Country station adds familiar voice

Continuing its efforts to make former KZLA-FM fans feel right at home, KKGO-AM (1260) has hired another DJ from the former country-music station. Shawn Parr, who hosted a morning show at KZLA for six-plus years during the 1990s and more recently had been heard at midday, will take over the 6 a.m.-10 a.m. weekdays shift at KKGO beginning Jan. 8.

There he’ll join former KZLA on-air personalities Whitney Allen, Brian Douglas, Paul Freeman and Tonya Campos. All of them lost their jobs when Emmis Communications pulled the plug on KZLA in August and instituted an up-tempo pop format, re-christened KMVN-FM (93.9).

That temporarily left the nation’s second-largest radio market without a country station, but KKGO stepped into the void on Friday, abandoning its pop-standards format of artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Michael Buble in favor of Kenny Chesney, Martina McBride and Tim McGraw. Mt. Wilson FM Broadcasters, which owns KKGO, offers the country format on another of its stations, Tijuana-based XSUR-AM (540), heard in San Diego and Orange counties and parts of L.A.

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-- Lee Margulies