By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, May 2013
In mid-May 2013, FOX 11 LA promoted Araksya Karapetyan to full-time anchor on its Morning News broadcast. Karapetyan had started her broadcast career while at the Newhouse School at Syracuse, interning at LA’s KFI AM 640 and KABC-TV; she had joined FOX 11 the prior year as a general assignment reporter and fill-in anchor. The original FishbowlLA framing tracked the KFI-internship-to-FOX 11-anchor pipeline as a recurring LA-broadcast-development path.
Then
The 2013 announcement landed Karapetyan in the 4:30-to-7:00 a.m. weekday and 10:00-to-10:30 a.m. anchor slots, plus continued contribution to Good Day LA. Kingsley Smith, FOX 11’s VP and news director at the time, framed the promotion around her “smart and in-depth reporting” and “exceptional commitment to the community.”
The piece pulled out an additional KFI-to-FOX 11 pipeline data point — earlier that same month, KFI newscaster Aron Bender had been promoting Katherine Timpf, another former KFI intern who had moved on to Fox News and had broken an exclusive that month. The original FishbowlLA framing noted the two-thread pattern: KFI’s internship program had been feeding both the local FOX 11 newsroom and the national Fox News operation.
The early-morning weekday anchor slot at FOX 11 was structurally significant. LA’s morning-news market had been consolidating around a handful of strong-personality anchor combinations — KTLA’s morning team, KTTV’s Good Day LA, KNBC’s Today in LA, and a few others were the major-station offerings. The Karapetyan promotion put her in direct competition with that established morning-news anchor bench.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by Richard Horgan — was warmly tracking. Karapetyan’s quote about not previously thinking of herself as a morning person (“I used to go to bed at 1:45 a.m., not wake up at that time”) captured the early-morning-anchor lifestyle adjustment in a relatable way.
Now
Araksya Karapetyan has continued at FOX 11 across the entire interval since 2013. She has become one of LA’s most-recognized morning-news anchors across the post-2013 years, with multiple Emmy nominations and a substantial local-personality following. She has continued anchoring weekday mornings and contributing to Good Day LA through the decade and a half since the original promotion.
Her broader public-profile has expanded through community-engagement work, an autobiographical book about her family’s Armenian heritage, and substantial Armenian-American community advocacy work — particularly around the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where her FOX 11 coverage and personal commentary substantially elevated the LA Armenian-diaspora reporting register.
Kingsley Smith continued as FOX 11’s VP and news director for years after the 2013 hire; the station’s broader morning-news brand has continued under multiple subsequent news-director cycles. KFI AM 640 has continued as one of LA’s anchor talk-radio stations; the broader KFI-internship-to-on-air-talent pipeline that produced both Karapetyan and Katherine Timpf has continued operating.
Katherine Timpf, who had been mentioned in the 2013 piece as another KFI-to-Fox News case, has continued at Fox News as a recurring panelist on multiple programs across the years. Aron Bender has continued at KFI as one of the station’s anchor newscasters.
The 2013 piece reads now as a documented snapshot of a substantial LA-local-TV-news anchor’s career-launch moment. The KFI-internship-to-LA-television-anchor pipeline that the piece flagged has continued to be one of the recurring development paths in the LA-broadcast market across the post-2013 years.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.