It’s Sunday, and Sunday Archer’s Lines usually run to the personal or the think-heavy. This is one of the former.
And it’s the long-awaited sequel to this one, the first part of my radio journey and the story of how I got here.
As we prepare to relocate to Atlanta, some of our plans are firming up. I’ll load up my car with stuff and drive across the country first. Then the big moving trucks get loaded and head east. Ronnie will follow a few days behind me with Misty Mao, and then the search for a new home begins.
That brings to mind how I got to Los Angeles in September of 1999.
That move was a lot more nerve-racking.
I had nothing lined up. Just a vague message from Steve Streit, then programming KBIG, saying he didn’t have anything for me, but to call him when I hit town and maybe something part-time might open up. But I was in love, and she had decided she wanted to move to L.A., so I uprooted my life and left my great gig with Clear Channel in Miami.
The move had taxed my last financial reserves. I do believe I was on an anxiety weight-loss program during the week we were on the road.
There was nothing for me once we got situated in an apartment in Glendale.
Fortunately, I did manage to land a full-time gig. Unfortunately, it was out in the High Desert: Operations Manager for a group of stations. A very long drive there and a very long drive back.
Then I got some part-time work at KBIG. That meant working the occasional evening shift, getting home after midnight, then getting up at 6 to make the drive to the desert.
Fortune smiled when Jhani Kaye took over KBIG. Eventually, he brought me on full time, and I didn’t have to drive to the desert anymore. I hardly had to drive at all. I lived only a few blocks from the station at the time.
I wound up doing afternoons and Disco Saturday Night, a longtime ratings-book winner.
Then 9/11 hit, and in the economic aftermath, I was caught in a round of cost-cutting and laid off.
Not long after, KBIG realized it couldn’t do without me, so I was brought back as Assistant Program Director and occasional evening host. That ramped up when we started doing our famous nighttime dance shows and live broadcasts from nightclubs.
Yada yada yada, and I got caught in another round of layoffs in January 2006. (I found out by getting an email I wasn’t supposed to get. That’s another story.)
That’s when things got chaotic. My marriage began to crack and eventually ended. Fruitless searches for work didn’t help. I did manage to land some side gigs here and there, including working for Total Traffic and even training to be a network operator at Premiere.
It was my Total Traffic work that got me noticed by KFI. And that’s when “Broadcast Journalist Rob Archer” was born.
But not quite yet.
I also landed a great full-time gig at Dial Global as a DJ on the national AC format. I met Gary Thompson, who turned out to be one of my best friends and collaborators ever. I got moved around a bit and finally found my way into management—programming and running a couple of formats and creating some early streaming formats as Dial tried to figure out what it was going to do in that realm.
(Turned out, not much.)
I kept doing KFI on the weekends.
Sadly, the Dial gig went away in October 2012. The company eventually renamed itself—again—as Westwood One and has now been dismantled so much that it’s only a hollow shell.
A bit after that, the news career began in earnest. KFI brought me on full time, and I leaned into this new radio version of myself that I didn’t know was in there. Jhani Kaye called me once and said, “News is what you were born to do.”
Falling in love is also what I was born to do. KFI was where I met Ronnie. We spent years being friends, then we started dating, fell in love, and got married. And my KFI career was going gangbusters.
But you know how it goes.
Yep, another layoff in 2015.
Just days later, KNX and I connected. (Thanks go to Chris Little and Vicky Moore for putting my name in News Director Julie Chin’s ear.) So I didn’t spend much time looking for work. I was right back at it within a few weeks.
And that’s how I spent my last ten years—helping cover some amazing and terrifying stories along the way. Fires, mass shootings, ecological disasters, elections, City Hall scandals, the pandemic, the strikes.
I picked up a few awards along the way. It was also the longest stable stretch I’ve ever enjoyed in radio.
Thank you.
Now I’m off to Atlanta to rejoin Ken Charles, my former KNX boss, and continue doing these things we call radio and news.
I’ll try to do my usual Tuesday and Thursday updates here this week, but if I don’t, you can probably figure out why.
It probably means I couldn’t get Wi-Fi.
I’ll be on the road, catching up on lots of music and albums—and listening to WSB all the way.
Come along for the next chapter. Subscribe to Archer’s Line for radio, media, culture, history—and whatever happens after the moving trucks arrive.
What a journey! So glad that your brilliance as a broadcaster will be back on the airwaves and you and your beautiful wife Ronnie can begin a new adventure (with Misty Mao along for the ride). Have a smooth move and a triumphant entrance into Atlanta!