KRTH News Director Quits in Dispute : Radio: Award-winning Claudia Marshall claims the FM station refuses to take news seriously. She takes Oregon post.

Over the five years that Claudia Marshall delivered her brief but award-winning newscasts on “oldies” station KRTH-FM (101.1), she saw her seven-member news staff fired and two on-air morning show colleagues dismissed. And she was embarrassed when the station added phony Teletype sounds to her broadcasts last January.

“I’ve been working against all odds to try and get the news of this community covered responsibly,” Marshall said in an interview this week. “Then they add Teletype sound effects to make it sound like we actually have a news department. I just can’t go along with that. I feel foolish every time I open the mike.”

So Marshall--KRTH’s news director and lone reporter--handed in her resignation Tuesday.

“It’s as if, one by one, the things I really loved about the radio station were gone,” she said.

Since her start at KRTH in 1986, Marshall had written and delivered two newscasts per hour during morning drive time. The station formerly had aired hourly newscasts throughout the day, but when it fired the other news staffers it stopped all newscasts except for her morning reports.

Marshall, 30, concluded that management at KRTH, which is owned by Beasley Broadcasting Group, did not take news seriously. She doesn’t think many radio stations in Los Angeles do.

“As you tune down the FM radio dial these days, good luck trying to find a serious, thoughtful news presentation,” she said. “And trying to find a job to do that kind of work in this market is impossible. Personally, I think it’s a real disservice to the listener here. I think listeners need and want a responsible, thoughtful--if encapsulated--news presentation. To say that you can do it with one person, well, it just can’t be done properly.”

KRTH program director Mike Philips and general manager Pat Norman did not return calls from The Times.

Marshall, who this year collected a total of nine awards from the Associated Press, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Radio and Television News Assn., has decided to leave Los Angeles for a quieter existence that she hopes will be better suited to serious newscasting. She has accepted a job as a reporter at an adult-contemporary radio station in Portland, Ore., the nation’s 25th-largest radio market.

“To move from No. 1 to 25 is certainly, in the eyes of some, a step downwards,” Marshall said. “I don’t feel that way at all. I think I’m going to be able to do better work there because I’ll have better resources.”

Marshall was looking for a position where she could combine her news-gathering skills with her affinity for on-air repartee. (In addition to delivering regular newscasts, Marshall had been a kind of sidekick for Steve Morris, onetime KRTH morning deejay.)

“I think I’ll be able to make more of a difference with my work in a place like Portland, Ore.,” she said. “It’s hard to reach people and it’s hard to make a difference here.”

Last year, Marshall co-produced a 20-part series on the effects of malathion spraying. It was for this documentary--in addition to her reporting in general--that she won several awards.

Marshall said that she recently judged the national Edward R. Murrow Awards and, in that capacity, listened to newscasts from radio stations all over the country.

“I was so amazed at what some of these radio station are doing in these smaller markets,” she said. “It really puts to shame what we are doing here.”

Marshall began her career in news broadcasting in 1984 at KFWB, where she landed a newswriting job after graduating from Western Michigan University. She moved on to reporting at KFWB and said she later had to “unlearn” some of the formal delivery techniques she acquired there when she went to KRTH in 1986.

Despite her disillusionment with the state of radio news, she feels bad about leaving.

“It makes me sad,” she said. “I always felt that we did something that was unique, something that was a real service to our listeners. But I just can’t do it anymore. . . I’ll miss L.A. It’s a wonderful, horrible place and it was home for six years.”