Ready to Make Waves

At 21, she was Maureen O’Connor Reilly, separated from her husband, a single mother with a year-old son. Having dropped out of a local college, where she had been an English major, she moved back home with her parents and started looking for a job.

She answered an ad for a post in the billing department at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey “but it was filled. They said, ‘Well, we have something open in traffic in the radio station.’ I figured it was traffic reporting--’I can do that.’ ”

Today, 27 years later, in the Los Angeles office where she has been president and general manager of KABC-AM (790), KMPC-AM (710) and KLOS-FM (95.5) for eight months, Maureen Lesourd laughs at the memory. As any radio maven worth her bands knows, traffic is not freeways but doing “logs,” or placing commercials in the various “day-parts” of the schedule. Which is how Lesourd, married for 21 years to her second husband, found a career behind the mikes.

In a medium where the vast majority of senior executives are male, the unassuming, 48-year-old woman with a feather cut sits amid the top of the heap of radio managers nationally. Yet don’t overlook an inner core of toughness in the informal manner of an executive who does not hesitate to come out to greet guests in her secretary’s office.

She cautions, for instance, not to automatically assume that KABC will still carry Dodgers baseball games after the 1997 season. “I’d like to look in the eyes of the [new] owner. I’ve looked into Peter’s [O’Malley] eyes. It’s a classy organization, and I’d like to know who I’m negotiating with.” She says rumors of a rift with the Dodgers last fall were not true.

And she says she has no intention of caving in to the demands of an African American group, Talking Drum, that wants her to fire weekday afternoon host Larry Elder, who is African American and generally conservative, because the group doesn’t like his stand on a variety of race issues--even though she acknowledges that its calls for a boycott of KABC have cost the station a small amount of advertising revenue. “Maybe it’s the Irish in me, but I don’t like to be threatened by bullies when they have no real thing to bully about,” she says.

Lesourd was appointed to her present position last May in the wake of the Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC Inc. She’d been working at ABC-TV in New York but has spent most of her career in radio.

Of rock station KLOS and talk outlets KABC and KMPC, Lesourd says “a lot has to be done. What we have done is we’ve developed a good, solid plan as to where we need to take the radio stations, and now it’s sort of setting course to get it done.”

She’s made substantial changes already. Not the kind of stuff that draws headlines--except for firing KABC’s veteran morning host Roger Barkley last September and bringing over Peter Tilden from KMPC to team with Ken Minyard. Though the move drew a hailstorm of protest, Lesourd has no second thoughts.

“I think that [now] we have a very unique blend of topicality, entertainment and, I think, a very broad appeal. . . ,” she says. “The station through the years has lost a lot of ratings, frankly. Of course, your morning show is always your anchor for the day.” The 5-9 a.m. program hasn’t shown any ratings progress yet, but Lesourd says she isn’t worried. “You can change a format with a music station and win overnight. You can’t recycle an audience that quickly in talk radio,” she says.

“We did a lot of research, a lot of investigation,” she adds. “There is a certain relatability that talent needs to have with the audience, and that was limited, frankly, in the morning show that we had. We worked on that but it didn’t go in the direction we wanted. . . . What you look for in teaming people up is a certain chemistry.”

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Another change is that KABC now offers traffic updates every 10 to 12 minutes in morning and afternoon drive time, instead of every 15 minutes.

“When people get ready to go to work in the morning, they have kids go off to school, they’ve got to shower themselves, they’ve got to do a million things. You’ve got to move ‘em, quick”--she snaps her fingers--”and you’ve got to be there for them. And that’s not the time a listener has 20 minutes to sit and listen to one particular issue. Now our morning drive is a great combination of important issues. ‘Need to know this now.’ We move on from this, move to that.”

She wants that snap to carry through the day. Now it’s news every half-hour instead of at the top of the hour. She plans to hire a reporter to cover major local stories. “I think by making KABC more of a solid, issues-oriented, some-news-[and]-talk station, we’ll appeal to listeners so that if a big story takes place, they don’t jump over to a news station.”

As for why KABC trails KFI-AM (640) in the talk field, Lesourd says that “they were lucky to get Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura [Schlessinger]. . . . I certainly intend to give [KFI] a run for its money.”

She therefore is particularly pleased with the hire at the start of 1997 of Marc Germain, the former Mr. KFI--now Mr. KABC. “KFI made a mistake in firing him. It was an opportunity for us, and we jumped at it.”

The biggest changes have been at KMPC. Lesourd and David Cooke, whom she hired last summer as operations manager/program director for KABC and KMPC, have completely revamped the weekday schedule. Gone are hosts Michael Reagan, Bob Heckler and, as of last week, Xavier Hermosillo. In are Marilyn Kagan, Joe Crummey and Yolanda Gaskins.

Early on, Lesourd noticed that KABC and KMPC were “very similar” and decided that “the best thing to do was to find some point of differentiation--balance them better.” She took weekend specialty shows like Elmer Dills’ restaurant reviews from KABC and moved them to KMPC, meanwhile moving Leo Terrell’s and Burt Katz’s issues-oriented shows from KMPC to KABC.

“We’re taking [KMPC to] more of a lifestyle-oriented talk, which would be more appealing to women than issue-oriented talk,” Lesourd says. “Issues certainly, but it might be something that would be more appealing to me.” In that regard, she added Robin Abcarian, a columnist in The Times’ Life & Style section, to the morning drive time, teaming her with Tracey Miller as “Two Chicks on the Radio,” although the pair also present their take on political and social issues.

As for KLOS, she’s been moving it toward classic rock; last Wednesday it became 80% classic rock. She hopes the sound will “transcend to women. We’re going to lose the hard edge.” Morning drive hosts Mark & Brian now also play music.