Before he was named the senior director of sports programming at SiriusXM, Jason Dixon helped WDAE make a successful transition from 1250 AM to 620 AM and a subsequent format switch to sports talk radio. The ambition to work with sports came after he found Todd Schnitt difficult to work with on The MJ and BJ Morning Show on Power 93, even though he enjoyed the role.
Dixon was paid to stay at home and not show up to work for several weeks, and he had to call station operations manager Gabe Hobbs every Monday to see if he could go into work that week. Once the format flipped to sports, Dixon was welcomed back to the station and tasked with helping enhance and augment the product in the marketplace. Dixon recently spoke about this experience in an appearance on the Sound Off Podcast hosted by Matt Cundill.
When WDAE moved to sports radio in 1996, the locale had its NFL team in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, along with the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL, who had been in the league for four seasons up to that point. The Tampa Bay Rays began playing in MLB during the 1998 campaign, then-known as the “Devil Rays,” and there were also several college and local teams to follow as well. The format was in its early stages, less than a decade from the launch of WFAN in New York City, and ensuring its success in the city was a hefty responsibility for Dixon to assume.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” Dixon said. “Actually I was the assistant program director of the sports station. I asked Gabe, ‘Well, who am I assisting?,’ [and he said], ‘Nobody.’ So in the most Clear Channel of all Clear Channel ways, I was getting the assistant programmer rate to assist no one.”
With the development of professional sports taking place around the city and importance of local content, it was critical that the station spoke about the Buccaneers. A preponderance of the content was centered around the team, inviting discussion and debate from co-hosts and callers.
“Whether they were winning [or] losing, it didn’t matter,” Dixon said. “That was what was important, so the idea was just build as much content around the Bucs as humanly possible.”
At the same time, the marketplace was also known for the personalities it had on the air, with hosts conveying different styles that appealed to the audience. Hosts such as Steve Duemig and Chris Thomas helped establish WDAE as a sports talk radio station that amassed significant interest, and it eventually became more complicated when the Lightning became involved. Additionally, Dixon always remained attuned to the ratings and scrutinized the results in order to help guide his decision-making pertaining to the outlet, which continue to grow in size and scope.
“The biggest thing was, for me, the competitive factor,” Dixon said. “Every three months, we’d get those ratings come across and, ‘Were we up? Were we down? Did we win? What did we lose?’”
Now working in satellite radio, SiriusXM collects various data points on each one of its shows while also remaining aware of what is going on in terrestrial radio. Part of Dixon’s job is to track best practices in terrestrial radio because listening habits are the same across both mediums.
In fact, he expressed that it does not matter what input button a user presses on their car stereo, for they are still listening to content for the amount of time they are within the vehicle. Dixon affirmed that the company will not make a decision to hire or fire a host based on a piece of research, something that he says may serve as the impetus for change in terrestrial radio. Yet there is also danger, he acknowledges, to relying on the ear test.
“That’s one of the things that I always talk with our program directors about is they have a thirst for information; that they want data [and] they want to know, ‘Hey, did people listen to that show?,’” Dixon said. “My message [is] kind of, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ because maybe that great show that passed the ear test for all of us didn’t garner the numbers we thought it would, [and] it’s not as significant to us.”
SiriusXM recently launched its new mobile application in an effort to expedite the discovery of content and make it easier for listeners to engage with their favorite channels. Jason Dixon is keenly aware of the impact local radio has in the overall content landscape and expressed that SiriusXM will not necessarily go that route.
For example, SportsRadio 94WIP talks about the Philadelphia Eagles throughout their program, while SiriusXM’s NFL Radio channel may just spend a segment within a program on the team. The value proposition, he argued, is in who is on the air, part of the brand identity that the company seeks to foster within its new logo and identity.
“We’re not going to hyper-localize them to death,” Dixon said, “but what we can do that maybe the local station can’t if we’ve got Phil Simms on talking about them or Coach K is talking college basketball on our college sports channel. That’s the separator is that we’re not going to outlocalize the local station, but we’re going to have people with credibility talking in these various niches…. at a high level that you’re just not going to get anywhere else.”
