After Reshaping Talk Station, He’s Moving On
Talk radio listeners may know him only as a character on the Phil Hendrie show--maybe a real person, maybe not--who provides a regular foil for the outrageous host. But few probably know how much David Hall has shaped what they’re hearing.
After 11 years as program director at KFI-AM (640) in Los Angeles, Hall is moving up the ladder of the station’s parent company, Clear Channel Communications, shifting next month to oversee some of the company’s nationally syndicated talk and sports programming. But the past decade has been one in which both Hall and events have changed talk radio here and around the country.
“It’s very different now, compared to what it was 10 years ago,” Hall said. “We kind of redefined what talk radio is all about. It seemed talk radio should be a mix of what’s very entertaining and very informative. We also made a pretty big change in thinking what information should be.”
When he started, Hall, 37, said his image of a talk radio host was a middle-aged guy peering over half-glasses at a stack of newspapers. He sought to change that, and instead of just the headlines, he wanted topics on shows to include universal truths and experiences that would resonate with listeners.
So Bill Handel’s KFI morning show tries to give commuters a full dose of information and insight on the hot topic du jour: Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, the latest earthquake, the Raiders, Monica Lewinsky, terrorism, Enron.
By changing the presentation, Hall was looking to reach an audience different from the stereotypical talk radio listener.
“I always pictured guys in jumpsuits and comfortable shoes listening in their garages,” he said. “We’re not like that. We’re younger and more female. That’s a pretty concerted effort we’ve had over the past decade to be different.”
The effort seems to have worked. When Hall arrived at KFI as news director in 1989, the station’s ratings barely registered--about 0.7% of the listening audience. According to the most recent Arbitron ratings of listeners age 12 and older, during the fourth quarter of 2001, KFI was the fourth-most-listened to station in the area, with a 4.2% audience share. “David has been so tremendously successful at KFI, I’ll just try not to screw it up,” said Hall’s replacement, Robin Bertolucci, who oversees a trio of talk and sports stations in Denver. “He’s invented and created a lot of the personality at the station. He really built KFI. He turned that whole paradigm on its head, filling a void the other stations didn’t know existed.”
“People have tried to get me to say bad things about him, but I don’t have anything bad to say,” said Erik Braverman, who programs KFI’s archrival in the talk business, KABC-AM (790). “When he got the job of program director he inherited some great talent. But it lacked focus and direction, and David brought that.... Even with all that [on-air] talent, he’s the heart and soul of the station.”
Hall says his thoughts about diversifying talk radio with a combination of perspective and news were borne out after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In other markets, listeners sought out all-news stations, he noted, while ratings in Los Angeles showed KFI and KABC at fourth and 12th in the market, respectively, beating out AM all-news outlets KNX (1070) and KFWB (980), which were 16th and 20th.
“After the World Trade Center, people didn’t care about other people’s opinions, they wanted information; 9/11 shows that talk radio is pretty well-rounded, and giving people what they want, when they want it,” Hall said.
A key for KFI has clearly been nationally syndicated conservative host Rush Limbaugh. In the talk era before Limbaugh, Hall said, “everyone tried to be reasonable, tried hard not to ruffle feathers. Rush started ruffling feathers and got huge ratings for it. A lot of people who had been in talk radio for a long time thought it was a flash in the pan.”
Hall has known Limbaugh since they worked together in the late 1980s at KFBK in Sacramento, where Limbaugh got his start. KFI was one of the first big-market stations to carry Limbaugh’s show, and Hendrie, John & Ken and Dr. Laura Schlessinger all became syndicated after laying foundations at the Los Angeles station. Among his earliest changes, Hall moved Schlessinger from a late-night weekend shift to midday weekdays, and worked to differentiate her from the pack of on-air therapists.
Hall also brought Hendrie from Miami, where he went after an earlier stint at KFI. In return, Hendrie added “David G. Hall” to the cast of characters he voices during his frenetic, four-hour show, portraying Hall as a scratchy-voiced “vice president of syndication” forever complaining about the style of the show, encouraging Hendrie to cater to spurious advertisers and making impolitic comments about women or ethnic groups.
“Phil Hendrie, he’s just a trip,” Bertolucci said. “I don’t want to be the next David Hall character.”
Not every move was a home run, including the acrimonious departure of Tom Leykis in 1992 after a contract dispute. Hall also programs Clear Channel’s other Los Angeles-area AM properties, sports station KXTA (1150) and talk station KLAC (570).
Despite his relative youth, Hall has already logged a quarter-century in the radio business. “I knew I wanted to be in radio from about the time I was 9,” he said. At the age of 12, he lied about his age and secured an internship at the local Top 40 station in his hometown of Sacramento.
Hall soon learned just about every job at the station, working the control boards when deejays left to meet groupies, and answering request lines.
“Here I was, this seventh-grader from Catholic school, and every day after school I was talking on the phone with 16-year-old girls,” he said. “It’s still the best job I’ve ever had.”
After getting his chance on air (“All I wanted for years was to be a big deejay; I finally got the chance, and I was just awful,” he said), Hall became a news reporter at Sacramento station KFBK, winning awards for his coverage from Mexico, Nicaragua and elsewhere. He was named news director there before leaving in 1989 to take the same job at KFI. Two years later he was promoted to program director, when the then-struggling station just started carrying Limbaugh.
“We had no ratings,” Hall said. “We had nothing to lose.”