Connect with us
Barrett News Media Summit 2024

BNM Writers

5 People Who Aren’t Doing News Talk…But Could

These are people who could take what made their shows great in their respective formats and excel in a completely different arena.

Ryan Maguire

Published

on

Talent crossing over to news-talk from a different format is nothing new.  It’s been done for years.  Often though, many of these people fall into one of two uninspiring camps:

TALENT A– A jock on a music station that has aged out of the target demo.  However, they have enough name recognition in the market to land a news-talk gig.  Their shows are big on humor but have little depth.  It’s formulaic and contrived.   

TALENT B– Thinks that doing news-talk means they have to be a Rush or Hannity clone to be successful.  So, they drape themself in an American Flag and regurgitate the same conservative talking points that have been strewn across the news-talk landscape for years.  It’s formulaic and contrived. 

I’ve always felt that TRUE talent is transcendental.   When I worked in news-talk, I was never afraid to look at a candidate who didn’t have a background in the format.  The key was finding the RIGHT person…and not an individual who fell into the two camps I listed previously.

As a PD, I would always keep long list of talent I liked, regardless of format.  Here are five names off that list.  These are individuals I’m familiar with who are NOT currently working in news-talk but would absolutely KILL it if they chose to crossover.

NICK WRIGHT- Co-Host of First Things First on FS1

I had the good fortune to work with Nick for almost four years when he was doing sports-radio in Kansas City.  His knowledge of athletes and teams were never in question.  However, as I got to know him, I found out quickly just how intelligent and well-rounded a person he was.

Growing up in KC, Nick went to an exclusive prep school and could have easily gone to Harvard or Yale had he chosen to do so. He even managed to snag a spot as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Our conversations were rarely about sports.  He had amazingly well-thought-out opinions on politics, race, pop culture, the economy and history.  He’s successfully been able to weave those opinions into the sports shows he’s hosted over the years.  Following the death of George Floyd, Nick made an impassioned plea to white people which has since gone viral:

Photo CBS Detroit

MIKE VALENTI- Afternoon Show Host on 97.1 The Ticket in Detroit

As a Detroit sports fan, I’ve been a daily listener to Valenti’s show for years.  The man is a verbal assassin and has become one of the most phenomenally successful local sports-talk show hosts in the country. 

If he ever wanted to jump into the world of news-talk, I have no doubt he’d enjoy the same amount of success.

Valenti has never been shy about talking about non-sports topics on his show.  As COVID-19 put a halt to sporting events, much of the subject matter on his shows changed.  Valenti spent time on his programs focusing on the social and political impacts the pandemic had on people in Detroit and across the state of Michigan. It was great content and it certainly didn’t have a negative impact on his ratings.  He and his partner Rico Beard dominated the market throughout the spring and summer books. On September 30th, Mike jumped away from sports and led his show with reaction to the surreal first Presidential Debate.  The content was as good, if not better than what I heard from many news-talk shows that day:

Photo Radiocom

ANDREW FILLIPPONI- Co-Host of The PM Team on 93.7 The Fan in Pittsburgh

I had the pleasure of working with Andrew during my time in Pittsburgh.  I recall one afternoon at the studio; I saw him intently reading the book John Adams by David McCullough. 

“Poni,” I quipped, “I hope that’s not your idea of show prep.”

He smiled and went on to explain how he was getting ready to watch the HBO Miniseries of the same name and wanted to read the novel first.  We then went down a rabbit hole of talking about Adam’s politics, his role in history, which founding fathers we thought were overrated, etc.  It was a side of him that I had never seen before and it always stuck with me.

In the years we continued to work together, I made a point to steer conversations away from sports.  We’d talk about relationships, business, politics, etc.  He always had the ability to make stop and think about the topic at hand and even question my own views.

Knowing Andrew, he loves sports too much to want to cross over into news-talk.  However, he has the chops to do so. My colleague Brian Noe did a fascinating piece on Andrew for our sister-site and it’s worth a read.

MIKE WICKETT- Host of The Wickett on Wisconsin Podcast

Mike, unlike others on this list, has done news-talk for a living. 

After successful sports-radio stops in Ann Arbor and Milwaukee, he was hired co-host middays on Kansas City’s KMBZ. 

I worked directly with Mike in both of his sports-radio stops.  He was always quick witted, an absolute wizard with audio production and never afraid to go against the grain of popular sentiment.  Despite that, I was surprised when he left sports-talk to do news-talk on BZ.  I wasn’t sure if he would be able to tackle the far more serious topics that the format would present.

Naturally, he proved me wrong.

Mike spent 3 on KMBZ and became a Top-3 performer with Men, Women and Persons 25-54.   He was never afraid to spar with people on politics or social issues, but also knew how to add the right amount of levity and self-depreciation to make him relatable.Wickett left radio in late 2019 and is now a stay-at-home-dad.  He’s done some fill-in work on various news and sports stations, but also hosts the Wickett on Wisconsin Podcast.

Photo Country 1025

JONATHAN WIER- Morning Show Co-Host on Country 102.5 in Boston

Jonathan is in the same category as Mike Wickett.  They worked in news-talk (at the same station no less), then crossed over to do something else.  In Jonathan’s case, he left spoken word entirely and now works as the morning co-host on Country 102.5 in Boston.

I met Jonathan when he was hosting the top-rated evening show on KMBZ in Kansas City.  If you listened to his show, his success would have been no surprise.  He attacked every topic with an infectious energy that made it impossible to stop listening.  He also had an amazing knack for getting the best out of every other voice that was on his show (whether it be co-hosts, producers, anchors, callers, etc.).   BZ let him go as part of a cost-cutting move in July of 2019. 

It didn’t take him long to land a gig, as Beasley hired him to head to Boston only a few months later. You can get some samples of Wier’s current work here.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading
1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. August Winter

    December 14, 2020 at 7:53 pm

    Wickett is a piss poor researcher, and will put you to sleep when he talks. He has the charm of a tarantula.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

Avatar photo

Published

on

A photo of clocks

News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading

BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

Published

on

As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading

BNM Writers

News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

Published

on

A photo featuring I voted stickers

The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

Subscribe To The BNM Rundown

The Top 8 News Media Stories of the Day, sent directly to your inbox every afternoon!

Invalid email address
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Advertisement
Advertisement

Upcoming Events

BNM Writers

Copyright © 2024 Barrett Media.