Some Comments on the Death of WTDY

Last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, 8 employees of MidWest Family Broadcasting who worked in news and on-air on WTDY-AM, including my friend and long-time radio partner, John “Sly” Sylvester,  were summoned to a meeting and fired by General Manager Rick McCoy.  The station now broadcasts continuous Christmas music, and indications are that sometime after the holidays it will switch to a sports-talk format.

While last Wednesday’s mass firings signal the death of WTDY as a local talk station, it also signals the death of any credible news effort on the part of MidWest’s group of radio stations in Madison, leaving Clear Channel’s cluster of stations (WIBA-AM, et.al) the sole surviving active radio newsgathering operation in town. Without news and traffic reporters, MidWest has ceded local coverage of winter storms, tornados, floods, and other such events to the other stations in the market.

WTDY’s death actually was a long, drawn-out drama that began in July of 2003 with the death of William R. Walker, who took his father William E. Walker’s small radio operation and turned it into a thriving group of more than 40 radio stations in 4 states.  His death was a blow still resonating in the group, which departed from his template for success that involved serving the community with a strong news presence and local on-air personalities.

I was a shareholder, manager, consultant, and on-air performer in the group that employed me for the better part of three decades, until November 18, 2008, when Glen Gardner and I (we were doing the WTDY morning show at the time) were thrown under the bus.  Glen’s analysis of the death of WTDY is better than anything I could write.  This is what he posted Sunday:

In my opinion there are two types of (commercial) broadcast operations; those that are sales-driven and those that are programming-driven. In a sales-driven operation the sales department in effect runs the station. If they can’t or won’t sell a particular product it goes away. In a programming-driven operation it’s the product side of the company that drives the business model. The Sales Department is given a product to sell and they sell it. MidWest family used to be a programming-driven organization with people like Bill Vancil, Dick Record, Jonathan Little, Tim Morrissey and many others calling the shots.

Then superior sales people like Robert Lewin would go sell it and be compensated well for their craft. At MidWest the tables have turned and that is bad for local radio. Sometimes good programming takes a much higher skill level to market. It takes product knowledge and passion. It takes more work. Lazy sales departments are much more comfortable selling large chunks of commercial matter across many frequencies because it takes virtually no skill, which means a bunch of low-paid flunkies can sell it by the truckload. That also drives ad rates down which provides less resource for local programming. It’s a truly vicious cycle.

The other major problem with a sales-driven model is a lack of regard for the real implications of the loss of solid local programming, news and personalities. In these times radio is really not needed as a music delivery medium. I’ve got 60 gig of my favorite songs on my Galaxy III. It’s 24 hours of WGLEN. Every song I ever wanted and about 20 gig of songs I can’t even tell you why I have. I just don’t need radio for music anymore (that’s coming from a 56 year-old guy, can you imagine what the 25-year-old-thinks?). So, what goes between the songs on a music station is critical and the real future for radio is the spoken word format as music importance fades.

What MidWest did with these and other firings is got rid of not just people, but local product. All those news people not only supplied WTDY with product, but all the other music stations in the building. When the weather got bad it was Tim and I and other newspeople who broadcast across all the signals to supply the local content that people depend on. I can’t wait to see what happens the first time there’s a blizzard, tornado, flood or other disaster. That’s what they fired! They fired their local product and will be left with a bunch of jukeboxes that will be worth less and less as music becomes less important to the radio listener. They fired what goes between the songs!

They also fired their best shot at survival.

Let me give a quick example of sales-driven versus product-driven that you may be old enough to remember.  During the gasoline crisis of the 70’s, gradually Americans shifted to smaller and more fuel-efficient cars.  Cadillac sales personnel whined to GM that they had no small, fuel-efficient cars to sell. As a result of the constant din from the sales folks, Cadillac put the Cimarron into production in 1981.  It was one of the biggest failures in auto marketing annals, right up there with the Edsel.  A mere 132 thousand Cimarrons were sold during its 7-year production run.  What the sales people didn’t realize was that Cadillac buyers didn’t give two hoots in hell about fuel economy or smaller cars.  They loved those big gas-sucking barges with the giant V-8 engines and tons of chrome.  That was Cadillac’s market niche, and they dominated it.  This is why sales people don’t make good organizational leaders.

Former MidWest Madison Vice President and General Manager Bill Vancil agrees wholeheartedly with what Glen says above:

You are spot on Glen! The scenario you've described is the reason I retired from the business. But, hats off to the determined programming pros like Pat O'Neill, Tim Moore, Jim McGaw and others who keep a flow of relatable programming finding its way to the remaining listeners despite the encumberance of the sales driven forces you've so well described. The convulsions that have taken place within broadcast management have opened "Pandora's" box even wider.

Here are some additional very articulate and insightful words about the demise of WTDY from Deana Wright, who was a news and traffic reporter for WTDY until last Wednesday.  Her statements will have real broadcasters shaking their heads in amazement.

I was often amazed when I would speak at events or attend community functions, that so many people had never heard of WTDY...didn't even know where it was on the dial. You can have the best product but if nobody knows it exists your audience will not grow. And, if folks were listening to Sly...the emphasis on 'If"...then what was being done to recycle those listeners and keep them listening to Kurt's "Forward" show and beyond? I was there for the last 3 years and none of us in the newsroom were ever asked to do a personal appearance for a client...at least to my knowledge. That's another way to attract folks who don't currently listen.

 The way I see it several things needed to happen including more focused positioning of the station (positioning statement was non-existent), the creation of promotions aimed at increasing station awareness, much more community involvement, goals should have been set with the staff involved...and a plan implemented to reach those goals, and the station should have been more concerned with servicing our core listener...hard to do, though, when that either hadn't been identified or we just weren't privy to that information. You know I once asked our PD what the station's cume was...I wanted that info to include in a talk I was giving at the state capitol and later at UW-Madison...he replied, "what do you mean, cume?...smh. And I followed that question with another, "who is our core listener?"...the answer?..."I'm not sure, you'll have to ask Randy". As you know, I've worked in major market radio for more than 15 years...and syndication and voice tracking is now the norm at most stations, which contributes to the demise of local programming.

Deana is the daughter of the late Reverend James C. Wright, the Madison civil rights pioneer, and her radio credentials are top-notch.  She came back home to Madison a few years ago to join the WTDY staff after a successful career in some of the largest radio markets in the nation.  What her post so dramatically illustrates is that people who were clearly out of their depth in running a news-talk operation had been appointed to positions of power by a management core that had so clearly abandoned the concepts that Bill Walker used to build MidWest.

Many former MidWest employees posted on social media sites after hearing the news of the death of WTDY comments like “Bill Walker is rolling over in his grave”.

Best of luck to all the people, including my friend Sly, who are now looking for work.  Trust me, better days are ahead for all of you, but the same can’t be said for the company that fired you.