As a kid, I listened to the radio for music and waited for school closings. That was it.
The fact that actual people had actual careers in radio did not even enter my consciousness until I was in my mid-20s in graduate school.
I never thought you could make a living reciting town names in alphabetical order, and I certainly knew I wasn’t cut out for the music DJ business (“Comin’ at ya right now, a banger from Def Leopard – the two-armed drummer era – it’s Photograph!”).
In grad school though, I spent hours alone in my apartment, doing my homework, and wasting time. My number one time waster in the late ‘90s became sports radio. I was in Worcester, Massachusetts; Greg Dickerson and Gary Tanguay hosted a local show. They would go on to varying degrees of success in Boston, with Tanguay being the more accomplished of the two. I enjoyed listening to the banter – I had never heard it before — and like a zit-faced teenager, I’d get nervous calling in every now and then.
It spoke to how pathetic my personal life was at that point in time, but more interestingly, it spoke to my authentic enjoyment of the medium.
I thought about those guys as having the best time ever, talking sports, and hanging out. I pictured multiple TV monitors, chicken wings, and maybe even beer. Seriously. It was Worcester – not even Boston – but I thought of them going to all the games and talking to all of the players. I know, I was 26 but had the global awareness of a 12-year-old.
Of course, in Worcester in 1997, they probably had one television, couldn’t even get credentialed, and likely shelled out their own five bucks for Subway.
Flash forward 10 whole years.
In 2007, I was the morning television anchor at the local NBC in Hartford, Connecticut. At the same time, I was a freelance host for ESPN Radio. Before leaving my full-time ESPN.com job at the Worldwide Leader back in 2001, I had cultivated a network and convinced a few friends to try me on the radio as a host.
I wasn’t terrible, but I was reliable, low maintenance, local, and cheap.
As I have said in the past, I also loved it. ESPN wasn’t Worcester of course; access to athletes was easy. All I really knew was ESPN, so I thought it was always that simple to get a coach or quarterback on the phone – reach out to our on-site stringer in 2003, and boom, Ben Roethlisberger’s on the phone after throwing for 350 for Miami of Ohio against Western Michigan.
I would learn later that there aren’t many (or any) other places that could do it the way ESPN could back then.
But in 2007, I was at a career crossroads. I could have left NBC and rolled the dice as a freelancer with the hope of getting picked up full-time at ESPN. I had seen it happen, and one of my fellow freelancers, Ryen Russillo was working himself up the ladder and doing quite well. Same with Freddie Coleman.
However, I never considered it a viable option. It wasn’t because I didn’t love the medium. I did. It wasn’t because I didn’t have faith in my ability. I did.
It was because I thought that, back in 2007, radio was dying. Internet. TV. Newspapers, kind of. I thought they all had better long-term viability than radio. Yes, even newspapers.
When I was offered the TV reporting job at CNBC, I accepted, and since my contract stated I could only work for NBC Universal, goodbye ESPN Radio.
I didn’t hesitate to make that sacrifice.
Was that a mistake? No, I don’t think so. Did I regret it? To some degree, yes. I traveled to the New York/New Jersey line and continued my television career. I did do some short radio features that played across the country, which was fun but never jogged my soul enough to make me realize I liked it better than television.
Then along came John Gambling and WOR.
During the financial crisis, starting in 2008, just about every media outlet in the country wanted CNBC people on their air. The network had not streamlined its media relations at that point, so when some random radio producer could not get Jim Cramer or some other CNBC A-Lister, they reached out to me. As for WOR, I had never heard of the host and never listened to the show, but of course, I said yes right away.
I realized then that I missed radio, and I looked forward to being a guest as opposed to a host, and though it was total BS, I liked being called a “financial expert”.
John Gambling, as I recall, was a right-leaning morning host, and we had great conversations. They asked me to come on with more regularity, and it got to the point where they asked me to fill in for him a few times when he was on vacation.
I had no idea what to expect.
They had a news person. A weather person. A traffic person. All of us at one small table in the studio. It was weird. But intimate.
A television show would have had multiple producers, production assistants, and technical folks – as many as a dozen in all. At WOR, off the air, there were like two.
No green room breakfast spreads. No person bringing you coffee, water, and more information.
Not what I expected but then again, I had no expectations. Radio was more streamlined than television anyway, but many of the cuts had already begun before I got there.
And the offices/studios? Ancient. Nothing like ESPN or CNBC. Not quite linoleum floors and old wooden desks – but not far off.
But that was the thing. I didn’t care because I didn’t really know. My TV experience was so full of staff and sources of energy, which was great. And then, ESPN Radio made me think booking and staffing was easy. I was in LaLa Land, and local radio was a universe away from all that.
When I eventually landed full-time in radio, more than a dozen years after WOR, I was partially right about radio. It was struggling. What I was wrong about was that, had I gone the full-time route in 1997, I may have been ground floor of the podcast movement or moved back into a local market right when national sports radio was losing its power. If that had been the case, I may have graduated out of the infantry phase of it and actually had a green room, some hot coffee, new equipment, and some staff to help book a show.
Honestly, I was spoiled. Maybe even a little entitled. But stripped down and struggling, radio is still here, still (fighting to be) relevant … and way more fun than 90 percent of all the TV jobs out there.
So let’s milk it for everything she’s got.
