Fans of Bomani Jones got a nice surprise this week. The feed for his podcast, which had sat dormant for months, suddenly alerted subscribers that a new episode of The Right Time was waiting for them.
Jones exited ESPN earlier this year. His contract was not renewed as part of the cost-cutting measures across all of Disney’s divisions. His show is now part of the Wave Sports + Entertainment portfolio.
Wave Sports + Entertainment may not have the sort of ubiquitous name in sports media that ESPN does, but thanks to Paul George and the Kelce Brothers, the company has proven its worth in the podcast space. That is what Jones was looking for as he weighed his options for The Right Time‘s next chapter.
In this conversation, Jones talks about how to build a podcast that blends sports and other topics, why Wave Sports + Entertainment is the right partner at this point, and how sports talk is filling a void for middle-aged Black audiences.
Demetri Ravanos: Wave Sports + Entertainment is a very different animal for you. You are coming from ESPN, the quintessential entity in sports media. Now, you are going to a place where you are the lone media member as opposed to an athlete trying to either transition or start something new. So how do you fit in with the Wave Sports + Entertainment portfolio?
Bomani Jones: Yeah, that’s a good question that, to be honest, you ought to ask the Wave people. I hadn’t even thought it out that far. Part of that for me, and I think that this is kind of what’s different about doing a podcast versus being on TV or radio or all that stuff, is that I’ll always look at podcasts individually as just kind of like their own worlds of sorts, right? There are certainly some ways and places where I give thought to a larger brand and how I fit or something like that, but with Wave, my question primarily just was, “Okay, what can you do to help me grow this podcast that’s already successful?”
I think that maybe if I was starting from zero, we’d be talking about something else, but I’ve always thought myself – and partially as a function of the places that I’ve worked – but I’ve thought a podcast is something that the individual talent and everybody surrounding it, they’re going to be the ones that make it into whatever it is, and they’re going to have to do a lot of the building in that regard. With Wave, what’s so impressive about them is their ability to take what it is that you’re doing and then optimize it for all the means of distribution and everything else.
Now to the beginning of your question, it is a little interesting that in this brief time that I’ve been away, one of the big stories that’s popped up is this whole Travis Kelce and Tay Tay thing. I guess we’re coworkers. You know, that can’t be anything that I worry too much about because I don’t know how much they’re supposed to worry about me, but yeah, that is a little bit different, I have to say.
DR: It does seem like there is a class of podcasts or maybe it’s just a standard boilerplate go-to slogan whenever somebody is launching a sports podcast that it is going to be “a melting pot of sports and culture.” I wonder why it is that you think you are better at it than anyone else trying to start this thing. There is no shortage of them, and you have had a long history of success in this space.
BJ: I think the thing for me is, at least in terms of journalism, is I was doing the “and” before I did the sports and I was doing the “sports and…” at Page 2, which is probably the best “sports and” thing anybody has ever come up with. I’m also there at the same time as [Bill] Simmons and his brand of “sports and” I could never quite do, you know what I mean?
The thing that I feel like I’ve gotten better now at this point in my career is this “sports and,” it ain’t let’s call it Hall & Oates, right? It’s Simon & Garfunkel; it’s Gladys Knight & the Pips. Sports has got to be out front. I firmly believe that because people got to know they’re coming to get something out of this. I think for a lot of people, the attempt at sports and pop culture ultimately becomes more about self-gratification than really getting to the audience.
The other thing that I think gets tricky when you do “sports and” stuff is you’ve got to get people who want to hear your sports and people who want to hear your end game. They’re probably not going to show up just to get “the and” if they don’t like the sports. They’re probably not going to show up to get the sports if they don’t like the “and,” because they’ll go get somebody that does the sports that they like. It doesn’t matter what the other stuff is. What matters is if they like it. You have to learn to be judicious about these things and understand what exactly it is that people come to you and people come to your podcast for.
What I have been able to do over the last, and this sounds crazy, 23 years of working this job is that the people who are coming for an opt-in product from me, by and large, are people who know me and thereby are people who trust me. They are willing to hear some of these things that I want to talk about. It takes time to earn the trust in all those places, and so this very long answer to get back to the top of it. I think the thing that helps me is with the pop culture stuff – I developed an independent reputation for being somebody who talked about pop culture; I developed an independent reputation for being somebody who talked about current events, and I had an independent reputation for talking about sports. I dabble, I guess, in some ways in the first two now and I am in the third more, but the truth is, I’ve done all of those in such a fashion that when I’m now dabbling in them, I’m dabbling into expertise as opposed to simply dabbling into interest.
DR: You and I had a conversation a while back. I had just gotten back from doing some radio fill-in stuff in South Carolina and I said to you that I was kind of shocked by the amount of Black voices on the phones when I took calls. It was overwhelmingly more than any time before. You had a really interesting theory about it being the lack of a classic rock format for guys in their 40s and 50s at this point who grew up listening to rap. I wonder if you think that is just benefiting sports radio or maybe that is benefiting podcasts too with Black audiences.
BJ: I think it’s benefiting podcasts and I think the numbers bear out. It’s really benefiting YouTube, which is a place where Black people over-represent in that sample. But this is kind of the flipside of all the rap from our youth that we were defending. It’s not that easy to listen to it in the car with your kids, so you don’t really have those stations. I think Atlanta has a classic rap format. I honestly don’t know of any other city that does. So once you get to your grown man station in life as a Black man, where do you go? I know in Raleigh they were telling me that when they went from the AM to the FM dial, suddenly they heard a lot more Black people on phones.
It’s always been a thing with ESPN. ESPN programming has a much higher Black viewership than most television shows do. When you think about it, how many other places on television are you tuning in and Black people are the stars? That’s what happens with sports.
Now, what I think is interesting though, in terms of format, especially when you start talking about places in the South where you just have fewer options, that’s where you really start hearing more and more Black people get on to phones for sports talk. That’s also a function of sports talk’s growth outside of urban areas. You ain’t getting that many of those calls in the afternoon up here on WFAN right now. It’s a really weird sort of quirk. I think it may be partially cultural in the sense that I think that in the South in particular, Black culture and white culture are far closer to each other, both in proximity and just kind of what their substances are. But you turn on the radio in these cities where one of the host’s name ends in a Y? You know, “John and Sully” or something like that, You know what I mean? No, Black people ain’t calling them. We’re not having nearly as much overlap in those spaces.
Even once you’re just talking about the cultural elements of it, you start talking about coming up north and the people are more likely to be Catholic. The ancestors, I guess you got your Mayflower types certainly, but up here it’s much more a discussion of immigrant culture. When you get to the South, everybody’s going back generations and generations still in the United States. They’re all coming from the same direction.
DR: You and I talked recently and you said that what was appealing about Wave Sports + Entertainment is that this is what they do. Podcasts are not a division of a much larger company. The same could be said for Meadowlark Media, and I think there are a lot of people who would wonder, if that is what you were looking for, why you would not prioritize past relationships as you were trying to figure out what your future is after ESPN.
BJ: Yeah, I think the question that I would ask people in response to that is, “So what exactly does that do for me?” I don’t mean that snidely or rudely, but I think that people with the assumption that I would wind up going to work for Meadowlark are operating under the premise of what my relationship has been with Dan Le Batard. What about me implies to you that I make business decisions based on something that personal? You just can’t, that’s not how things work. You can’t do that.
So in 2022, when my contract was expiring with ESPN, I talked to Meadowlark. I’ll let you know, we were pretty deep in talks with them, but in the end, I wound up in a situation where I was doing Game Theory for HBO, and Game Theory was the single most important thing to me. Every other decision that I was going to make, both personally and professionally, is going to be made with Game Theory in mind. I thought that it would be best for me to not be doing a start-up television show and also trying to restart a podcast with a new staff and producer at a company that itself was a start-up. I just thought that that was too much.
It didn’t even really come up this last time that my deal was up and I was trying to find a place to be. The way that Dan sells things, you know, “It’s work, it’s family.” It ain’t really how life works. But, you know, that’s him and the way that he does things. I think that people who really love Dan and who enjoy the things that I did with him, they would love to see me go work there and be part of this thing that they already love. I could totally see how that would be the best thing for them. I just don’t know how those people would necessarily explain how it would be the best thing for me.
DR: Is there a part of you that worries if you go back to do anything with that collection of people, there’s always going to be a segment of the audience that is going to see you and Dan together and think of you as the sidekick?
BJ: Yeah, the sidekick thing with Dan is very interesting because on Highly Questionable, if you go and watch it, there’s very clearly a sidekick and it’s his father, right? But it was this weird thing because his father is at once the sidekick and also the centerpiece. It was a really good thing because ego stuff typically comes up when people do television shows together and who plays what role. But it’s really helpful to have this cuddly old man in between and everybody can be like, “No, he’s the real star of the show.” Then none of that other stuff ever comes up. But that show, it wasn’t mine. That’s something that I know when I worked with Dan that he struggled to understand. I didn’t mean this in a bad way, but “It’s your dad. It’s your city.” Like when I would come in to do radio in the same studio where he did his radio show, and it’s just covered wall to wall with Dan Le Batard Show stuff, it’s his and that’s cool.
I never saw myself as a sidekick, however there was a hierarchy. He is Dan Le Batard. They built the studio because he’s Dan Le Batard, all of those things.
Now, if I had come in 2022 and decided to work there, what would have been more likely was that we would have used this show The Right Time as kind of its own tentpole and hopefully, the plan would then be to build out a network of sorts underneath The Right Time. In the Le Batard AF, I am neither A nor F in the way that I wanted to go about that. I admit that was very important to me for the reason that you describe.
I’m kind of past the point in my career where I want to position myself in a way that looks like sidekick stuff. So I think that part is totally fair, but at the same time, I really don’t know the numbers that closely on his end, but I’m assuming that his operation is a bigger one than mine is. So, his show being a bigger one and me being there with my own thing that isn’t as big? That’s okay. I can live with that. I was at ESPN and my show wasn’t as big as Zach Lowe’s. That’s fine, not a problem. That’s kind of survival of the fittest.
I don’t think with the way that Meadowlark does things now, that there would be a place for me. Everything now seems to be treated as an offshoot of The Dan Le Batard Show now. That, I absolutely would not go for, but let me be clear. That also was not offered to me. So I’m not pretending like I turned it down.
DR: You said one thing in there that I want to wrap on. You mentioned that at the time you did not think going to an upstart network while having Game Theory would have been the best thing for you. Obviously, you wish Game Theory was still on, but the fact that it is not on the air anymore, did that allow you to take more chances as you tried to figure out what you were going to do next?
BJ: I would say the opposite. Me taking chances on where to go with the podcast is much more of a function of my previous employers not renewing my contract there. Once your old job says you don’t work there no more, the risk is there.
But also I don’t see Wave at all as being risky. I would even make the argument that for a podcast, working at ESPN would be far riskier. It would be much riskier for Paul George to take his podcast to ESPN than it would be for me to take what I’m doing and bring it to Wave. This isn’t just about ESPN. This is about most of these large companies. I’ll give you an example. After I get off the phone with you, we’re going to do a rehearsal show. I’m going back and forth with Sean Yoo, who’s my new producer, and we’re talking about some stuff and he’s like, “Hey, we got a tweet that we’re putting out. The social team wants you to quote tweet that. And if you check that e-mail I sent you, we’ve got the schedule.”
I checked it and it’s a spreadsheet in a Google Doc of what the schedule is and the planning for what to do with the social channels as we break this show out and introduce it to some new people because we’re slapping a new coat of paint on it and all of that stuff, right? That doesn’t happen in the same ways, at least in my experience, at the big companies. For the big companies, it’s like, “Hey, man, they got this thing called podcasting that the kids are doing. We should probably get into that. So we need to send some things out on social” then you bring that person who just doesn’t have anything to do and then it goes from there. I’m working now with people who are much more native to the space, who have a much more organic knowledge of these things, and can strategize much more.
What I’ve always felt like, no matter where I’ve been, no matter where I’ve done, it’s my job to come up with something good. It’s your job to get people to consume it. If I come up with something and you put it in front of people and they reject it, then that’s my fault. Okay? But with a podcast, I know I’m going to give you a good podcast. I know that 100%. And from what I’ve seen from Wave and people they have worked with previously, I know they’re going to be able to take the social channels and take all these other things and get this out here to more people probably than I was capable of getting out to when I worked at ESPN.
So no, this to me is the opposite of a risk. This is taking a product that has been built over the course of five years, bringing the subscriber base that we have that we’ve built in and now supercharging it. I think that the more likely outcome here is that this now goes farther than it ever has and it goes to places that I probably didn’t think were possible at some point.
I’m taking the podcast and it’s going to a place and the place is then going to do whatever that place does with the podcast. But in terms of leaving ESPN, if you wanted to make the argument that I took a step down of sorts when they decided to cancel High Noon, that’s perfectly fair. It’s not even hard to get around that. But for the podcast. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All that matters about the podcast is whether or not the people you work for are the best equipped to get it out to as many ears as possible to allow them to make a decision as to whether or not this is something they want to be part of their regular lives. And I think in that direction, I probably took a step up.
To learn more about Point-To-Point Marketing’s Podcast and Broadcast Audience Development Marketing strategies, contact Tim Bronsil at tim@ptpmarketing.com or 513-702-5072.
Demetri Ravanos is a columnist and features writer for Barrett Media. He is also the creator of The Sports Podcast Festival, and a previous host on the Chewing Clock and Media Noise podcasts. He occasionally fills in on stations across the Carolinas in addition to hosting Panthers and College Football podcasts. His radio resume includes stops at WAVH and WZEW in Mobile, AL, WBPT in Birmingham, AL and WBBB, WPTK and WDNC in Raleigh, NC.
You can find him on Twitter @DemetriRavanos or reach him by email at DemetriTheGreek@gmail.com.
