Jon Weiner, aka Stugotz, was back on WFAN this morning filling in for Boomer Esiason with Gregg Giannotti during Boomer & Gio. Stugotz is filling in four days this week, the first time he has been on for an extended time since flirting with the station and the Brand Manager opening created when Spike Eskin left the station to move back home to Philadelphia.
Giannotti said he had watched a golf video Stugotz had shot about a year ago and brought up one of the things he said in the content. “You said in there that you missed the pressure of live radio,” Giannotti said. “Did you used to feel pressure when you guys were on live?”
“It’s not so much the pressure as it is the urgency, the excitement,” Stugotz said. “Because now, for the most part, we do two hours live every day on YouTube Live. And then we tape a couple hours after that and we deliver our episode every single day to largely a podcast audience, a digital audience. I miss the high-wire act that live radio provides for me, especially the type of show that me and Dan did. And doing it at ESPN where we were towing the line all the time.”
He went on to say a lot of it was about avoiding getting into trouble, but getting right up to that line without crossing it.
“What I miss is that kind of being on the high wire without a net and toeing the line and hoping you don’t say the wrong thing. Saying the right thing and it being exactly the right thing, but you didn’t go too far to get yourself in trouble. I just miss doing all that stuff live. I got into this to do live radio; I didn’t get into this to tape a couple of segments on Tuesday that we’re gonna air on Friday. You don’t get the same thing from the live YouTube aspect because, there’s no restrictions really with YouTube, whereas with ESPN you were kind of messing with people.”
Stugotz said some people, including his father, thought The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz was making a mistake by going from ESPN to YouTube and the other ways the content can be accessed. He said his father even asked him if he had the ability to access YouTube, not fully understanding how it all works.
The conversation then came back to the love Stugotz has for radio and his desire to do a show that runs similar to a sports talk radio show.
“There’s just something about doing live radio,” he said. “It makes me feel alive. There’s something about sticking the joke at the end of the segment and then you hear the bumper in your ear…I just miss it all. I love what we do, I really do, it just feels a bit disjointed. This has a flow to it.”
“You still have a passion for the platform,” Giannotti said to Stugotz. He replied, “I do. I love the platform…I got into this to do sports radio, but the entire industry has shifted and changed. It’s a digital world so our show had to adapt. And you give me a couple of shows a year here in July with nothing to talk about, which is what I prefer by the way, and that kind of fulfills me.”
