to a double shooting we have two victims down suspect vehicle is a dark colored sedan
I think they were saying LAPD Airship is overhead me that suspect vehicle is going down the hill from where you guys are at so the LAPD Airship is over and they're looking at a vehicle right now that's possibly unknown four-door vehicle yeah it's it's a four-door sedan it was going uh Northbound on Eagle Rock from 31 when we were coming uh southbound that's the last we saw them I don't know if they hopped on their freeway they were going the opposite way of us all right so black fordor sedan last scene leaving the area it came out as an ADW shooting so an assault with a deadly weapon call which is not an ambulance shooting when we hear an ambulance shooting that means that an
ambulance is already attached we heard the officers show up and say hey we've got two victims of gunshot wounds here at the address, 1400 block of Cliff Street this one's going to be a little tough on access just because it's up in the canyons and it's very difficult cuz if they establish a crime scene around a corner we're not going to be able to just you know have line of sight so we need to get in get our shots H it's always access problems up here in the Hills always we'll try to uh we're going to flip around here find a spot and then we'll we'll walk up as far as we can how's it going man did it happen right here or is it further right here police car pumping on right in front you can't even ah it's as
good as we're going to get yeah I appreciate it no problem did you see what happened jeez Gabriel's on the other side it looks like lfd came up the other road on the west side we are on the east side of Cliff Street not a common place for this it's a common area but not a specifically common place so we'll see what ends up happening as far as whether they're going to transport this person I still see lafd resources on the other side of the black and white at the top of the hill that's where the shooting occurred maybe some kids hanging out looking at the view and things went sideways with situations like this in the moment you never know we always have to do our due diligence research and find out exactly the specifics of
what occurred we'll get a few more shots from here we'll edit it get it set get it over to Gabriel on the other side then he's going to handle processing the story what are you getting on that side uh I can see the back of the black and white at the top of the crest and it looks like FD is still up here and I have a group of teenagers ear late teens early 20s on the K rail make sure you get that I have a little bit but P pushed us all the way back yeah no I understand I think they're I think they're coming to you so go for that all righty bye because Gabe and Zack had coordinated before arrival they're able to film the same crime scene from two angles and it turns out all the action is happening on Gabe's side of the
Hill hey sorry yeah can we confirm uh two or yeah is it a uh homicide investigation at this point okay thank you sir all right lap is confirming it is a homicide investigation that's enough preliminary information for us to send this in we're going to we're going to head down and uh get this over to Gabe he's going to finish up the processing and he's going to take care of the story from here but confirmed homicide investigation here LAPD uh Northeast division handling there was a suspect vehicle again we don't know the details of the incident but very rarely do we find that out until much later in the day so Pio will be communicating with Gabe and our editor and then
they'll find a uh a final story at a certain point but first we do have other breaking news two men found shot to death overnight the LAPD says their bodies were found in the 1400 block of Cliff Drive in Mount Washington police gave no information on arrest as the police extend the perimeter of the crime scene gab's car accidentally gets trapped inside and now it's up to Zach alone to chase the next story all right so we cleared that Gabe's going to handle the rest the footage that we shot on that is already rendered we'll hand that off to him we now have a structure response at 1681 East 49th Street which is going to be like 49th in Long Beach 49th Alam which is just to the South here looking out to
the Horizon I'm not seeing anything oh no we do have a good working fire yeah we got a big fire going oh it's yeah I'm seeing Flames up 455 is out with it's going to be a residential originally they were saying commercial but it's a two-story residential previous burn board up there's a car going and there's looks like a lot of accelerant around the building it's probably going to be arson at this point but we'll wait for the confirmation they're getting starting to get heavy streams on it they'll probably have this down the next five and then fourth David will be clearing up the roof is caved in and it's definitely heavy fire load inside that building twostory and there's a car it looks like it's going off and then a lot
of accelerant around that car so I'm unsure if the fuel tank ruptured or maybe an ARS an intentional set usually you don't see houses fully involved from the floor to the attic that quickly so my susp for arson is fairly high on this one of the big identifiers for a structure fire like this is the color of the smoke when we first we're getting here coming off the freeway you can see just a really thick incredibly dense packed column of smoke coming off of this building they're drowning this fire as best as they can and you're seeing a massive change in the color of the smoke if you look up you can see now we're looking at instead of a black thick column we're seeing a gray uh whitish
color which is a really good sign cuz that means they're getting good water on the fire but the amount of fire involvement here in that second story is huge there goes a big master stream right there on the right side let me get a shot of that really quick and we're still getting heavy fire load cuz they're not doing interior fire attack this is going to be a defensive fire only all right they're getting a handle on it we're going to get out of here so we don't get trapped in 45 is going to be starting to clear by Zach measures tonight was a solid 6 out of 10 there were only three stories the big residential fire the hidden run and the shootings at the Overlook in his 17 years behind the wheel the average story gets between 2
to 20 hits every station that picks up the story needs footage and every use of the footage counts as one hit so naturally the bigger the story The more hits the greater the payout a quote unquote hit can range between $100 to $1,000 depending on the nature of the incident the scope of damage the exclusivity The Newsroom demand and the News cycle of the three stories tonight two were flops the fire had zero hits because it was a vacant home and there was no one inside it wasn't considered worthy for broadcast the same was true of the Hidden run some publication may buy these pieces in the future as part of a broad investigative piece but there's not much in archival footage to
dat both incidents have earned 0 the shootings at the overlooked turned out to be even more brutal yet that story has only had three hits to date the incident had occurred the day right after the presidential elections and the newsrooms were too preoccupied to pay attention to anything else if the shootings had somehow taken place before election day Zach's hunch is that the story would not have gotten buried there is a tiny chance for some stories to reach five figures per hit Zach calls these once in the lifetime stories Mega hits where the incidents come out of nowhere but are so crazy they go International overnight there was the serial arsonist in La Harry Burkhart
back in 2011 then there was Christopher Dorner in 2013 who went around shooting police then there was the da Vinci fire in 2014 that was so intense that it melted freeway signs shattered windows and caused over100 Million worth of Damages and the latest one was in 2023 when he and his team got an exclusive of a cop killer who was taken into custody after a high-profile overnight Manhunt in Zach's 17-year career he's only had these five despite pushing the boundary in Hardware software and operations Zach still can't change the reality of his profession being a Nightcrawler is Boomer bust in this line of work there are no minimums and no averages you don't get anything for showing up and
you only get paid when something sells in a Fickle world that demands not only the latest but is also changing its own interests valuations and priorities for stories daily Zach Skies make anywhere from $0 to $15,000 every month and even the most successful ones know that it's all luck of the draw and the coin generally won't be landing on their side being a Nightcrawler is about being the right person in the right place at the right time and it takes patience expertise and grit to live at night to keep Faith to keep chasing leads and to not flinch from the chance to shoot lightning in a bottle while the rest of the world is sleeping from 9:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. Monday to Sunday Zach Gabe and
the rest of the team at KNN are all working keeping the people of La as informed as ever
