Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good. Then again, I will respond to that cliche with another: Success is where preparation and opportunity meet. And what happened on KCMO Talk Radio this week is proof of that.
As I’ve written about in recent columns, Kansas City received national attention in recent weeks for its vote this past Tuesday to continue a ⅜-cent sales tax for the Chiefs and the Royals to upgrade Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Super Bowl Champs, and help the baseball team move to a new stadium downtown.
The vote failed miserably on Tuesday, but I won’t bore you in those local details.
However, our KCMO morning show was quoted on TMZ, ESPN, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, and other national outlets.
And it had nothing to do with the sales tax vote.
I was scheduled to have Chiefs Team President Mark Donovan on the show on Monday morning to discuss the upcoming sales tax. But by Sunday morning, media reports began circulating that Chiefs wide receiver Rashee Rice was potentially involved in a multi-car accident in Dallas involving a rented car under his name. Those involved in the crash fled the scene.
It was Easter Sunday, but it was the biggest off-field sports story of the day. Naturally, all parties involved were not speaking publicly on Sunday.
With Donovan set to join me on Monday, I had an obligation to the audience to ask him about Rashee Rice, even though that’s different from what he was on the show to discuss. Credit goes to the Chiefs PR team, who did not reach out on Sunday or Monday morning, asking me to avoid discussing the Rice situation.
I had never had Donovan on my show. We aren’t a sports show and don’t have the rights to the team, so it was our first time talking.
After talking it through with my producers, we decided to ask him about the Rice situation at the end of the interview after we had gotten through all the sales tax information. Our thought process was that if we put the controversy at the beginning, we might end up getting a crappy interview the rest of the way on the thing we were having him on the show to discuss, the sales tax vote. So we got through about 7-8 minutes of tax talk and ended with an, “I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you…”
His answer was, “In all these situations you have to wait until you have all the facts and frankly, we don’t have all the facts at this point. The one comforting fact that we do have is that there was a multicar crash in Texas, in Dallas, and fortunately, it doesn’t appear that anyone was hurt, and we should be grateful for that. We’ll get to the bottom of it, we’ll gather the facts and we’ll react accordingly.”
It wasn’t much, but I knew it was all I needed because the team had not discussed it anywhere else.
The aforementioned national media outlets then used the comment.
Now, the recognition is nice, but we wanted to make sure we used that exposure to re-target our own audience and make sure they knew that this national exposure was there. The main purpose of these promos and imaging items was to make sure they realized that the show was “the place” for information in Kansas City, and if you miss out, you just might miss out on the national breaking news.
We also had some fun tweaking the sports stations, since they also had to reference us in their credit for the Donovan quote. We basically beat them at their own game, which is how we branded those elements.
Then, we were able to sprinkle in some of the national coverage we received into our show the following day, including making fun of my own name for how a Good Morning America anchor pronounced it. It was not targeted at her but simply a way to organically create content with the coverage we received, have fun, and make fun of myself in the process.
Everything can be content. And doing it in a way that’s natural, not braggadocious, relatable, and fun for the audience is a fine line to walk, but an important one to try and achieve when/if these opportunities, even with local media, pop up.
There’s no doubt that this story fell into our lap, and we did nothing but get lucky in having this interview lined up before the breaking news on Sunday. But it took weeks of working back channels to land the interview, and I had all but given up before it finally clicked last Friday.
So, while it’s sometimes better to be lucky than good, success is where preparation and opportunity meet.
Pete Mundo is a weekly columnist for Barrett Media, and the morning show host and program director for KCMO in Kansas City. Previously, he was a fill-in host nationally on FOX News Radio and CBS Sports Radio, while anchoring for WFAN, WCBS News Radio 880, and Bloomberg Radio. Pete was also the sports and news director for Omni Media Group at K-1O1/Z-92 in Woodward, Oklahoma. He’s also the owner of the Big 12-focused digital media outlet Heartland College Sports. To interact, find him on Twitter @PeteMundo.
