Declining Revenues Force University Radio Station to Cut 6 Employees : Budget: Layoffs will mean more jazz and blues at KLON-FM, but less news.

LONG BEACH —  Listeners who tune in to KLON-FM at Cal State Long Beach will get more blues and less news in the wake of recent layoffs at the jazz radio station. A budget crunch has forced KLON to lay off six employees, including four from the news staff, officials said.

Gone are morning news anchor Debra Baer and one full-time reporter, Frank Stoltze. The news section’s two-man production staff, which produced news features and took news feeds from reporters in the field, has also been eliminated.

Night-shift deejay Roy Daniels, who had joined the station before it switched from a polka-gospel-jazz-and-blues music format to strictly jazz and blues in 1983, received a layoff notice, as did the station’s concert production assistant, Lisa Dante.

Daniels was let go partly because he was drawing one of the highest salaries, General Manager Rick Lewis said. Scott Willis, who has filled in for vacationing disc jockeys, is taking over Daniels’ shift.

The cuts, which Daniels said came as a surprise, were announced two weeks ago and took effect immediately.

With the layoffs, the station will cut $200,000 from its $2.75-million budget, Lewis said. The layoffs reduce the full-time staff to 20 employees. A handful of part-time employees will round out the staff.

The station’s budget has been declining since 1990, when it was slightly more than $4 million.

Lewis, 45, blamed the layoffs on a reduction in funding and some unexpected expenses. “It just hasn’t been a good year,” he said.

One of the biggest fund-raisers, the Hollywood Jazz Festival, was canceled last spring in the wake of rioting. Last month’s Long Beach Blues Festival, traditionally the public radio station’s most lucrative fund-raiser, fell $300,000 short of projected revenues.

Lewis said the station also paid more than $60,000 in legal fees to thwart a challenge by an Orange County religious group, St. Ignatius Retreat Assn., which had asked the Federal Communications Commission not to renew KLON’s license. The group contended that KLON had failed to provide adquate educational programming. An administrative law judge rejected the challenge, ruling that the group failed to meet several deadlines for filing additional documents.

Lewis, who was once a producer with National Public Radio, has resigned but will remain at the station for six months to finish some projects he started earlier this year. Sharon Weissman, the station manager, will take over as general manager when Lewis departs.

KLON broadcasts from Cal State Long Beach and has a weekly listening audience of 290,000, Lewis said. Broadcasts reach all of Los Angeles County, northern Orange County and the southern coastline to San Juan Capistrano.

Lewis was hired in 1985 from NPR to head the station’s fledgling news department. He started news breaks every half hour, between Dizzy Gillespie, B. B. King, Muddy Waters and Billie Holliday, and hired a news staff to report local news.

Lewis also started “CalNet,” an award-winning half-hour afternoon news-feature program, and “Marketplace,” another half-hour show, which featured business news from around the world. The corporate sponsorship for “CalNet” ended unexpectedly last October, and Lewis said the station can no longer afford to produce “Marketplace.”

But he doubts that the shows will be missed.

“The average listener to KLON is a jazz fanatic,” he said. “So I would imagine they will be thrilled with the reduction in news and business broadcasts.”

Daniels agreed, saying that if the station focuses on jazz, it will pull out of its financial slump.

“It costs a lot of money to produce the news,” he said. “And it was such a small fraction of the programming that it didn’t make sense to have so many newspeople running around.”

The station will continue to broadcast news reports, but they will be shorter and less frequent. At least one full-time reporter will remain on staff.