When Nick Cattles accepted the job to host afternoon drive and serve as the program director of Sactown Sports 1140, he never could have envisioned it all ending within a year-and-a-half. Although he and Ramie Makhlouf catapulted upwards in the ratings and helped facilitate windfall for the outlet, personal matters made living on the West Coast too much of challenge to overcome.
Cattles had purchased a home and would have been content staying with the station had his personal circumstances been different, and he is gracious that Bonneville International accommodated his exit. Nonetheless, he returned to New England with the risk of completely upending his career without a full-time radio job and began to think about logical next steps in the sports media industry.
Over the ensuing years, Cattles hosted a podcast focused on the New England Patriots alongside Greg Bedard that elicited favorable feedback. An increase in opportunities within audio and his previous success rendered it possible to consider augmenting its presence within his media portfolio. Inherent advantages to the format, including being able to reach a wide subset of listeners and not worrying about commercial breaks, partially enthralled Cattles in this regard.
Yet he had always possessed a penchant for radio and pursuit of a career therein dating back to his time at the University of Rhode Island when a professor forewarned him about an ostensible slow death to journalism. The pull of necessity engendered the start of the eponymous program, The Nick Cattles Show, over the last seven months, presenting Boston sports talk in a different manner.
“I don’t act like everything is a five-alarm fire,” Cattles said. “I kind of look at the big picture when I break things down. Even if I’m looking at something very granular, I try to always keep the big picture in mind.”
Part of being able to adopt that perspective came through his time working at ESPN Radio 94.1 in Virginia Beach, Va., a marketplace without any professional sports teams. Management at the station informed Cattles that it was looking for a program with a national feel considering the transient nature of the locale. While it was a difficult assignment in serving as a full-time host for the first time, he believes it made him stronger in the role by amassing more perspective to handle other endeavors with aplomb.
“It’s a completely different vibe, it’s a completely different area and temperament and stuff like that, and people aren’t as negative,” Cattles stated. “They don’t critique as much [and are] not as negative in Virginia Beach as they are here in the Northeast.”
Although Cattles is currently not employed by a traditional radio outlet, he has proved successful in creating his own opportunities. The eponymous digital program frequently secures interaction from listeners through several digital media platforms, donations on Patreon and strong reviews from consumers. The challenge in the venture is in building an audience, withstanding the competition and monetizing the content, all of which can contain entropic elements governed by mere happenstance.
“You draw a difference between yourself and what other people do,” Cattles said, “and I think just my presentation and how I look at things and how I deliver topics and all of that, I think that there’s a line of separation between me and many of the other outlets and shows that people get to listen to around here.”
Cattles broadcasts a new edition of his show daily, albeit in a different structure that can concurrently limit versatility. Amid a world with dwindling attention spans and a plethora of content offerings, he tries to keep his episodes between 30 and 45 minutes.
This differs from previous experiences he had in radio where the programs lasted four hours and contained various segments separated by commercial breaks. When Cattles interned at 790 The Score, he gained more awareness about the format and early on-air opportunities. After some time out of sports media, he joined 98.5 The Sports Hub for its launch in 2009 but entered the role with a bonafide routine.
“My uncle gave me a bit of advice when I was unemployed for a couple of years before I got back into radio at 98.5 – and I used to live with him at my godparents’ and he used to get me up every morning,’” Cattles recalled. “I’d be like, ‘What are you getting me up for? I don’t have a job to go to,’ and he made a very impressionable point on me at that moment of my life, and it was, ‘Well, you’ve got to continue to live your life like you are working. You’ve got to – just because you’ve got downtime right now or you’re unemployed, don’t get lazy with it.’”
Cattles recently filled in on the Memorial Day edition of Toucher & Hardy on 98.5 The Sports Hub, the actualization of a return to the air that he was unsure would happen. The next step for him is to try and find a way to continue podcasting while making it back to terrestrial radio on a full-time basis. Despite uneasy sentiments about restoring his presence on the station airwaves on Monday, he utilized his entrenched, instinctive aptitude and proficiency to thrive alongside co-hosts Ryan Johnston and Kendra Middleton.
“It might sound really simple, but I try to do the best that I can every time I’m given an opportunity,” Cattles said. “I’m a big believer in being genuine with people – being who you are on the air – and so I think that’s part of it. I don’t ever look at it as building a brand more than just really creating a relationship between you and the listeners.”
There are sports media personalities who have branched beyond traditional media outlets and started their own independent business ventures, whether that be through a podcast, digital show and/or production company. Traditional media conglomerates grow in scope through new content formulation, along with mergers and acquisitions, but the aggregate faces heightened competition from non-traditional outlets and autonomous creators.
“You’ve got to understand that it’s very unlikely that you’re going to launch, and all of a sudden within a month or two, you’re going to be just dominating a piece of the market,” Cattles said. “I think you’ve got to be realistic and you’ve got to work hard and just do all that you can do promotion-wise and marketing-wise to try to build it as much as you can. I think people look at a podcast and they might think it’s not a lot of work. It’s more work than I even thought it would be.”
The podcast is subsidized through several different means, none of which would be possible without consumption and an audience. Cattles is aware of the impact of listeners, and he values the relationship with the growing cohort. Cultivating trust and rapport with the audience helps safeguard the program against developing a reputation for being mundane or capricious.
“If you create that connection, then you’re going to be happy for a long time [and] you’re going to have a career because if you do that, people will come back and they’ll listen to you,” Cattles said. “It goes back to whether they agree with you or disagree with you, [it] doesn’t matter. If they feel connected to you, you’ve done your job.”
After the show, Cattles edits video clips of the show to promote the product on social media while also uploading the program to several podcast platforms. Moreover, he puts the show on his Patreon page and continues to tackle other editorial tasks. Cattles estimates that live streaming the program saves him some time in the work, but he still nonetheless strives to deliver for the audience.
“It’s a little bit more handcuffed in a way because I’ve got to get the stuff out there, get it done and then kind of do all the other work behind the scenes to make sure that it’s out there and that I’m promoting it,” Cattles said, “because people have told me in this business of podcasting, ‘Promotion, promotion, promotion.’”
Cattles does not know where his career will take him next, factors that are partially out of his control. In a scenario where the podcast does not work and he cannot return to a radio station, he is unsure what he would do because he does not have the qualifications of a prototypical 9-to-5 job. For now, though, he is remaining optimistic that things will work out and that he will continue talking about things he loves, staying attuned to change and doing Boston sports talk differently.
“The podcast is incredibly rewarding, and if thing works out – the podcast, the show works out – and I can say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m doing and this is my career and it’s going to financially support me,’ then that would obviously be a fantastic option to have in my life,” Cattles explained, “but there’s a lot of different factors that go into it.”
Derek Futterman is a former associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. Find him on X @derekfutterman.
