I caught John Hines at an awkward moment. The local radio and TV vet was just about to step in to give a deposition. “Its a ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’ thing,” he said.
I told him I was sorry to hear that. Those things are always some degree of gruesome. “Ah, what the hell,” Hines replied, “I’m getting used to it.”
The guy has bounced around town and the broadcast business long enough and often enough to know a thing or two about surviving traumatic transition … which will help him as he leaves K102, Clear Channel’s cash-cow country station for morning drive duties at KTLK, about 60 feet down the hall.
Hines’ arrival is scheduled for the Monday after next, March 19, and he’ll get an extra hour, working 5 to 9 am, as the station cuts back one hour of Dan Conry’s show. The move was announced earlier this week after the station parted ways with Andrew Colton, a TV news guy who was recruited for KTLK out of Florida by Clear Channel brain wizards. Colton was lured up, and given the title of “news director” on the now farcical premise that KTLK was going to offer a bona fide news product.
(And yes — full disclosure again — I briefly worked there. Which is why I can assure you the idea that the station was ever serious about hiring reporters and going head to head with WCCO, much less MPR, was absurdly implausible from the get-go. No effort was ever made to do anything other than market Fox News and read wire copy.)
Post-deposition, Hines called back to say that, no, he has no specific agreement that he will continue on with local Clear Channel in the event KTLK’s ratings problems persist and notoriously impatient Clear Channel corporate, (who mandated the idea of an FM talker to local managers), decides enough is enough and flips it over to Smooth Jazz 3.0.
“You know how these contracts go,” said Hines. “Its basically just a wage agreement. I’m free to leave anytime I want, and they’re free to make their moves.”
One hopes Hines’ reputation as a broadcasting pro and as a reliable employee to the local empire will protect him from the combination of reckless fiat and/or incompetence afflicting the station thus far.
“For me, personally, its a challenge,” he says. “The station doesn’t have a, uh, ‘strong market position’, as they say, and after 16 years of doing what I was doing, I want to see if I can help turn the place around.”
Hines is one of those familiar personalities who has somehow managed not to register as any kind of political ideologue. But, I wondered, is that middle-of-the-road shtick viable on an unapologetically hard right-wing station like KTLK, an other-worldly realm realm where George W. Bush is still given the benefit of the doubt … when he is not being painted as a victim of scurrilous whiners?
Hines believes he can get away with being a straight morning radio jock. He says morning drive is, or can be, a separate beast entirely from everything else that follows. “There is not a station in town,” he says, “that has a morning show that mirrors exactly what goes on the rest of the day.” (Mmmmmmm. The key word there, John, would be, “exactly”.)
The previous show was doomed by being forced to pretend the station was some kind of legitimate news source. Hines says, “A lot of elements in the show, like the news clock, [the hourly schedule for traffic, weather, breaks, etc.] will probably change.” And he says he expects to draw in the show’s producer, Christopher Gabriel, a grossly underutilized talent in my estimation.
Fundamentally though, the issue is the audience KTLK has chosen for itself. By appealing solely and only to the hardest of the hard core Bush-nicks and echo chamber mushrooms, they are in a position where unless their hosts feed that crowd what they want — and regularly — their prospects become more and more limited.
Hines mentioned Jay Leno’s monologue as the sort of equal abuse comedy that draws a nice audience. And that may be true. But radio is played in tight demographic compartments, and talk radio’s is one of the tightest of all. Despite the overwhelming abundance of comic (tragi-comic?) material sloughing off the current administration you’re risking summary alienation from KTLK’s target demo if you put more than a toe down that path.
Bottom line though, Hines is a pro who at least knows and understands the true variety of opinion and humor lurking in these towns, and that is waaaay beyond Clear Channel’s usual knuckleheaded view that, “the Twin Cities are no different than any other place” — (a direct quote from one of their barnstorming consultant-gurus).
Good luck, John.
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