'Steady decline for years': KGO hosts reflect on Bay Area radio station closure

When longtime San Francisco Bay Area talk radio station KGO went off the airwaves this week, it was a blow felt far beyond the radio dial.

The AM station that operated on the 810 kHz frequency had been broadcasting local talk shows and news programming since the 1920s. The station had gone through many changes over the years, but perhaps the most important shift came in 2011, when Cumulus Media, the company behind Audacy and iHeartRadio, took over the station, beginning a decade of cuts to the local programming. The downsizing culminated Thursday, when host Mark Thompson's show was abruptly cut off and replaced with ads teasing a new format and songs about money and betting, leading to speculation that the new station would be themed around sports gambling.

The news led to an outcry on social media — something of an online wake for the local bastion of independent talk radio.

Morning show host Nikki Medoro had worked at the station for over 11 years, arriving in 2011, a few months before what she described as "the original blowout" of Cumulus' takeover.

"It's been a whirlwind ever since. While what happened [Thursday] is not a surprise, because I've been through this many times in the last 11 years, it still stinks," she told SFGATE.

Medoro began as a street reporter in the evenings, graduated to evening anchor with Peter Finch, then was an afternoon anchor alongside Brett Burkhart. She also did news for Chip Franklin, then earned her own show, becoming the first woman morning drive-time host in the station's history.

She sees the shutdown as a big loss for the Bay Area. "It's losing its community square," she told SFGATE. "Information is not hard to find. What's hard to find is a place where you can all talk about it in real time that's not social media, and it doesn't use a lot of technology."

The station's function as a medium of public debate led to strong bonds between listeners and hosts.

I really feel like I knew some of my listeners, even though I never met them in person, and I know they felt the same way with me," Medoro said.

David Lazarus, who currently covers business and consumer news at KTLA, began working at KGO in the late 1990s. He fondly recounted an experience when he was working as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle and was first invited as a guest on the Ronn Owens show. During a commercial break, Owens took Lazarus into the office of the station's general manager and suggested Lazarus become a guest host.

"Before I knew it, when the regular hosts started taking vacations, they started letting me sit in," Lazarus told SFGATE. Eventually, he earned his own three-hour show on Saturday nights.

"They said you could talk about whatever you want; it doesn't have to be money, you can talk about politics, just have some good times," Lazarus said.

In 2007, Lazarus moved to Los Angeles, but he kept recording his show from a small studio that was set up in the LA Times office. He officially stopped working for KGO in the early 2010s, when the station began to cut local talk shows.

"KGO has been in steady decline for years, and that's unfortunate, but that's kind of the industry overall," Lazarus said. He said that perhaps the station's centrist identity made it difficult to keep an audience engaged as media tastes evolved, and posited that conservative listeners flocked to more extreme outlets, while NPR siphoned off many liberals looking for news content. He thinks the rise of podcasts peeled off the next generation of potential KGO fans. "Radio is just a wonderful medium. It pains me that like print, we're now seeing it in its last days."

As for behind-the-scenes talent, former KGO producer Albert Ermelo also took the news of the closure hard. He started at KGO as an intern in 2016, then moved up to the role of producer for a variety of hosts, most recently Mark Thompson.

"It was kind of devastating to hear my friends lose their jobs," Ermelo told SFGATE. "A lot of the listeners still follow me on social media and still interact with me on a daily basis. To know that they are robbed of something they've enjoyed most of their life, it was devastating."

"I was just very shocked. I knew that things might've changed, and people might lose their jobs, but I never thought KGO would close."