One of the more iconic radio voices in New York City over the past three decades is Mike Francesa. The business has changed since you first heard Mike & The Mad Dog back in 1989 as many new options for sports information have surfaced in the last three decades.
This week, on the New York, New York podcast at The Ringer, John Jastremski had Francesa on to talk about New York sports and how Francesa views where the business of sports talk radio is headed.
“When we started, it was a really different world,” he said. “The internet hadn’t taken off yet. There was no such thing as a podcast. You didn’t have the information at your fingertips. Now, everybody has everything at their fingertips. Twitter has even changed it again. Now what you have is the buffer between the athlete and the game/fan has eroded. What it has done is it has made the people that do what Dog and I started very different. Stories are broken in a moment’s time. People don’t think that the game is enough. Now I have to do a million different things to compete.”
While the industry has changed, Francesa said it is also a lot easier for people to break into the industry compared to when he started.
“You can start your own stuff on Tik Tok or your own podcast. If you cut through, great! That’s the key. How do you make a name for yourself if you aren’t a brand when the audience has so much available to them? That is the thing that has put the pressure on the performer. I think a lot of them fail at being clever instead of doing the best job they can do in the area they are there for.”
Jastremski added that there is a void for people that miss the way that Mike & The Mad Dog did their show. Francesa countered that even though things are going to change over the course of 35 years, quality will always win.
“If you are good at what you do, if you are entertaining and opinionated and you give them something that’s unique, they will come find it.”
