When Ken Carman was working a job in a stone plant, he embarked in strenuous physical labor on a daily basis and called former prisoners his colleagues. Seeing them on a daily basis, he recognized the value that was embedded within the second chance they were receiving to right their previous wrongs and got to know the stories behind each person. While Carman recognized that they were not going to move him up into high places per se, he gained an inherent understanding of people that rendered him apt to encounter and interact with people from many different types of backgrounds.
Being from Akron, Ohio, which is just outside of Cleveland, Carman witnessed the potpourri of professions that take place within the sprawling metropolis. Although he desired to be a sportswriter from the time he was in high school, he was doing what was necessary for him to make a living as he worked to find opportunities in sports media.
In addition to working at the stone plant, which made the type of stone that is utilized on the sides of houses, he was also involved in landscaping and part of the effort to maintain different homes and areas around the locale. Aside from teaching him the importance of humility and not letting his ego interfere with his path, he also became more connected to everyday people who would become devoted listeners.
“It’s finding a way to treat all those people respectfully and resonate with those people,” Carman said. “I think that that’s actually helped a lot in being able to talk to the types of listeners that we have because our listeners call from all over and they all have all types of different backgrounds, but they all seem to be Browns, Cavs and Guardians fans.”
If Carman had not been hired to work at 92.3 The Fan in 2011, he was prepared to drive a bread truck in order to make a living. After all, he was preparing to get married, purchase a home and raise a family, and he needed to find a way to sustain a source of revenue.
Carman did not take school very seriously, something he regrets later in life, but he greatly values a conversation he had with his assistant principal in high school. Upon completing a project, he was told to sit with the high school administrator at lunch, a direction he thought indicated that he was in trouble. Instead, he received a life-changing suggestion to consider working in radio, something that altered his career trajectory and led him to find a way to combine his love of sports with journalism.
Carman attended the University of Akron and studied mass media communications while participating in the college radio station. Looking back on the program, he regards it as a seminal time in his journey that helped him further discover his passion for the medium at an operation that was managed similar to a sizable commercial operation.
While he was at the station, his supervisor had notified him about an opening as a part-time board operator and followed up to ask if he had applied for the position. Upon Carman revealing that he had not, his supervisor implored him to apply for the job immediately, which he ended up landing.
After his graduation, Carman worked on honing his craft as the play-by-play broadcaster for both Ashland University athletics and the Akron Aeros. In yearning to master the art of effectively and compendiously evoking imagery, telling a story and adjusting to the cadence of the game, he became more aware of his own identity and proclivities as a broadcaster.
“There’s never been anywhere outside where I can fall into bad traps of trying to reinvent myself,” Carman said. “I am what I am, and there’s a lot of people thankfully who like me, and there’s a lot of people who are still entertained by me anyway, so that’s made it a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding.”
Carman has worked with 92.3 The Fan since its inception in 2011 where he hosted a Friday night football show and other weekend programming. Although he wanted to succeed, he did not have any blueprint of how stellar performances would lend themselves to his professional growth and entered the studio with the mindset that each broadcast was his last.
To this day, he remains motivated by both fear and paranoia, especially having been laid off in the business before at his previous job with Clear Channel Radio. Carman ensures he never takes the platform he has been afforded that allows him to disseminate his opinions en masse for granted and approaches each broadcast in the same manner.
“To have an opinion and for people wanting to hear that opinion is a blessing and it is not a right,” Carman said. “It is really not a right; it’s really a privilege. Because of corporate downsizing at another company, I’ve had that removed from me, so I know what it’s like to lose that. I don’t ever want to lose that again, at least I don’t want to ever lose that again on my terms.”
The inherent apprehension about losing his job has bolstered Carman’s mental acuity and refined his concentration for each episode of his radio program, which is now broadcast in the morning drive slot within prime hours. Before transitioning to this spot, however, he enhanced his skill set through invaluable feedback from his producers that assisted with his program from 7 p.m. to midnight, people who allowed him to experiment and receive feedback on how to improve with each repetition. At the same time, Carman was becoming more erudite in the profession by being receptive to being guided by his colleagues and continued developing a rapport with the listening audience.
Within his formative years in radio prior to his time on 92.3 The Fan, Carman remembers being yelled at on several occasions within professional settings. Before being hired within the sports talk format, Carman worked in rock radio and performed an abundance of grunt work and mundane tasks to make sure the hosts would be comfortable and that the shows would be positioned to succeed on a daily basis.
“I’ve been doing this at a pretty high level for a long time, and I don’t always take criticism the very best, but I know that my bosses have the very best of intentions for me,” Carman explained, “and knowing that people aren’t there to put you down but they’re there to work with you.”
Cultivating meaningful and enduring professional relationships with colleagues can engender a feeling of mutual trust and understanding. Once this sentiment is achieved, there is, oftentimes, diminished feelings of foreboding doubt and tergiversation that may have otherwise been present. For Carman, it has been a fundamental aspect of his development that has helped contribute to his own progression as a media professional.
“Trusting people – that’s what I want people to be able to do,” Carman said. “That’s what I think we need to work on, and there’s definitely been some bosses who have taken advantage of that trust, so I can understand that.”
Upon the departure of Chuck Booms from the morning slot in 2015, Carman appeared on the program as a fill-in host alongside Kevin Kiley. At the same time, he continued hosting his evening slot and hosted weekend programming on Sunday nights at the national level for CBS Sports Radio. Several months later, Carman was named the full-time replacement and discovered how to appeal to a new sector of the audience on a regular basis.
“It was eye-opening because I thought that everybody knew who I was because I was on at night and I was on the station,” Carman said. “I found out that the morning audience is a much more active audience, and you have to go quick and you have to be more direct and you have to be to the point.”
Before starting the role, Carman’s bosses warned him that he needs to be ready to take punches and emphasized how the experience would be different than anything he had done in the past. After a brief adjustment period, during which he felt that many things he was saying were falling flat, he eventually began to interest the audience and come into his own on the air. Less than a year later, Carman was without a co-host, as Kiley submitted a letter of resignation to the station after allegedly being censored in expressing his opinion following repeated misogynistic comments on the air.
“It was a totally new experience because I had to learn all over again that there were things that [we] wanted to do that they don’t know yet,” Carman said. “There’s things that we can try now and do now that the listeners would be with us on, but at the time, we didn’t really understand that.”
Carman began to work with Anthony Lima, who was in the interim role as co-host before being granted the position permanently a few months later. When he met Lima for the first time, Carman recalls his co-host telling him that he would not like him at first and then proceeded to make a joke that he says that only Clevelanders would understand. Immediately thereafter, Carman recognized that he would be able to get along with Lima and was incredulous towards the premise behind why he did not think they would get along right away.
“I think we’ve always been different,” Carman said. “We’ve enjoyed a very personal relationship with each other where we can say, at times, terrific things about each other and then horrific things about each other to each other’s faces, and I don’t think it’s affected our relationship at all. If anything, it’s made it stronger.”
Over the years, there have been some points of truculence on the show that have led to a plethora of on-air disagreements or arguments. In fact, Carman estimates that he and Lima quarrel at least once a week on the program, something that they are willing to do on the radio and from which move on. In the end, their chemistry and friendship is seemingly perdurable and they understand how their cohesion as an on-air duo continues to captivate the listening audience seven years later.
“We’ve never been able to hold a grudge with one another, and I think that’s what’s helped us separate ourselves from others and is what has hopefully endeared us to our audience,” Carman said. “….There are times where Lima and I, for that moment we are very angry with one another, but at that time, we’re very good at pulling emotion out of each other, and I think that’s what the listeners enjoy.”
In a similar manner, Carman and Lima regard the callers to their program as an additional voice on the show and treat them as if they are in the studio with a microphone in front of them. By providing them that level of credibility and prestige, they do not hesitate to castigate these participants when they make a statement that is not genuine or based on legitimate fact.
During a recent episode of the show, several callers dialed the show to express their frustrations regarding Cleveland Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski, who has led the team to a 5-3 record on the season thus far. While many sports fans are not afraid to criticize their team, this scenario happened directly after a thrilling victory over the San Francisco 49ers.
The entire ordeal led to a rant from Lima about how he felt the callers wanted him and Carman to discuss the prospect of the coach being fired at any moment there is some level of adversity in the season. He went on to refer to it as “an exercise in futility” for the fans and punctuated how he had no interest in doing that type of broadcast.
“We don’t want to sit there and entertain people who are saying things just because they said them before and they want to double down and triple down on them,” Carman said. “I think that’s [what] he was frustrated with is that our callers, who are a character [and] a part of our show, it seems like they weren’t being honest with each other and they weren’t being honest with themselves and they weren’t being honest with us.”
Carman regards authenticity as an indispensable aspect to any sports radio program, along with the hosts being able to laugh at themselves. Even though the sports talk radio format grants longform conversation, there are times calling for brevity and being able to discuss serious matters.
Although he always aims to be genuine with the listening audience, Carman does not deny that there are some theatrics involved with hosting his radio program. There are instances where he accentuates a point and crafts things in a manner so as to effectively convey what he wants the audience to know.
For example, if Carman is addressing a problem about the Browns, he will construct the delivery of his point in such a way that is conducive to the listening experience while also keeping the attention span of the audience in mind. The modern media ecosystem has granted the consumer more autonomy over what they want to consume, sometimes causing it to be more difficult to hold interest without being supplanted by something else.
“I want them to be listening in, and I want them to turn up the radio for that moment because I want them to hear exactly what I’m saying as if I’m talking to that one man or woman driving right down 480; driving down 77,” Carman said. “I don’t want it to sound like I’m talking to thousands of people every 15 minutes; I’m talking to one person in particular, and they know when I’ve made my mistakes, and I’m willing to admit when I make mistakes.”
Sports radio outlets are in competition with other media providers all across the industry, the primary platform of dissemination notwithstanding. A preponderance of brands actively utilize, or have at least explored capabilities made possible within the digital sector and technological innovation as a whole. Over the years, Audacy’s 92.3 The Fan and Good Karma Brands’ ESPN 850 Cleveland have gone head-to-head in the ratings, an imperative data source that Carman does not scrutinize over. Despite being cognizant of how these metrics have long been venerated and utilized within sales and sponsorship endeavors, he works on retaining the existing audience and expanding the breadth of a show through their content.
“I know that they’re important, and I know that there’s a lot of things that I always have to make sure that I do nuts and bolts wise to make sure those numbers are up, but I always look inward,” Carman said. “I always look inwards. I always make sure we’re doing our thing well, and if we’re doing our thing well they’ll be there, and thankfully they’ve been there.”
Since Carman has been on the air at the station for 12 years, he has seen audience members grow as time goes on. Thinking back on his tenure at the outlet, he finds it hard to believe that there are people who work in the city that are in their 20s that have been tuning in to the program from the time they were in middle school. He now also reaches his listeners and other consumers within the city as a sports anchor on evening broadcasts on FOX 8 News, keeping viewers aware of what is happening with the players, teams and leagues pertinent to the city.
“When they trust you that you have the best interest [of] the area at heart, that means a lot,” Carman said. “I think that that’s part of that success – that you can tell the truth and they know that your heart’s into it and you know that they trust you that you want what’s best for the region.”
When Carman initially landed the job at 92.3 The Fan, he remembers the reaction from his grandfather and the pride that he had. Having grown up during the Great Depression without completing a high school education, he was very poor and worked hard to make ends meet. Through it all though, he had an ostensible hubris for Cleveland and was elated to discover that his grandson would be able to proffer his opinions to the audience.
Some radio hosts may look to move to a larger designated market area, such as New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago, granting them a new audience and additional teams to cover, along with the possibility of additional opportunities. Carman does not like to project entirely far into the future, but if there is one thing he knows for sure, it is that he has no plans on leaving Cleveland during his career. Through his occupation and livelihood, he has a passion for discussing the local teams that he grew up watching and providing the local perspective to a growing legion of fans.
“It’s just something that I couldn’t imagine doing anywhere else, and it’s something that I really take pride in every day because you know this business can go away at any time,” Carman said. “It’s going to be cliché, but I really am thankful for every day here.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
