The Next Generation?

When Pio Ferro left Miami for Los Angeles in the summer of 1994, he remembers being surprised by what he found.

“In Miami, it’s very different from here,” he says. “In Miami, Hispanics aren’t [a] minority. And if you’re not a Hispanic, you are a minority.”

Ferro was talking about the population at large, of course, but he could just as easily have been discussing the two cities’ radio communities. For while Miami’s active Spanish-language radio market is largely run by Latinos, half the top 10 Spanish stations in L.A. are managed by English-speaking white business experts who often understand little of the programming they air.

Though L.A. has exploded under that leadership, becoming the largest, fastest-growing and most diverse Spanish-language radio market in the country, taking the market to the next level may require general managers who possess more than just an ability to crunch numbers. Eventually, most observers agree, station management will have to reflect the public it serves.

“We need people who understand radio and so on, have that education, but that have the culture,” says Richard Heftel, president and general manager of three Spanish-language stations in L.A. “It’s better for the community, it’s better for the listeners, I think it’s better for the radio station. That’s the future.”

If that’s the case, then a piece of that future is taking shape just a few dozen steps down the hall from Heftel’s Hollywood office. Because that’s where Ferro, a Cuban American, and Maria Nava, a Michoacan, Mexico, native, direct the programming for Heftel Broadcasting outlets KLVE-FM (107.5) and KSCA-FM (101.9), the city’s two top-ranked stations.

Ferro, 25, and Nava, 31, aren’t the only talented young program directors shaking up Spanish-language radio in L.A. Nestor Rocha, 25, has found a winning format with his tight, youth-oriented playlist at KSSE-FM (97.5), while Martin Fabian, 28, who took stations in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara to the top spot in their markets in the last four years, is hoping to do the same here for KLAX-FM (97.9).

“It would be a huge opportunity if Pio or myself or anyone who is right now a program director . . . would make it to general manager,” Nava says. “We’re sitting here as program directors now, and right now this is what we want to do. But if you ask me where would you like to be 10 years from now, I probably wouldn’t want to be a program director. Hopefully I’ll get to be a general manager.”

That’s Alex Nogales’ hope as well. The national chair of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, Nogales monitors media practices on a number of issues, including the hiring and promotion of Latinos. On this score, he found the L.A. radio market in need of reform.

“We’re concerned about that. Because there is a discrimination going on,” he says. “Nobody can tell me that a very good Latino programmer can’t succeed as [well] as a non-Latino programmer. Or [as] a general manager.

“It’s about money. It’s not about the fact that they have really good programs. It’s more about money than it is the sensitivity about the program.”

Those inside the industry, however, say the reason so few Latinos have assumed management positions has more to do with station ownership than any sinister motive. Most radio groups have traditionally been owned by whites, and when these groups began buying up Spanish-language stations in the 1980s, they often transferred proven front-office staff from their English-language affiliates. Moreover, general managers have typically come not from the programming department, but from sales, where language skills are less important.

“You have to search a little bit and find the right person, but once you do, I don’t think it matters if he’s Hispanic. I don’t think it matters if he’s Anglo,” says Ferro. “I don’t think he’s going to run the business any differently.

“[But] I think there’s going to be a lot more people like me, a lot more people like Maria, that know radio, that know how to do it in Spanish. The market’s going to be very different in 20 years.”

Heftel is an example of the traditional general manager, having worked his way up from a low-level accounting job to the front office of KSSK-AM and FM, his father’s stations in Hawaii. He became general manager of KLVE and KTNQ-AM (1020) shortly after his family bought them from Liberman Broadcasting in 1986.

“Why am I here? We owned this thing. It’s part of the family,” says Heftel, who studied Spanish before assuming his post. “In me they knew they had somebody that understood radio and that they could trust completely.”

And that confidence proved well-founded: Although KLVE drew acceptable but unspectacular ratings for Liberman, a Latino-owned company, under Heftel it rocketed to the top spot in the market, a position it has held for 27 consecutive months.

Yet as the company has continued to expand--12 years later, Heftel Broadcasting owns 39 Spanish-language stations, making it the largest Spanish-language radio company in the country--so did the management opportunities for its Latino talent. Claudia Puig, a Cuban, is general manager of Heftel’s four stations in Miami, for example, while David Martinez, a Chicago-born Puerto Rican, runs WADO-AM (1280) and WNWK-FM (105.9) in New York, and Cuban Jose Valle, who started as a receptionist at KLVE, is in charge of KLSQ-AM (870) in Las Vegas. And there are other Latinos in front-office positions throughout the Heftel empire.

But while a step up into a general manager’s job would seem the likely progression for a successful program director, it’s not always a perfect--nor even desirable--fit.

“A general manager runs more the finances,” Rocha says. “I don’t think it really matters if he understands Spanish. Money is a universal language.

“I think it would be great for a Hispanic to be a general manager. But I would rather be the president of programming for a network. I know what I’m good at and it’s music.”

Looking Out for No. 1: Ferro and Nava may soon be competing for a general manager’s job, but for the time being they’re waging a tense battle for the top spot in the local Arbitron ratings. Ferro’s KLVE has spent the last 2 1/4 years in first place, with Nava’s KSCA, which began broadcasting in Spanish last February, closing fast. In the last quarterly listener survey, the regional Mexican station was second, just 1.2% behind KLVE.

“The station I fear the most right now is [KSCA] because it’s programmed so well,” said Ferro, who this month was named Heftel Broadcasting’s program director of the year. “It’s the same company and Richard [Heftel] might see it that it doesn’t make a difference who’s No. 1. But it makes a difference to me.

“Right now the only goal I have is to be No. 1 in the next book.”

Nava, the music director at KLVE before taking over programming for KSCA, is more diplomatic, saying, “our purpose . . . hasn’t been and won’t be to kick KLVE [out] of first place.”

Yet when KSCA’s morning show knocked KLVE out of the drive-time ratings lead last October, Nava’s celebrating was probably audible on the other side of the wall separating her office from Ferro’s.

“It was incredible, yeah; it was great,” she said. “I do, certainly, get complete satisfaction when the station that I’m paid to program is doing well.”

And now a new front has opened in the battle. January’s Arbitron surveys showed Ferro’s evening drive-time program ranked first in the 80-plus-station L.A. and Orange County market, while Nava’s 11 a.m.-2 p.m. show on KSCA finished fourth in its time slot.