awkwardness of our mutual friends. All because they didn’t share the same accountability with businesses and sponsors that I stressed from the minute I met them.
I was banging my head against the wall over and over again. And I did that for 16 years.
I thought I could find others who could do it and sustain it the way I did it. In reality, I never came close to finding that result in any way over 16 years despite dedicating every minute of every day to building the personal brands of people who were far inferior at doing sports radio and the business of sports media in the 21st century.
So, a year ago, I quit trying to do it and went back to doing it myself.
A year ago this week, I had droves of a**holes and former “friends” sending me hate mail and destroying my reputation on social media while I was in a Johns Hopkins cancer hospital ward in a rubber suit sleeping next to my bald, ill wife who hadn’t eaten or opened her eyes in six days.
Yeah, I’ll probably remember that for a while.
So, now – a year later – it’s very easy to say that I’m far happier.
8
I sell advertising for a living. I promise results. I don’t “hope” for them. I demand them because my business partners explicitly demand that accountability from me. And that’s the way the world works.
It’s basic accountability. I like being accountable. I was accountable when I had a girlfriend with a baby at 15. I was accountable when I did journalism in the newspaper world in the 1980s. I’ve always had to be held accountable for every word – and some words that I didn’t – say on the radio. I was accountable in caring for my wife while she fought every day for her life in 2014. I’ve been accountable to care for a 96-year old mother in Dundalk.
I’m a grown up. I’ve always done the right thing.
I’ve never met a business owner who didn’t understand the accountability of sales results. In 16 years of trying desperately to educate and mentor folks who took the baton from me, I never had a host who really understood the risks I took, the responsibility – to partners, to investors, to banks, to sponsors, to the tax man, to the FCC – that I had or the burden of helping grow the business of our sponsors at WNST.
In addition to managing a wide variety of employees and job responsibilities over those 16 years – and being charged with the responsibility of feeding their families and making a payroll every two weeks – I also navigated massive change in a totally fluid and a rapidly developing industry of new media.
The sleazy funding of corporate radio via Arbitron and “ratings” – which are by any measure almost comical if not disturbing as a monopoly industry – has never really changed. The notion of social media and authenticity and “local” are all lost in a world of FM & AM radio mergers, takeovers, downsizes, Jacks, etc. The Jane Goldstroms of the advertising world, who control and direct the money, laugh at me and tell me that no one listens until I write their name in a sentence on the internet or mention them once on the radio and somehow everyone hears their name.
It’s like our political system – sad, in some comical way.
8One day, I’ll be blogging about the absurdities of this “radio industrial machine” and the frauds at the advertising agencies who support it even when they know it’s all a big scam atop a house of cards in a room full of smoke and mirrors. But it’s all funded and shared by the corporate thugs like CBS, Clear Channel, etc. who don’t even believe the fiction that Arbitron peddles but they’re all a part of the hustle, like the politicians in Washington, D.C.
But the world has provided a different measurement for results and the world wide web has matured.
WNST is no longer encumbered by being a radio station. We’re a full-color, 3D, live, growing brand that you’re interacting with right now.
Everyone is on a mobile device around the clock and everyone in the media world is jockeying for your attention. Chances are you saw pictures from my 30-30 MLB #GiveASpit tour this summer on social media faster than you heard it on AM radio.
In my world, it all ties together. You’re here right now reading this so I’m doing something right.
As the owner of WNST.net & AM 1570, I’m the essence of “unique” – I’m the ONLY ONE IN AMERICA DOING IT THIS WAY!!!!!!
I dare you to find anyone, anywhere who owns his own AM “daytimer” radio station at 1570 on the dial who is doing world-class content, being profitable, happy and growing in the marketplace every day.
Since the changes last August, I’m doing my radio content in a way that suits my lifestyle, our sponsors needs, our listeners’ sanity and appealing to their
