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RADIO : There’s Love (and Ratings) in the Air : KLVE-FM’s new bosses changed the playlist and cut back the chatter. More listeners tuned in for the rotation of romantic songs.

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<i> Leila Cobo-Hanlon is a frequent contributor to Calendar</i>

‘H ola, que tal Sur de California. Les habla Pepe Barreto!”

For 10 years, KLVE-FM (107.5) listeners have awakened weekday mornings with that same greeting, cheerfully called by that same voice. Most of that time, no one made much of it. The station scored respectable ratings but in recent years has been overshadowed by rival Spanish-language outlet KLAX-FM (97.9).

Until early this year, that is, when KLVE suddenly soared to the top of the local radio rankings and morning personality Pepe Barreto became King of the Hill, at one point beating such heavy-hitters as Rick Dees and Howard Stern.

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Some might call it luck, but as often happens with success stories, this one was the result of a master plan.

“You have to give credit where it’s due,” Barreto says. “Yes, I’m doing better than ever, but I haven’t changed what I do on the air. The new administration changed the music we played. Before, it was a mix--we wanted to please God and the devil. . . . Now KLVE’s music is very specific and we are known as a romantic music station. And the audience recognizes that.”

Faithful listener Alberto Paredes, for one, definitely hears the change.

“Now they play more music than before, and there’s a wider variety of romantic music. I mean, there’s a reason why the name is ‘K-Love,’ not ‘K-Ranchera,’ ” he says, contrasting the KLVE and KLAX formats.

KLVE had always been primarily a romantic music station. But somewhere along the line, its format got sidetracked and all kinds of musical styles--from salsa to rock in Spanish--started creeping in between love songs.

“It had turned into ‘ Radio Amor ‘ and everything else, and it had an awful lot of talk,” says Bill Tanner, who a year ago was named vice president of programming for Heftel Broadcasting, which owns KLVE and sister station KTNQ-AM (1020).

Tanner decided to find out exactly what his audience wanted to hear. The overwhelming response: love songs.

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At the same time, he was also able to convince his deejays that “less is more--that they were an absolutely integral part of what’s on the radio,” he says.

“But it’s like seasoning in the stew: If you put too much in, it can be awful.”

The end result is a station that has kept all its deejays but follows a strict format with tight, agile segments in which the emphasis is the music and not the talk.

“This wasn’t a radical change; this was refining and tuning,” says KLVE owner Cecil Heftel. “I always thought KLVE should and could be No. 1--not all the time but at least part of the time.”

In October of last year, when Tanner and new programming director Pio Ferro came on board, KLVE was attracting 2.5% of the audience on a given day, as measured by the Arbitron ratings. By December, it was No. 11 with 3%, and by April, KLVE was No. 1 in Southern California, with 5.2%, while Barreto’s show climbed to first place in the morning.

In the most recent ratings covering the summer, both the station and the morning show fell to second place, but this hasn’t fazed Barreto, 48, a cheerful, good-natured man and devout Christian who views his success pragmatically.

“Well, ratings go up and down and you can’t always be on top,” he says. “But my purpose in the morning has always been to entertain the audience that wakes up in Southern California. But entertain them with class. Many deejays underestimate their audience by thinking they’ll reach the majority by talking dirty. Those days are over. What I do is talk about different topics, some entertaining, some informational. And I don’t create on-air characters. My characters are my audience.”

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O n a recent morning, Barreto shares the KLVE studio with traffic reporter Lupita Pena and news director Richard Santiago, who reports news briefs every half-hour. But this is definitely Barreto’s show. He single-handedly mans the phones without the aid of a screener, edits calls and plays the music.

Every hour or so, he throws a new topic at his listeners. One this morning seeks listener reaction to a book titled “How to Seduce an Older Person.”

Calls pour in. “Can you believe it?” Barreto asks off the air as he plays back a listener’s confession on how he conned a wealthy, older woman. “And the book doesn’t even exist! I made it up!” Barreto clearly enjoys having fun with his listeners.

Later, however, things get more serious when he asks for reactions to a judge’s ruling in Texas forbidding a mother to speak Spanish to her child at home.

As Barreto takes call after call, he is unfailingly courteous but brief and to the point, per the station’s requirements. He is a seasoned reporter who covers local news for KMEX-TV Channel 34, and he prides himself on being able to talk to audiences at their level. So much so, in fact, that despite being Peruvian, he has managed to become immensely popular in a city where the majority of Latinos are Mexican or Central American.

Barreto was already a well-known radio personality at home when he and his wife moved to California in 1972, looking for bigger opportunities. He started as a deejay in San Francisco, then moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to work at KLVE and KVEA-TV Channel 52.

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“People think of Pepe as a class act,” Tanner says. “They think he tells them things that are important to their lives. A lot of our audience has a difficult time here, and we help them get along. And Pepe is very aware of what goes on.”

Teodoro Lainez, who has been listening to KLVE for years, agrees: “Pepe Barreto helps people. I like his show because of the variety. But what I like best,” he adds, “is the music.”

B ottom line: Music is the es sence of KLVE.

“If a deejay becomes too high-profile, the audience doesn’t listen as long,” Tanner explains. “About 300,000 new listeners have appeared from the fall [of 1994] to now, and our old fans listen much longer. That’s what’s making the ratings go up.”

The numbers have translated to higher advertising rates and to bonuses for on-air personalities. Still, Barreto doubts that he makes nearly as much as his English-language counterparts, although he declines to divulge his salary.

“It really doesn’t matter,” he says. “I do this because I like it. And I just do my best every single day, because I’m only as good as my last show.”

And although Barreto magnanimously states that the triumph of KLVE is the triumph of good music, he does not hesitate when asked what he would like to do in the future.

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“Talk radio or talk television,” he says, laughing. “I love that.”*

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