The legal dispute between Cumulus Media, Susquehanna Radio and former The Ticket hosts Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp is officially over.
The station on Tuesday evening released a statement saying that a mutually agreed resolution of litigation has been reached.
“They each appreciate one another’s sincere efforts to resolve their differences so that everyone involved can move forward,” the statement read. “The parties wish each other well.”
McDowell and Kemp resigned from The Ticket in July after discussions between the station and the duo on a new contract had reached a stalemate. The big discrepancy centered around McDowell and Kemp’s desires to have a podcast outside of their sports talk radio hosting duties.
Dan and Jake would later launch a Patreon-funded podcast called The Dumb Zone, which was a play on the name of their show on The Ticket, The Hang Zone. Cumulus/Susquehanna sent a cease and desist prior to filing a lawsuit against the pair in federal court.
The company alleged that McDowell and Kemp launched their podcast while still actively employed at the station and formatted the podcast similarly to the radio show, targeting the same audiences.
The company alleged McDowell violated a six-month non-compete clause in his contract, which would’ve prohibited him from radio or media work from the time his employment was finished.
“The Dumb Zone does not occur at any specific time. It is not published daily or even on five consecutive work days. There is nothing about The Dumb Zone that prevents or discourages listeners from listening to The Ticket at any time,” a legal response to the Cumulus suit filed on behalf of McDowell and Kemp said. “To the contrary, Ticket listeners choose to listen to The Ticket based on the content The Ticket broadcasts. If Plaintiff suggests that its audience has shrunk, it’s not difficult to identify the primary reason.”
Mediation in this case started at the end of August. In mid-September, a motion to dismiss the lawsuit was filed.
Since it ultimately was an employment matter, the legal argument for McDowell and Kemp was that federal court was not the proper venue.
Lawyers for the pair argued that they didn’t violate their non-disparagement clauses by discussing some of what ultimately led to their departure from The Ticket.
“None of these four things appear to be ‘confidential information’ even under the extremely broad terms of the confidentiality rule at issue here,” the filing said.
Now that the case has settled, both parties can move on.
