Christopher Gabriel spent years commanding the stage before Mitch Albom convinced him to trade scripts for a microphone. Today, Gabriel hosts mornings at 580 KMJ in Fresno, but his path to news/talk radio started far from a broadcast booth — it started in a Detroit theater. Gabriel built a career performing in stage productions across the country, taking on roles in works by Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Neil Simon. That career eventually put him in Albom’s orbit, and the connection would change everything.
Gabriel was starring in one of Albom’s plays, Duck Hunter Shoots Angel, at Detroit’s City Theatre when the two struck up a friendship. The production ran inside the Hockeytown complex alongside the Red Wings and drew strong crowds throughout its run.
Albom had seen Gabriel perform in Tuesdays with Morrie in St. Paul and brought him out to Michigan for the new project. That decision put Gabriel in the same city — and eventually the same room — as Albom.
The pivotal moment came over lunch at Albom’s office at WJR, where the conversation drifted from theater to Gabriel’s growing restlessness with it.
“I love this play, I love doing it, but I feel like I’m a little burned out,” said Gabriel, recalling what he told Albom that day. “I’ve done so much theater — so much Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Neil Simon — and I need a change. I need a creative change.”
Albom didn’t hesitate.
“Without skipping a beat, he goes, ‘I think you’d be pretty good as a talk show host,'” Gabriel said. “And I thought, well, I did radio in college — I never thought about that.”
Finding a New Way to Tell Stories
Gabriel didn’t view the jump to radio as leaving storytelling behind — he saw it as reinventing how he told stories. In theater, he’d delivered other writers’ words through roles like Iago in Othello and the gentleman caller in The Glass Menagerie. Radio offered something theater couldn’t: a chance to write the material himself while keeping the connection with an audience intact.
“What excited me was I saw the possibility of continuing to be a storyteller but using my own words,” Gabriel said. “Every day, I don’t care if you’re doing sports talk at WIP or news/talk at WGN or doing what we do here at KMJ, every day is a shared journey of discovery between whoever’s on our show and the audience, and the audience is the most important player in that equation.”
He carried that philosophy into how he approached interviews from the start.
“I never liked calling interviews interviews,” the KMJ morning host shared. “I like calling them conversations, because a conversation is far more intimate and far more personal.”
Nearly 22 Years and Still Going
Gabriel has now spent close to two decades building the career Albom first suggested, and the results have surprised him in more ways than one. He didn’t originally set out to host a news/talk program — sports talk was the goal from day one. Still, mentorship from a veteran colleague reshaped his approach to opportunity early in his career.
“I love this more,” said Gabriel, comparing his radio career to his years on stage. “I love the impact that we can make, that we can have on a community. We can affect change, sometimes when change is needed.”
He credited broadcaster Pat Kessler with teaching him the mindset that carried him through news/talk radio instead.
“He kept saying to me, just say yes,” Gabriel said. “Whatever job comes along, whatever chance you have, say yes.”
That advice paid off at 580 KMJ, where Gabriel’s morning show has built the kind of trust that Albom once told him radio could offer. Listeners regularly stop him in public to talk about stories they heard that morning, and the show recently earned recognition as one of the top mid-market morning programs in the country.
Gabriel doesn’t take that connection for granted, and he traces it directly back to the conversation that redirected his career.
“There’s a trust factor — people listen to us in the morning on our daily 6 to 9 show,” Gabriel said. “That tells me they trust us. They’re with us. They’re engaged with us, and there’s nothing better than that.”
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Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing daily news stories, features, and opinion columns. He joined Barrett Media in 2022 after a decade leading several radio brands in several formats, as well as a 5-year stint working in local television. In addition to his work with Barrett Media, he is a radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.