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Hello boys and Spaulding, I’m back. Not sure why my old login didn’t work anymore but alas, it’s me. If anyone wants to verify they can DM me on Twitter.
I’ve checked in occasionally since the CoronaVirus has made a drastic impact on our programming to see what you guys think and I want to address a few things. And I’m happy to answer questions in the comments.
1) The idea of fear mongering. I’m just going to tell you how I honestly feel. Whether that’s about the Bears draft or a pandemic. After having my first child in the hospital for 27 days after birth and being implored by his doctor to be careful, this shit scares me. Some days I’ve been optimistic, some pessimistic. That’s just how I feel.
2) Speaking of my son, some of you think I do that too often. Fair criticism. Becoming a father is a life changing experience and I come from the school of radio that the best personalities live their life on the air. Mac and Stern were the two hosts I listened to most when I fell in love with radio. Now obviously I’m not putting myself on their level but I think we could all agree we’d be worse off as a radio community if Mac hadn’t been so open about raising Patrick and dealing with autism. I’ve received 100’s if not 1000+ messages from listeners of parents of premature babies. NICU stays are hard and the community of people who have experienced it is real. If it’s not for you, I get it. Just try to remember there are no sports going on, it’s my first child, and he came into this world in unusual circumstances. When we depart from the sports page we try to be relatable and movies, music, parenting, fishing, whatever isn’t going to hit every person the same way. The only topic everyone cares about is The Bears.
3) Callers. Yes, I enjoy callers less than most of you seem to, but not for the reasons most seem to be outlining. We get way less than the old days. We get literally 1500+ text messages per show and depending on the topic and how much we push it we can get 10,000. Think of your life. Are you willing to wait on hold for 15-60 minutes to talk for at most 2-3 on the radio? Research back in the day showed 1% of your audience would call. It’s much much much smaller now because people have better things to do and other ways to interact with the station that take way less time. So the quality of the caller has plummeted. Also, we can filter the texts and tweets and read the funniest, smartest, dumbest, most helpful, etc as opposed to having to take 7 or 8 calls to get one good one.
Now, could we do better? Sure. We could do better at everything we do. But I’ll admit that I find caller driven shows to be mostly lazy. When I did my Sunday night CBS show it’s solo and the bosses are from NYC so they like callers. I’d do a monologue and people would call and react. It’s fine. It’s just not that challenging and so much gets repeated. As a listener I tune in for the hosts, producers, and guests. Hopefully they are all professional communicators. It doesn’t mean calls can’t be funny and good and provide unscripted gold, they can. And it is something that differentiates radio from podcasts, I just find the juice to not be worth the squeeze 9 out of 10 times we go to the phones.
That’s enough for now... I have thoughts on bits, the old days of the score, the laughable idea the score is dying, and plenty more. I know I’ll never win over some of you and that’s ok, I just appreciate your passion for the score and sports radio. It’s a good thing. Any questions?
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