Tony & Kris in the Morning join USRN

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United Stations Radio Networks announced effective immediately, the network will begin marketing Tony & Kris in the Morning to both radio affiliates and national advertisers.   United Stations President/COO Jim Higgins made the announcement at USRN’s New York headquarters in conjunction with Tony Randall and Kris Rochester, who are the show’s Nashville-based hosts as well as the owners of Tony & Kris Productions, LLC.


Tony & Kris in the Morning was born when Tony Randall and Kris Rochester met and began working together in the Gadsden, Alabama vicinity.   Both have been in the radio business since they were teens; both began in 1986, Tony at age 18, Kris at 16.  The pair worked at different stations in Northern Alabama before meeting in 1991.   When they met and realized immediately that their personal chemistry worked on the air, the two launched a morning show.  Not long after starting out, the pair landed at WHMA-FM in the Gadsden-Anniston, Alabama market.  Less than a year later, they landed the plum assignment as the morning show at San Diego’s KSON-FM.  

Tony & Kris had a 10-year run at KSON, during which they won the ACM Award for Major Market Broadcast Personalities of the Year, and they were also nominated in the same category by the CMA Awards committee.  The Morning Team then spent more than five years at a cross-town rival in San Diego, but their dream was to take their talents to a wider, national audience.  To that end, Tony & Kris formed Tony & Kris Productions and partnered with Cumulus.  Cumulus currently has “Tony & Kris in the Morning” on seven of their Country Stations, and an eighth affiliate, the first non-Cumulus station on the new Tony & Kris network, was also added recently.  

Tony & Kris in the Morning is the first complete morning show in any format to be part of the United Stations lineup.