Conversational News, KFI Style
Listen as KFI-AM (640) news reporter Chris Little tells a story:
On Jan. 11, during the 9 p.m. newscast, Little was at a nut factory in Compton. There had been an explosion. Four people were burned, one critically.
“Everybody was in there hollering, saying, ‘Help, help,’ ” Ella Brown told Little, her voice riddled with anxiety. She had been watching from across the street, Little told listeners, adding: “She says she heard a small boom, saw a little smoke . . . “
“And then a couple of seconds later,” Brown said, “I saw the big one. Boooom. A whole gush of smoke came out.”
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“Conversational writing, up-tempo, a lot of use of sound, make it short. We can be that precise about how it needs to sound to fit the radio station,” said Mark Austin Thomas, 45, news director and assistant program director. “You’re [not] going to hear that on other radio stations.”
Thomas and David G. Hall, the talk station’s program director, believe that style of reporting, and the station’s news presence in general, have helped KFI to its perch as the top-ranking nonmusic radio station in the crowded Los Angeles-Orange County market. Currently KFI is in sixth place, according to Arbitron, averaging 58,400 listeners per quarter-hour.
Still KFI’s bread and butter is talk. Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger are on its roster. So are local host Bill Handel during morning drive; Karel (Bouley) and Andrew (Howard)--an openly gay couple doing general talk in the afternoon--and the recently syndicated comic-impersonator Phil Hendrie at night. All of which, on any given day, may live up to at least one of its billboard promises to teach, tickle or torture.
Whether KFI’s news-reporting style is all that different from chief news competitors--news stations KFWB-AM (980) or KNX-AM (1070)--or indeed news reports elsewhere on the dial is, of course, subjective. But there is a certain anomaly in KFI’s news operation.
In an era of consolidation, cost-cutting and outsourcing of news and traffic reports, KFI is the area’s only station with a full-fledged news department, with the obvious exceptions of the all-news stations. There are eight news reporters, a sports director, two traffic reporters, three anchors, two editors and an assistant news director.
Last summer, KFI partnered with Fox News Channel for national and international coverage. “I wanted us to have a network affiliate, a la [CBS-owned] KFWB and KNX or even [rival talk station] KABC [AM (790)],” Thomas said.
But it’s the local news coverage that KFI executives insist sets the station apart.
“If there’s a story coming out about unemployment statistics,” noted Thomas, “instead of just talking to someone from the Chamber of Commerce and getting the figures out, we’ll go stand in an unemployment line.”
“Let’s say the [Los Angeles Unified School District] decides it can’t afford a music program in an elementary school or middle school,” Hall said. “We may or may not go to the school board meeting to report that, but we’d go to a middle school and find a student [who plays] an instrument, and do the story from his point of view.”
Not all of KFI’s competitors are convinced that’s an appropriate strategy for news.
“When I turn on the news, I want to learn something. So much of the news seems to be obsessed with emotions rather than intellect,” said Bob Sims, KNX news director. “I learn very little by some reporter asking some child, ‘What did you think of that?’ I learn from a teacher or administrator or an expert rather than someone in line. Interviewing one or two people on the street does not give you an accurate cross-section of what people think.”
Barring major breaking news, KFI does six minutes at the top of the hour, and one minute at the bottom from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. During the key morning-drive period from 5 a.m. until 9, it’s six minutes at both ends of the hour with quarterly updates.
In the 10 years since Hall’s arrival at KFI as program director--he is now 35--KFI has won nine awards for best newscast under 15 minutes from the California/Nevada Associated Press Television/Radio Assn., three station-of-the-year awards as well as 19 Golden Mikes, in various categories, from the Southern California Radio/Television News Assn.