Sports director C.S. Keys, reporter and weekend anchor Andrea Nakano and producer Mike Lamar were fired yesterday afternoon by Richard Doutre Jones, the CW affiliate's vice president and general manager.

“This had nothing do with the people in the sports department; it had everything to do with return on investment,” Jones said. “I think people depend on us for weather and news; I don't think sports is what they think of.”

XETV lost its affiliation with the Fox network last summer, meaning the station no longer could offer any live sporting events. Jones said he would not have cut the entire department had his station still carried network sports.

Jones added that “because of the proliferation of people getting their sports from the Internet and ESPN . . . in these tough economic times, it just became an increasingly difficult decision I had to make. I was agonizing over it and I had to do it.”

Jones said the station would not ignore sports, but would use news reporters to cover “any viable sports story as a news story.”

Using the ongoing LaDainian Tomlinson saga as an example, Jones said, “If LT was traded tomorrow, we would report it.”

Keys was hired in May 2004, about a month after leaving KUSI Channel 9/51, where he had served as the morning weatherman for the previous four years. Nakano joined the station in February 2007. She previously worked as a news reporter at KFMB Channel 8.

Many other local stations in this market and nationally have reduced their sports presence in recent years. The NBC and ABC affiliates in San Diego do not have a regular sports segment on their 5 p.m. newscasts, and the Fox affiliate does not have a scheduled sports report on its 10 p.m. weeknight news.