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Over the last couple of months, I’ve done eavesdropping pieces on both New York afternoon drive shows. First, I did The Michael Kay Show on ESPN New York and then most recently I did Evan & Tiki on WFAN. Top market in the country and I noticed both stations take calls. Kay’s show seemed to lean more heavily on them, but both interacted with callers throughout.
Some stations have stopped taking calls altogether. Others only do texts, and some have a way for a caller to leave a voicemail message. The idea here being that the callers don’t do a good enough job of adding to the conversation or keeping the flow and the hosts should be the experts on the sports topics and entertaining enough to do shows with a limited amount of input from the listeners. It is a good theory; however, the problem wasn’t the callers themselves. It was the way we conditioned the callers.
Callers need to be screened, told to turn down the radio, and how it will work when they get on the air. Then they need to be reminded to stick to the topic and not ask how the hosts are doing or anything else you want them to be aware of. As you go, you learn who is and is not a good contributor, and you try and have a handle on it. Hosts or producers shouldn’t be afraid to cut someone off if they’re getting off the subject, aren’t making sense, or completely go off the rails.
But that’s talk radio and when I listen to it without calls it seems to lose a bit of what it was designed for and what it is best at.
Nobody wants to hear something that sounds like this, “Should the Lakers play LeBron and Bronnie together, let’s see what the text line says. Someone in the 310 says ‘do whatever is best for the team to win games,’ here’s one from the 747 that says, ‘Bronnie should never see the floor.’ 818 says…well…wait can’t say that on the air, let’s get another from the 310 that says, ‘No way!'”
I heard something the other day where a show had just played a voice message from a caller and one of the hosts said, “Well Bob, I’m not sure if you meant the whole season or just the postseason so I can’t really answer.”
You could have if Bob was on the phone line.
The other thing that tends to happen is instead of the callers becoming a crutch for the show, they use content crutches. Everything becomes a segment with a name that all kind of sound the same but are just a little bit different. And again, mostly done with just the hosts and producers talking without other voices.
My opinion is talk radio reacted too far to a problem that was something it could have corrected in the first place. Unfortunately, I feel like I say that a lot when it comes to radio.
Talk radio and especially sports talk radio was designed in part to give the fans an outlet. Something good or bad happens and the hosts talk through it, bring on guests to dive into it and then get the pulse of the fans. It’s much better done live on the air, so you really hear the emotion, or at least get the chance to hear the host rip apart the caller and entertain that way.
As is often the case, some bad apples ruined it for the bunch. The ‘bad apples’ in this case are the hosts who just decided to show up, open up the phone lines and have at it. Those hosts judge themselves solely by how many callers were on the line and often would end up almost interviewing the callers and taking way too much time with them.
Some folks decided then that the callers were the problem and the best way to solve it was to eliminate them. So, instead of training producers and call screeners and doing it the right way, some took the easy way out.
Very few sports talk show hosts in the country are good enough to carry shows without taking the input of the audience. Sports radio is supposed to be a journey you’re on together. And certainly, there should have been rules in place to prevent ‘Cowboy Mike’ from calling in wanting to talk about the Dallas Cowboys when the subject of the day is the Astros in the playoffs and things like that.
I remember the great sports radio consultant Rick Scott once writing in a report about a host that said something along the lines of, ‘Stop going into break saying ‘Larry, Tom and Phil, we’ll get to you when we come back’ because the only people that care are Larry, Tom and Phil.’ He was so right and so many hosts are still guilty of that mostly because they aren’t prepared to talk about anything so if Larry, Tom and Phil drop off they’re in trouble.
Callers should not be relied upon in sports talk radio, but if you’ve eliminated them, perhaps think about why you did and see if you can correct it instead of losing out on what can be a great part of the overall content and sound of your station.
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The Best/Worst Thing I’ve Heard/Watched/Read Recently
Here’s something I did not like seeing recently. As you are well aware, all three big radio companies, iHeartMedia, Cumulus Media and Audacy have relatively recently filed for and then come out of bankruptcy. When that happens, you certainly don’t expect for a company to come clean and lay out all of what happened, who they couldn’t pay and why. However, do they need to put out a press release that makes it look like screwing a bunch of businesses out of an enormous amount of money is an exciting thing and something to be celebrated?
In the most recent example, here is a quote from David Field in the Audacy press release about coming out of bankruptcy:
“We are pleased to have successfully achieved all of our restructuring goals, emerging with an outstanding balance sheet, delivering industry-leading growth, serving our listeners and advertisers with excellence and honoring our commitments to employees and partners. Today, Audacy embarks on our next chapter, capitalizing on our position as a scaled, multi-platform audio leader, differentiated by our exclusive, premium audio content, including our unrivaled leadership in sports audio, powered by our industry-leading financial strength and focused on accelerating our innovation and digital transformation. We are maximizing a broad set of opportunities to further accelerate our growth for the benefit of Audacy and all of its stakeholders.”
Wow. That is certainly one way to put it.
The reality here is this is celebrating more than $1.5 BILLION in debt being ‘discharged.’ Meaning people don’t get paid or get much less than they were owed. A lot of bad happened to get to this point and a lot of bad happens to people in a bankruptcy like this. I’m guessing there are some ‘partners’ who were owed a substantial amount of money. They might take issue with reading about how much the company is, “serving our listeners and advertisers with excellence and honoring our commitments to employees and partners.”
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In Case You Missed It
I was a big Pete Rose fan growing up. I was too young for most of his early Reds days, but man did I pull for Philadelphia and Montreal when he was with them, unless they were playing the Cardinals of course. The whole player/manager thing to me was so cool and I just always appreciated how much he loved the game and that hustle.
Barrett Media’s Mark Kreidler wrote about Pete and his relationship with the media. Mark wrote, “The media never knew what to do with Pete Rose because he either was or wasn’t what they expected, depending on the day. I’ll tell you this, Rose was a writer’s dream. He always talked and never stopped, and in the instant that he said anything, you were convinced he meant every word of it. He spoke the way he played, bluntly.”
Mark summed it all up well. You can read the full column by clicking here.
Dave Greene is the Chief Media Officer for Barrett Media. His background includes over 25 years in media and content creation. A former sports talk host and play-by-play broadcaster, Dave transitioned to station and sales management, co-founded and created a monthly sports publication and led an ownership group as the operating partner. He has managed stations and sales teams for Townsquare Media, Cumulus Media and Audacy. Upon leaving broadcast media he co-founded Podcast Heat, a sports and entertainment podcasting network specializing in pro wrestling nostalgia. To interact, find him on Twitter @mr_podcasting. You can also reach him by email at Dave@BarrettMedia.com.
