KGIL News-Talk Radio Lays Off Key Employees

Facing a decline in advertising revenues, the San Fernando Valley-based KGIL-AM news-talk radio station has laid off three key employees, including the programming director and its lone street reporter.

Its sister station, music-oriented KMGX-FM, laid off an on-air announcer as well. The stations, which broadcast from Mission Hills, had a total of 50 employees before the layoffs occurred last week.

Elimination of the jobs leaves KGIL (1260) with only one person in its newsroom--which provides local news reports every hour on weekdays--and no reporters working full-time in the field. Tom Mosher, general manager of the station, said its weekday news reports will largely consist of wire service reports being read by Ed Ziel, the news director.

Mosher said the layoffs were caused by the recession, which has hit media companies especially hard. He said that in the past year, the station’s revenues from advertising have dropped more than 10%.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Mosher said. “It is a tragedy of our economic times. Sometimes we have to go in and make business decisions that are not comfortable.”

KGIL bills itself as the “largest town hall meeting in L. A.” and with KMGX forms the only commercial AM-FM station operating in the Valley. KGIL primarily consists of talk show programs dealing with local topics, supplemented by hourly news broadcasts.

Those losing their jobs were programming director Mike Lundy, reporter George McQuade, KMGX (94.3) announcer Malinda Ellison and Lisa Fredlender, an assistant to Lundy.

Ziel will be the only remaining news employee and will be responsible for making hourly news broadcasts. He will probably have little time to report from the field, Mosher said.

“It depends on what the stories are, but we probably won’t cover as much City Hall stuff,” Mosher said. “I think we are still going to be able to cover and deliver the news for our listeners. The wire services and other news-gathering services are still available; we will have the stories.

“KGIL is issues-oriented. We are local and will continue to be that.”

The four employees whose jobs were eliminated had several years of experience at the station, Mosher said.

Only McQuade, 39, of Reseda could be reached for comment. He lamented the loss of his job but said radio stations everywhere are feeling the squeeze of the recession and news programming often is vulnerable to cuts.

“I saw the writing on the wall,” he said. “I have no hard feelings.”

McQuade became KGIL’s morning street reporter three years ago, working primarily out of a downtown office and calling in reports ranging from school board to police operations and court cases. He became known among other reporters as “Lone Wolf McQuade” because of his solo position.

“I gave the illusion that I was just about everywhere,” he said. “I was like a small-town reporter in a large city.”

He said elimination of his position leaves the station without the ability to do up-to-the-minute reporting on breaking news or to go live continuously from the scene of a major incident.

“It is a substantial loss to lose local news reporting from the field,” McQuade said. “There will be no one on the street.”

McQuade said he helped win KGIL notice in news reporting and a 1991 Associated Press award for excellence in news broadcasting in California and Nevada for a newsroom with fewer than three employees. He has not yet found a new job and said most radio and television stations he has contacted have no openings or have laid off news employees also.

He said one station manager did ask McQuade how he developed his knack for getting the KGIL microphone positioned in front of speakers at press conferences, thereby giving the station a free plug when the press conference was televised on local TV stations.

“I said hire me and I’ll show you,” McQuade said.