TV: Dallas media mogul Tom Joyner adds to his portfolio

12:58 PM CDT on Saturday, October 1, 2005

By MANUEL MENDOZA / The Dallas Morning News

Tom Joyner was watching TV the other night when he saw a promotional spot for his new comedy-variety series. It was immediately followed by a commercial for the upcoming film, The Gospel, and there he was again.

"I thought, 'Whoa, you can't get away from me.' "

The longtime Dallas deejay, philanthropist and entrepreneur suddenly appears to be everywhere. A nationally syndicated radio host for 12 years, he launches a syndicated TV show this weekend, his autobiography dropped last month, and he recently raised $1 million for Katrina relief. And there's that bit part in The Gospel, a movie about a young singer trying to find his way back to the church, opening Friday.

"We're a company that's trying to reach out and touch African-Americans in any media we can: Internet, TV, movies, Morse code, taxicab dispatch," the 55-year-old says in a phone interview, only partly joking. "I'm a radio guy trying to do some other things, but I'm still a radio guy – black radio."

As the top-rated urban deejay in the country, drawing 8 million listeners to his Tom Joyner Morning Show on 115 stations – including his home base, Dallas' KSOC-FM (94.5) – Mr. Joyner has a built-in promotional platform for his other endeavors. And he's used it.

In 2001, he started a now-influential Internet site, www.Black AmericaWeb.com, to provide news and commentary from a black perspective, followed two years later by the formation of his company, Reach Media. Through the Tom Joyner Foundation, he has also raised $30 million since 1997 to send needy students to historically black colleges.

Now his weekly Tom Joyner Show, shot in Los Angeles and airing in Dallas at 10 p.m. Saturdays on KTXA-TV (Channel 21), will compete with Soul Train and Showtime at the Apollo for weekend viewers looking for live R&B performances and laughs.

He has already lined up Babyface, Toni Braxton, and Earth, Wind and Fire. The Tom Joyner Show Players from his radio show also will appear in sketches on the weekly series. The first episode, featuring a sweltering duet between Chante Moore and her husband, Kenny Lattimore, has Mr. Joyner's trademark loose, casual feel and some big-name sponsors, including Southwest Airlines, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble and Home Depot.

"We bring something to the table that no one offers," he says. "First of all, we have a built-in audience that's going to follow the show. Our audience is very active, and they pretty much do whatever we suggest doing."

Mr. Joyner's acumen is something the business world recognized even before this recent spate of high-profile activity, and it made him a multimillionaire last year.

He and business partner David Kantor sold a controlling interest in Reach Media to the station-ownership group Radio One for $56.1 million, half in cash, half in stock. They also signed 10-year employment contracts that keep them in charge.

Mr. Joyner is humble about his business sense. He credits Mr. Kantor, a former ABC Radio executive he knew from the days when ABC owned his radio show, and his son, Oscar Joyner, president and CEO of Reach. His other son, Thomas Jr., runs the foundation.

"It's good to be in the right place at the right time and meet the right people. I'm always looking for people who can help me get to where I want to go."

By his account, Mr. Joyner's been in right place, meeting the right people, since growing up in Tuskegee, Ala., during the civil rights movement. "I didn't realize it until long after I left that there was something in the air in my small town that affected me and other people the same way. I grew up in a town of overachievers."

The Tuskegee Institute and the Tuskegee Airmen were draws during the World War II era for ambitious black Americans.

After the war, a Veterans Administration hospital was built for recovering black soldiers.

"They came to town with the idea that we can be self-supportive, we can do anything we put our minds to, that no dream is unachievable. Without anyone saying these things, it was instilled."

Mr. Joyner's mother was a stenographer, his father an accountant who had dropped out of the airmen program, he says. The city of about 10,000 also produced Lionel Richie and was responsible for Mr. Joyner's accidental foray into radio. Saturday protest marches were a weekly regimen, populated mostly by kids because their parents worried about losing their jobs, he says. One week it would be about desegregating the schools, the next about voting rights.

"On this particular Saturday, we were protesting the fact that in our mostly black town, on our only radio station, they didn't play any black music. The guy who owned the station simply said, 'I don't need this. I'll let you play all the black music you want from noon to sundown. Who wants to do this?' And I raised my hand. I've been in it ever since."

Mr. Joyner graduated from the Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, with a degree in sociology and started his professional career in Montgomery, Ala. After spending a few years moving up the radio food chain, Montgomery to Memphis to St. Louis, he wound up at KKDA-FM (104.5) in Dallas in the early 1970s and became a local radio star.

He still lives in Las Colinas with his wife, fitness guru Donna Richardson.

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Joyner began flying back and forth between Dallas, where he had a morning-drive show, and Chicago, where he did afternoon drive, gaining him the nickname "fly jock." He accumulated 7 million frequent-flier miles and a growing fan base.

Then Mr. Kantor came calling, offering to help Mr. Joyner go national. KKDA wasn't interested, he says, so after a year or so off the air – his contract had a noncompete clause – his morning show went into syndication. Ironically, as he gained a national following, his popularity in Dallas fell.

Mr. Joyner believes he has become old hat here. Many people don't realize he's still on the air in Dallas, he says. Some think he has moved to Chicago. "We advertise, we have billboards and yet I get that all the time. The hardest thing is to sell out at home.

"In the rest of the markets we're in, I'm typically either in the Top 10, Top 5 or Top 3, and in a lot of cases I'm No. 1 in markets much larger than Dallas, more diverse. Pick, for instance, Miami. I have been consistently No. 1, 2 or 3 for all these years. And in Dallas, I'm consistently No. 20-something."

But he doesn't sound worried. After all, there's a TV show to produce, a book to promote, scholarship money to raise ...

E-mail mmendoza@dallasnews.com

The Tom Joyner Show
10 Saturday, KTXA-TV (Channel 21). 1 hr.

Tom Joyner Morning Show
5 to 9 a.m. weekdays, 6 to 8 a.m. Saturdays, KSOC-FM (94.5)