St. Louis Radio: Frank O. Pinion Headed To KFNS

Frank O. Pinion

Frank O. Pinion has been a fixture in the afternoon drive-time slot at KTRS 550 AM  for 20 years but is about to move up the dial to KFNS 590 AM The Fan.

His last day at KTRS is scheduled for next Thursday, his debut at KFNS on Oct. 2, according to stltoday.com.

Dan Caesar reports KFNS Owner Randy Markel has made many lineup changes in his tenure of less than two years, which once was the dominant local sports-talk station. But its fortune faded after missed payrolls, lawsuits and even a fistfight in the office between a host and the man running the station. It finally went off the air before Markel and a partner essentially bought it out of bankruptcy.

All of Markel’s previous moves were to bolster the station’s sports presence. “We’re sports, I don’t want this other (stuff) and we’re going to be sports,” he insisted.

But O. Pinion’s show has little — usually nothing — to do with sports. And he said he won’t change his approach of long-form storytelling, cracking jokes and selling. He is an expert salesman who is adept at steering the subject at hand into talking about, or to, his advertisers.

“I don’t know sports,” O. Pinion, 67, acknowledged in a lengthy meeting this week. “No one knows less about sports than me.”

He has had and will keep an unconventional business structure for his show.  He owns the show and is given four minutes of advertising to sell per hour, which he uses to pay himself and his staff.

KFNS 550 AM (1Kw, DA2)

He will have a similar arrangement at KFNS — he’ll average four minutes an hour to air his own ads, with the station having 12 minutes. He will keep 90 percent of that ad revenue he generates, with the station having the other 10 percent. But with his rate about 4½ times greater than that of the regular commercials, he figures to do well. And he said 13 of his 14 core advertisers are staying on board.

Markel said there also is a signing bonus and a salary for the first two years of O. Pinion’s deal, which runs through Dec. 31, 2020.

Though they would not get into specifics, it is believed that O. Pinion’s total compensation for the two-year period is to be between $400,000 and $500,000 — not including what he generates from advertising, minus what he pays to his staffers.

O. Pinion announced in July that he was terminating his stay at KTRS. He has said he was not happy with how business was being conducted there.