Feb 18, 2021 | Blog, Radio Business
Throughout my four-decade radio career, I almost always made it a habit, on my way to work, to listen to whoever preceded me. One of the biggest exceptions was Rush Limbaugh, who show aired right before mine on KMOX. I not only detested what he said and stood for, but...
Jan 18, 2021 | Blog, Radio Business
Early in my radio career, I worked for a music station that declared, “Every Monday In January Is Commercial-Free!” How did it manage that? Through the law of supply and demand. Because most big advertisers had spent so much money in the November-December...
Dec 8, 2020 | Radio Business, Television
Forty years ago tonight, millions of Americans learned from Howard Cosell that John Lennon was dead. Cosell made the announcement towards the end of a Dolphins-Patriots game on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” — and I missed it. At the time, I was...
Oct 12, 2020 | Blog, Radio Business
During all my years in broadcasting, there was a rule that commercials for competing companies could not run adjacent to one another in a break (e.g. car dealers couldn’t follow car dealers). Optimally, they wouldn’t even run in the same cluster. If they...
Sep 10, 2020 | Blog, Radio Business
The latest unemployment numbers reminded me of one of the ways in which radio can be an important resource in a community. In 2009, as the Great Recession was flaring across the country and millions of people lost their jobs, my friend Francene Cucinello decided to be...
Sep 4, 2020 | Radio Business
In 2008, my friend Kipper McGee was the Program Director of talk radio station “The Big 89” WLS-AM/Chicago. I had known Kipper when he’d spent a year or two in the same position at KTRS/St. Louis while I was its midday host. We stayed in touch after...
