For L.A. Radio Gossip, These Web Sites Are Tuned In

Some people like radio. Others love radio. And then there are people who live radio.

Those are the people you’re most likely to encounter via several Web sites devoted to the doings around the Los Angeles dial--often delving deep into what can only be characterized as minutia of the radio world.

There’s Don Barrett, a former radio programmer and author of the “L.A. Radio People” books profiling the region’s historic deejays, who can be found at https://www.laradio.com. Tomm Looney, heard regularly doing fill-in sports updates on news station KFWB-AM (980), sports-talk KXTA-AM (1150) and weekend talk stints on KLSX-FM (97.1), writes an L.A. radio column on the national Net service RadioDigest.com (https://www.radiodigest.com). One AM station executive who prefers to stay anonymous is behind an L.A.-focused venture called Radio-Gossip.com (https://www.radiogossip.com). And there’s Ron Fineman, a reporter for news station KNX-AM (1070) who shares the dirt and his take on radio and other media topics on his RonFineman.com (https://www.ronfineman.com).

Sometimes they have big scoops (details of Art Bell’s disappearance last year were broken by Looney), but much of the time it is the sort of things that you’d think could only possibly be of interest to true radio insiders--mid-level management job shuffles, minor on-air high jinks, that sort of stuff.

Naturally, radio professionals find the material quite interesting.

“Every morning when I come into the office, the first thing I do is turn on my computer and check out [Barrett’s and Looney’s] sites,” says Rita Wilde, program director of rock station KLOS-FM (95.5). “It’s the best way to keep in touch with what’s going on out there.”

But the readership goes way beyond the professional ranks.

“I’m getting close to 20,000 different visitors a day to the site,” says Barrett. “It’s a shock to me. I thought it was a very narrow corridor of interest in L.A. radio. But clearly there are people who grew up here and moved away and embrace radio with a passion. I get between 300 and 400 e-mails every day, people who love radio and want to talk about it and know about it.”

1,800 Willing to Pay for Access

Even more amazing, perhaps, was that he found that a good portion of those people were willing to pay for the access. In October, Barrett turned his site into a subscription service at a rate of $24.95 a year. Less than two weeks after initiating that fee for what had been free since he started it four years ago, he abandoned the move after suffering a small stroke and discovering he has a diabetic condition that he felt would restrict his Internet activities. But in just that short time, he’d already gotten 1,800 people signing up for the paid venture. (He gave them refunds after his stroke.)

Looney, too, has been stunned to find the amount of interest there is in his column, as has the operator of RadioGossip.com, who says that public demand led him to suspend what had been a fairly casual, once-a-week venture and redesign it as a more professional outlet, which was recently set to relaunch.

So who are the people reading this stuff?

“My readers are a mixture of hard-core radio geeks and radio industry types,” says Looney (his real name).

He uses the term “geeks” affectionately--he considers himself one, afflicted with a passion that crosses way over the border into obsession.

It’s the industry readers who really fuel the enterprises, though. These are the people who funnel news, rumors and innuendo to the sites.

“I get e-mail from all the top industry movers and shakers,” he says. “I get e-mail not only from the top radio personalities--Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Tom Leykis, Art Bell, the Greaseman and others--I also get e-mail from local radio personalities from L.A. and elsewhere.”

It’s those kind of connections that have given him such scoops as being the first to divulge the circumstances behind Bell’s mysterious absence last year. He’d actually had the scoop--that it was connected to Bell’s son having difficulties after being molested by an HIV-positive teacher--for weeks and chose to sit on it, but when Bell announced that he was going to reveal the truth on the air, Looney beat him to it. Bell went so far as to read Looney’s column on the air, and in that week there were 330,000 hits on his site, thanks in part to a link from his pal Matt Drudge’s site.

Drudge, in some ways, is the role model for Looney’s operation, which he proudly says sports an on-the-fly tone that he’s well aware does not meet conventional journalistic standards.

“I write in tabloid style,” he says, noting that he has no problem writing an unconfirmed rumor or juicy gossip, though he always labels an item as such. “I rarely quote anyone directly, unless they insist. Edward R. Murrow may roll over in his grave when I say this, but when people read my column, I don’t care whether they believe me or not. . . . I think the information anarchy provided on the Internet is fine, as long as it’s labeled properly.”

To him, he’s “in the trenches” with radio personnel, “bleeding and sweating and paranoid” about the changes in the business. He sees Barrett’s site as more warm and fuzzy, with an emphasis on memories of radio’s past--something in part attributable to their difference in age, Barrett being 58, Looney 34. Barrett doesn’t disagree.

“I have a vision and that’s to preserve the community of L.A. radio,” Barrett says. “I would never put anything in the column that would intentionally hurt someone. I get e-mails from people saying, ‘I know you knew something. Why didn’t you print it?’ Well, someone asked me not to. This is a difficult business filled with paranoia. Why should someone wake up and read [in my column] that they’re losing their job?”

RadioGossip.com and RonFineman.com fall somewhere in between the two. But there is one thing all the people doing this have as common ground.

“We have great passion for radio and great enthusiasm for the success of others,” Looney says. “I’m not a radio critic. I’m a radio glorifier. I love to see others do well and hear others do great radio.”

One Man’s Dream . . . : A station manager’s nightmare set? It might include such material as the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” (all 17-plus droning minutes of it), not to mention the Beatles’ notorious sound collage “Revolution #9.” For Chris Carter, though, both those pieces long were on the playlist in his head for his dream show.

So with his Sunday night “The Chris Carter Mess” on KLYY-FM (107.1) apparently doomed along with the rest of the station’s line-up with the impending switch to rock en espan~ol, he decided to bring his dream to life with an installment he titled, what else, his “All Time Dream Radio Show.” But in truth, it was really good radio, at least for a real rock fan, with selections ranging from Muddy Waters to David Bowie to X. The quality is no surprise to Carter’s regular listeners, as his show, usually emphasizing newer music, has been consistently good, doing a much better job of exploring new music than most of the stations around town that claim that as their mission.

In fact, Carter proudly notes ecstatic e-mails he’s received from listeners, ranging from high school kids to aging Baby Boomers, and on Sunday’s “Mess” he played a T.Rex song requested by a 72-year-old man and a Bryan Ferry track asked for by a woman who’s 70. OK, so those were ringers--his parents, who were his in-studio guests--but it does demonstrate the wide appeal of his free-wheeling and always passionate presentation.

Carter, a former member of the Carter, a former member of the band Dramarama, had planned to continue with “Dream Show” installments for at least parts of his 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. stints for what he had been told would be several more weeks. But the station has now decided to play out its pre-switch run without deejays.

Maybe that was because management got word of something Carter planned to do: Saving the best--or worst, depending on your perspective--for last, he intended for his final show to play the entirety of Lou Reed’s notorious 1975 noise experiment, “Metal Machine Music.”