Author Archives: Kent Sterling

Kent Sterling Fired as Indy Talk Program Director (part 2)

The number of hits on this site that my posts on being fired continue to accumulate troubles me, but never one to spurn an audience I offer this update.  The problem with explaining things after being canned is that it’s almost impossible to be perceived as anything but either morose and bitter, or ridiculously brave-faced.  Hopefully, this is interpretted as neither.

Being fired is a game-changer.  No doubt about that.  My old boss Tom Severino used to say that change is great when you choose it, but sucks when it’s chosen for you.  That’s true.  The thing that sucks is that you feel like you’ve somehow let everyone down – your family to an extent but especially the people who worked for you.  The people I managed are great, and deserve nothing but great things.  They trusted me, and now I screwed up so they have to adjust to some new person.  That’s not what happened, but the feeling is that somehow they are in peril because I’m not their to help.  It’s somehow arrogant, ignorant, and naïve all at the same time.

I’ve seen how radio talent and producers adjust to PDs being fired before, and it takes about 48 hours – which might be generous.  WIBC and The Fan continue to broadcast, and sound just like I left them.  That is what I would expect from a group of dedicated professionals.  The ratings for the Fall Book were outstanding for both radio stations, so I couldn’t be happier for the people there.  WIBC has been on an uptick for the past six months, and The Fan has had its three best months in September, November, and December so the rule of thumb that it takes two years to build a talk brand to the point that it can become a destination is just about right.

I’ve found a bunch of people I know in the same position – trying to piece together enough stuff to make a living while also doing only things you love.  I like the idea, as you might imagine, that doing what you love can also sustain itself as a profession.  Who knows whether that can be pulled off or not.  I may not be bright enough.

There is always the media, which is endlessly fascinating to me.  It is so filled with corkheaded dunderbrains that making sense of it, and building something positive in it is very alluring.  Take the failure of Air America, which never had a chance in the world to succeed.  The arrogant tools decided to provide a product without an audience.  Jeff Smulyan speaks often of the folly of hubris, and nothing smacks of hubris like a liberal talk radio network that only existed to counter the wildly profitable and popular conservative media like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.  “If people listen to Rush, they’ll sure as hell listen to us because we’re smarter and right about everything!” seemed to be the mission statement for Air America.  No one bothered to listen to Rush to hear that he is a superb radio talent, and that he is a conservative is really almost beside the point.

Clearly, interest in media survived my removal from it.

The Conan/Jay debacle is also very interesting.  I can’t imagine the unpleasant meetings and nervous stomachs in Burbank.  There are a bunch of people who screwed this up but good, and the collateral damage to NBC is still incalculable.  Can whatever they throw on to replace Jay pick up enough audience to make the affiliates happy?  Will the Winter Olympics capture America’s imagination and drive numbers for the February sweeps?  Can Jay win back the viewers that abandoned NBC completely from 10p forward?  Where will Conan land, and will the marketplace support another 11:35p show?  How many of the kooks who saw the idea of Jay at 10p on paper and said, “Damn it, that looks smart as hell,” will survive?  When will NBC grow the stones again to try something so outrageous?

Writing about myself is just about as self-indulgent as anything I can think of, so why would I do it.  I’m healthy, happy, and busy.  My friends have been fantastic, and my wife has been amazing as always.  I was foolish enough not to notice and appreciate it as much as I should.  Learning never ends, and this experience has been a good teacher.

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Conan O'Brien Out as Tonight Show Host

Jay Leno in explaining the mess that is the current late night debacle at NBC, comes off as something akin to Phil Hartman’s caveman lawyer character on SNL.  In reality though, Leno never loses.  Since 2004, NBC has planned to can Leno in favor of the younger and hipper O’Brien.  Then someone had the grand idea to load Jay into the 10p slot to save money and test the popularity of the longtime host at a time when employed adults are watching TV.

If it didn’t work, buh-bye Jay.  Really?  Not quite.  Leno has survived, and O’Brien gets the buyout.

Conan’s final Tonight Show will air tomorrow night on NBC affiliates, and Leno will slide back into his late night seat beginning Monday, March 1.  For his trouble, Conan will receive $33-million.  His staff will split an extra $12-million in severance.  February will be dominated by NBC’s Winter Olympics Coverage.

Leno averaged virtually the same audience he enjoyed as the late night champ – 5.2 million viewers.  There are many more viewers available at the time, so the show was seen as an audience failure by affiliates and the network.  “The Mentalist” on CBS ot the same time averages 17-million.  That lack of lead-in left NBC affiliate newscasts with far fewer viewers during their cash cow newscasts.

Those affiliates had become so enraged with the audience bloodbath that many had threatened to launch local programming in lieu of Leno to try to recoup some of that money.

So NBC looks like a company run by chimpanzees, and the affiliates will hope that the chimps have the brains to gather viewers in larger numbers so the financial bleeding can stop.

The most amazing part of this drama is not that the NBC executives made this colossal blunder, that Leno’s show failed to attract ratings, or that affiliates were ready to jump ship.  It’s that Leno is the survivor, as he always seems to be.  He appears goofy and affable, but when the chips are down he obviously knows how to play the cut-throat behind the scenes game better than David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and the NBC executives.  How this unfolded will be revealed over the next few month, but the one thing we know is that Leno played the right cards at the right time to be able to keep his gig.  He did the same thing in getting the Tonight Show instead of Letterman, and then again when the show initially tanked.

O’Brien won’t be crying poor, but he’s going to be sitting at home next week while Leno plans his return.

NBC will air some reality shows and established dramas to fill the 10p-11p void left by Leno’s departure.

Here is a really good rule.  It takes a great personality driven show up to two years to establish audience traction.  That’s life in broadcasting.  O’Brien foundered as the host of Late Night for months and months before finally attracting respectable ratings.  Same with Letterman.  Same with Leno.  And on and on.  Hell, the same thing happened with Indianapolis’ Bob & Tom.  They were nearly fired a year in.  Building habitual viewing and listening takes time, and programmers need to be committed to ride out the worst case scenario when they launch a show.  And they better be right.

NBC made a series of mistakes, but their biggest was in not establishing reasonable expectations in the affiliate community.  There was no way this kind of radical change was going to be immediately embraced by a 10-million plus level of audience.  The routine for millions of viewers in the Eastern and Western Time Zones  is to head to the bedroom at 10p, watch a drama, and go to sleep.  Leno was a departure from that routine, and people don’t like change done to them.  They went elsewhere.  Eventually, Leno would have found the audience.  The show was pretty good, and good usually wins, especially over dreck like CSI-Miami and CSI-New York.

I’m no fan of Leno’s middle of the road comedy and planned spontaneity, but the fault was with the programmers whose hubris led to unreasonable expectations.

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John Feinstein Hates Rick Greenspan, and Wants Us to Know It

My friend in Chicago, Len Totlan, PR advisor to the stars, is no fan of former Indiana University Athletic Director Rick Greenspan, and a big fan of author, sports enthusiast, and moral barometer John Feinstein.  This results in an email to me every time Feinstein lights up Greenspan in writing or on a broadcast.

Feinstein is a big fan of the Patriot League and the U.S. Military Academy.  He wants Army to perform well athletically and attributes the steep decline of the Army athletic programs to Greenspan.  Indiana University also slipped backwards under Greenspan, who presided over the nightmarish regime of Kelvin Sampson as the head basketball coach. 

Below are some of the most memorable and angry of Feinstein’s quotes regarding the man Feinstein loathes more than all others: 

John Feinstein was writing about the Jets today and was talking about some of their assistant coaches and he threw this line in:

 “And then there’s Bob Sutton, who was the coach at Army when I wrote, “A Civil War.” There are few better men in sports than Sutton, whose firing by the worst athletic director in history (Rick Greenspan) was the start of Army’s 11 year tailspin, lowlighted by an 0-13 record a few years ago.”

Here are some other quotes from Feinstein, who equates all incompetence in sports to the standard set by Greenspan.

“Ever since Kelvin Sampson was forced to resign in disgrace as Indiana’s basketball coach a couple of week ago, people have wondered how Rick Greenspan has kept his job as IU’s athletic director. Apparently Greenspan is going to survive because Indiana has another one of those gutless presidents that litter the college basketball landscape.”

“The real culprit in this story, though, is the athletic director, just like at Indiana. Bob Scalise has a lot in common with Greenspan: He’s arrogant and self-righteous and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

“The hiring of Brock gives some Academy grads flashbacks to Todd Berry’s arrival at West Point in 1999. Then-athletic director Rick Greenspan hired Berry from Illinois State without conducting an extensive search. Berry was fired in 2003 after going 5-35 in three-plus seasons.  According to author John Feinstein, who wrote a book on Army-Navy football, as well as Harry Walters, who played on Army’s last undefeated team in 1958, Navy’s Paul Johnson and Ohio State’s Jim Tressel both were interested in the position when Berry was hired. Johnson was at Georgia Southern and Tressel at Youngstown State. Walters said that alumni also were brushed off by Greenspan when they mentioned Jim Grobe, then at Ohio University, as a candidate.”

“Navy’s seven straight wins over Army by an average margin of 39-10 (think about that) are a reflection of the complete incompetence within the Army athletic program, dating back to the disastrous decision to briefly join Conference USA and the even worse decisions to hire Rick Greenspan as athletic director (he also ruined basketball at Indiana if you’re scoring at home) and Todd Berry as football coach.”

“On Tony Kornheiser’s radio show today, Jay Bilas was asked about Bruce Pearl and the Indiana job. He said, “Indiana is a little bit disfunctional right now. And, honestly Tony, I wouldn’t work for that athletic director for any amount of money. I don’t think he’s competent.” This echoes John Feinstein’s sentiments when Sampson was hired.”

“John Junior Feinstein was quoted on Tony Kornheiser’s radio show recently that Indiana AD Greenspan ‘could always be counted on to do the wrong thing.’”

“I pretty much lost it, screaming at Tim, Dick and Dean, ‘What the hell is going on here? Who hired this guy? (Rick Greenspan, the worst Athletic Director hire in history) They’ve given up! How can Army players give up!'”

“Soon after Sutton was gracelessly fired on a Philadelphia street corner by the graceless Greenspan, Dick had a bout with depression brought on by 9-11. He kept having recurring dreams about firefights he’d taken part in during Vietnam and also worried constantly that his players who were overseas fighting were going to die. During the period that he was out of work players streamed by Dick’s house to see him. Most of West Point went to see him. Neither Todd Berry nor Rick Greenspan ever contacted him. In fact, their response was to bring in Berry’s equipment manager from Illinois State and push Dick out of his job. “

John Feinstein is one of the guardians of sport.  He holds people accountable to a standard beyond wins and losses, but also to the records teams post.  He is what all sportswriters should be honest, indignant in the face of idiocy, and a zealous advocate for honest competition.

My enduring memory of Greenspan is of watching him sit on the sidelines of basketball games with reading glasses perched upon his nose scribbling furiously on a legal pad.  Just what the hell was he writing?  “Get Eric Gordon the ball more”  “Jordan Crawford looks high.”  “Deandre Thomas is a glazed doughnut away from being as big as I am.”  Was he working on a shopping list?  Who watches a game like that regardless of his position?

I have nothing against Greenspan, other than the peculiar scribbling during the basketball games, but I love it when a writer has an ax to grind – well-earned or not.  Feinstein obviously believes with all his heart that Greenspan is one of the worst people in sports, and that makes his writing a lot of fun.

Kent Sterling Fired as Program Director of WIBC and 1070 The Fan

In the event that anyone googles “Kent Sterling Fired”, I want them to come to my site. Why not. Maximize page views. In fact, it’s unlikely people will google this, unless my wife is eager to read additional material on the temporary freeze of her husband’s career.

My head is still swimming a little bit, but I know enough that staying busy is a really good idea for me. Hence this blog exists.

One of the things I really enjoyed about my responsibilities with The Fan was writing a blog about whatever the hell I wanted. The results were immediate and accurate, in stark contrast to the methodology of radio listener measurement. If I wrote something that resonated, I got hits. If I wrote about something only I gave a damn about, nothing happened.

In December, The Fan’s website generated 258,000 page views, which was 58,000 more than we had ever done. In November, we hit 200,000 page views. My blog did 48,000 views last month. That showed improvement that gave me reason to believe that I could write well enough and agitate effectively enough to get some people to come to a site and read for two-minutes a day.

I like to write, so that is what I’ll do. Everyday. You have to work, and that’s what I’ll do. Instead of busting my ass to bring people to 1070TheFan.com, I’ll bring them here. Certainly not in the same number at first, but I’ll do the work, have the fun, and reap whatever reward there is to reap.

My overhead is minimal. $10 to godaddy.com for the URL. And some cash to Rob Nichols for helping me get all of this up and running. That’s really it. Rob is another Emmis expatriate, although he left of his own volition.

He is the first place former Emmis folk turn for help when they are shown the door. Rob should get a taste of the HR money Emmis allocates to generalists who help the dearly departed deal with their newly acquired free time.

I wish everyone at Emmis well. It’s a great place to work during a very tough economic time. This year has been especially hard for Emmis Indy. I remember sitting in my office in 2005 and thinking about how the place never changes. Change came with a vengeance, and finally swept me out too.

And it will sweep John Calipari from his perch of iniquity in Lexington.  May he land with grace and may Kentucky be allowed by the NCAA to keep their wins and banners.