Mike Conti was drawn towards sports radio from early in his youth listening to broadcasts of the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, and while he never definitively had a thought that he wanted to work in the industry, the impression the spoken word made on him led him in that direction.
That, and realizing he was probably not good enough to play sports at a competitive level – so it is safe to say he wanted to stay involved in some way or another. Talking about the action, he surmised, had the potential to forge a viable career path, whether that be during play itself or in the sports talk radio format; therefore, he focused his time at Penn State University to help him achieve that goal.
“I was one of those kids who used to listen to the game on the transistor radio under the pillow,” Conti said. “That was me – like so many other people who got passionate about this industry I think listening to games growing up.”
Play-by-play was always an appealing option for Conti, and it is an aspect of sports radio he has had the ability to work in multiple capacities both at the collegiate and professional level.
But before he got there, he began his career working at Triad Broadcasting in Savannah for nearly three years as news director and assistant operations manager, and also assisted on the programming side of things. In this role, Conti received his first exposure to the management side of media, a section of the industry he continued to grow in soon thereafter – but it is not why he desired to work in media.
It is safe to say he was doing everything he wanted from the time he began pursuing his dream to work in sports radio – which included some play-by-play duties and hosting a daily talk show. Yet he felt unfulfilled and wanting more, and knew that his job at the time would not allow him to grow much further in sports media, or media as a whole for that matter.
“I loved everything I was doing as [a] part of [being] the program director of a sports radio station, but I felt like I hit a growth ceiling,” said Conti. “My goal was to work in a major market, and then I had to kind of assess what I needed to do to work in a major market.”
Conti immediately recognized the importance of versatility in media and willingly adapted his career to attain his goal of working in a major market. One of the primary sacrifices he made to eventually land a job in Atlanta, where he still works today, is by taking an opportunity to work in news radio in New Orleans. This was no usual start to a job though, as he was moving to a city that had recently been devastated by Hurricane Katrina, a tropical cyclone that killed over 1,800 people and caused over $125 billion in damage.
“That was a very, very intense two years in New Orleans where the flow of news and information never really stopped, and it was very, very challenging to keep up with it,” Conti said. “I also felt like kind of on a human level I was called to do that in a way; I felt like it was my responsibility as a young broadcaster to try to do what I could to help that city get back on its feet.”
As a news anchor and reporter at WWL radio, Conti refined his craft by keeping residents informed on daily newscasts, a task that helped him advance his standing in the industry. Sports did not completely elude him throughout his two-year stretch in “The Big Easy” though, as he began contributing to the New Orleans Saints Radio Network as a reporter and served as the play-by-play announcer on sister station WKBU-FM for the New Orleans VooDoo, a local arena football team.
WWL was the source for residents of New Orleans to receive relevant and accurate news and information amid the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, inculcating an obligation of ethical reporting and integrity among staff. The station served as an essential resource to the area during this strenuous and exasperating stretch of time, and by default, experienced much success in each ratings book. Moreover, Conti won a National Edward R. Murrow Award for his contributions to the coverage, a valuable reminder to the impact terrestrial radio can have especially during moments of profound difficulty.
Today, while he understands that attaining a genuine measurement of a station’s audience and reach potential has been disrupted by a global pandemic, he nonetheless assesses it in the same way as he did over a decade ago despite the method seeming entropic at the surface.
“My test is when I stop at a traffic light, I want to know what’s on the radio on the car to my left and the car to my right,” said Conti. “….I’ll never forget working [in New Orleans]… and stopping anywhere where people were in a car, and there was a very good chance you could hear WWL playing on at least one of the cars you were stopped with.”
Due to the prevalence of broadcast entities augmenting their presences on multiple platforms of dissemination, a common criticism of ratings over the years is that they are representative of just one sector of consumption. Conti concurs with that sentiment, which is why he utilizes other data including streaming metrics and social media analytics to formulate a more authentic evaluation of the station during each quarter.
“I think we can use the data from Nielsen to look at general trends, but I never want to overreact to a good book or a bad book,” Conti said. “I think it’s more handy to kind of gauge the overall direction of the radio station over really a 12-month trend as opposed to just going from month-to-month and even week-to-week. You can drive yourself crazy looking at that data you get every week because it can be very, very tempting to overreact to it.”
Conti worked in New Orleans until July 2008 before landing a job with Clear Channel Communications in Atlanta and continued to contribute to both sports and news content for WGST-AM 640, including serving as the station’s assistant news director. Additionally, he was the station’s lead morning news anchor and won the Associated Press’ Georgia radio news anchor of the year award.
Then in 2012, Conti officially transitioned from news radio to join a brand-new station on its launch day: 92.9 The Game in Atlanta. Here, Conti finally focused exclusively on sports radio, but still found ways to display his stellar versatility by taking on a variety of different roles – sometimes simultaneously. Through it all, he gained an understanding of time management, an important aspect of most managerial jobs and something he thrived in when he was named managing editor of the station.
Over the years at the station, Conti has contributed to talk shows, delivered sports updates, and hosted studio coverage, including pregame, halftime, and postgame shows, on radio broadcasts for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. Additionally, he has worked as the play-by-play voice of MLS’ Atlanta United FC and was on the call for the team’s first championship in 2018, which was also, at the time, the first professional sports championship in the area since the Atlanta Braves won the World Series in 1995.
“Someone tweeted at me the next day and said: ‘Do you realize only you and Skip Caray have called an Atlanta sports championship on the radio live?’” recalled Conti. “That just absolutely gave me goosebumps as someone who grew up admiring Skip Caray.”
Of course, hosting pregame, halftime, and postgame shows for the Falcons meant that Conti was in the building when the team was en route to winning its first-ever Super Bowl championship leading 28-3 at halftime. As is well known though, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots staged the largest comeback in Super Bowl history to capture the Vince Lombardi Trophy, infamously defeating the Falcons 34-28. When the game concluded, the next voice that was heard on Atlanta sports radio was that of Conti’s, and it was a moment of his career that he remembers because of the stress and profound trouble he had describing what had just happened.
“I will just never ever forget sitting in that broadcast booth trying to find the words to do that postgame show and trying to find the words to kind of put everything in perspective [to] try to wrap your head around what had just occurred,” said Conti. “It was certainly one of the most devastating moments in Atlanta sports history, and unfortunately I had to be the person on the postgame show to explain it.”
This past June, Conti was named as the new brand manager of 92.9 The Game, a new, multifaceted job for him that has required him to allocate time to ensure the radio station continues to maintain its sound and is at the forefront of innovation. Additionally, he works closely with sponsors, partner teams, and other entities to confirm a return on investment and the cultivation of revenue-generating opportunities. In sum, his job is to ensure the station is on an upward trajectory, both in its content and in its position in the marketplace.
“I’m very, very passionate about the brand, and I know very well what has succeeded and what has failed for us a brand,” said Conti. “Now, it’s just trying to build off the foundation that’s existed for the last 10 years [and] try to make it a little bit better.”
While it may not seem obvious, there are some areas of intersection between being a brand manager and having a broadcast role. In fact, Conti’s experience broadcasting on both radio in Savannah, New Orleans, and Atlanta, along with serving as a freelance play-by-play announcer on television with the Pennsylvania Cable Network, has prepared him for this moment.
“If you’re part of a show unit with a co-host, an executive producer, and an engineer, you have to collaborate on a daily basis with your team,” Conti explained. “So much of being a brand manager is that collaboration with your larger team. [It’s] not necessarily cramming down the type of content that you want to hear [or] the types of non-traditional events you want to be doing, but listening to your team and trying as a large group to find some solutions to do the best radio that we possibly can.”
The job of a brand manager, according to Conti, has been demanding thus far and has presented a challenge to him in trying to continue his broadcast presence while also being an effective manager. Always being one to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously, Conti had to face the looming decision of selecting his primary focus in the industry – and he chose management.
“At some point, you have to pick a lane, and I think that’s been the career crossroads that I’ve been at in the last year – I’ve got to pick my lane,” Conti stated. “The lane I chose, although I’m very passionate about play-by-play and want to continue to do it; the lane I chose was management, and I am pleased I was given an opportunity by Audacy and my market manager here in Atlanta to pick that lane.”
Working directly with Rick Caffrey, who serves as the senior vice president and market manager for Audacy in Atlanta, has not been a difficult transition according to Conti, largely because they are both Atlanta sports fans and P1 listeners of the radio station. Their meetings, while they usually run long, are generally productive; in fact, just 30 minutes of conversation one day came up with an effective campaign involving military listeners. He looks forward to continuing to pioneer new ideas with Caffrey as sports media continues to evolve at a rapid pace.
“I always tell my team: ‘I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to help you get what you need to do the best radio you can do every day,’” Conti said. “From a market manager standpoint, Rick [Caffrey] is very much the same way with me. He’s not necessarily telling me what to do; he is my resource to make sure I get what I need from the company to execute what I want to execute.”
Conti affirms that he has a talented staff on hand; however, he is always looking for chances to improve the current product. That is why he recently hired a new Atlanta Braves reporter for the station, along with several weekend hosts to improve that content. Additionally, he and Caffrey created a new mid-morning sports and entertainment talk show called The Front Row on 92.9 The Game featuring Steak Shapiro and Sandra Golden.
“Fortunately for me, I don’t need to sit into show meetings and provide feedback and advice for what our shows need to be doing,” said Conti. “My bigger goal is to just make sure we’re constantly evolving and not settling for doing the same thing every day…. You’re either going to get better or you’re going to get worse – you’re never going to stay the same – and I want to make sure that we’re always getting better.”
Working in news radio, even though his goal was to always remain in sports, was representative of augmenting his versatility and taking advantage of any opportunity he could to advance his standing in the industry. Today, he looks back on that time and recognizes that there are many similarities between the two formats, and having that duality in perspective has helped him understand the totality of the industry as a brand manager.
“As is the case in the news business, we have a responsibility in sports radio to make sure that we’re informing our audience in a responsible way and that we aren’t necessarily going on the radio and saying things because we know our audience wants to hear it,” Conti said. “I think there are some journalistic principles that are very, very important to implement in sports radio.”
Whether it is news or sports radio, the proximity to current events embedded within content in the spoken word format unquestionably gives it somewhat of an advantage when put up against other radio formats. The challenge for Conti and other radio executives comes in making that content available on-demand and accessible wherever and whenever the consumer desires to hear it. Technologic innovation helps in making that goal a reality; however, it requires collaboration from all parties to produce it, including on-air talent, engineers, and programmers among others.
The concept of abandoning terrestrial radio altogether and moving to an exclusive digital platform is something Conti and many others do not see as a viable option right now. After all, terrestrial radio has provided and continues to provide the foundation for much of the listening audience, and even though podcasts and other digital means of consumption are growing in their popularity, they are primarily complimenting the existing content on AM/FM rather than replacing it entirely. That, of course, could change as time goes on though but for now, Audacy is providing 92.9 The Game and its other sports radio stations with necessary resources, combined with “time, effort, and energy” to ensure the haste distribution of content.
“Over the next decade, there’s going to be a continual transition from in-car listening to on-phone and in-app listening, and that’s something we have to embrace,” said Conti. “Quite honestly – from a programming standpoint, there are a lot of advantages to that because for one, we’re going to get much more reliable audience measurement off of that.”
Something else that could shift in the industry over the next decade is the number of on-air talent that can simultaneously and effectively balance a broadcast and management career as some jobs become more conflated in scope. Conti, having achieved this throughout his career, knows that broadcasters would serve as “good coaches in that program director/brand manager role.” The one issue could be that there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
“I would love to see more on-air talent try to embrace that opportunity,” Conti said, “but I don’t know if it’s sustainable to do a four-hour air shift and all the show prep that entails, and fulfill all the commitments that come with being a brand manager at a top-10 market station.”
He’s just 41 years old with a wealth of experience in sports media, and while Mike Conti’s career is far from over, he is grateful for the various chances he has had to work in different sectors of radio. As a former member of the Alumni Society Board of Directors at Penn State University’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, he hopes to embolden aspiring broadcasters through his adaptability and versatility, both facets of his career and truths of the industry he tells young professionals when he meets with them.
“I’ve gotten to do so much and experience so much in my first two decades working in this industry,” Conti said. “If someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Tomorrow, you can’t do this anymore,’ I would have a smile on my face because I feel like I’ve been so blessed and so fortunate to have the experiences that I’ve had over the last couple of decades.”
Mike Conti chose his lane, and now it’s full speed ahead as 92.9 The Game looks to push its previous momentum and accelerate into the digital age of media.
“We were very, very lucky for a long time to have a lot of ratings success here in the Atlanta market, and to uphold that is very, very challenging,” Conti said. “It requires a lot of hard work and a lot of creativity, and that’s what I’m basically trying to bring to the position.”
