In the wake of the Inauguration Day massacre at WDFN I thought I would give you a few more nuggets of information regarding whats left of the radio station and why this happened.
The reason for the death of Detroit's original sports station
WDFN has been mismanaged for a really long time. I'm not here to blow my own horn, but Peter Connolly the GM who presided over WDFN in it hey-day really understood the product and what needed to be done to compete and win the sports battle. He left me alone and let me do what needed to be done to get the station noticed and to get ratings. I haven't had that luxury with any of the stations I worked with after leaving WDFN, it was one clueless GM after another. That is part of the reason I left the business, Programmers weren't Programming any longer.
The demise of WDFN started a when current Market Manager Til Leveque took over, she didn't care nor understand AM "personality radio" and DFN was pretty much left in the hands of Dom Theodore who was a music PD with zero clue how to operate or program a spoken word format, he faked i well and DFN suffered. Rona Danziger is the Program Director and she was too weak and powerless to advance WDFN's agenda, instead choosing to preserve her own job to the peril of the rest of the radio station. Sometimes you have to stand up and fight and she didn't, not once. In many ways you could say her era as PD makes her the George W. Bush of WDFN history, she rode it right into the ground and did NOTHING to stop it.
I'll give you an example of just how myopic Til Leveque and Dom Theodore (now with CBS) are, when they began the destruction of WDFN a year ago with the firing of Jamie and Brady, I wrote and article here about how and why it happened. It didn't take the pathetically thin skinned Leveque and Theodore long to call my bosses in Austin to complain about the blog entry, consequently I was called into the Principal's office and made to delete the post and apologize to Leveque. I wish I'd told the scumbag where to stuff her apology but I was attempting to be a good corporate employee and I said "sorry" and moved on. It still shocks me to this day that Leveque and her henchmen were worried about a BLOG in Austin, Texas while her radio stations were crumbling around her, it was the most pathetic move ever and I hope to someday tell her to her face what a limited human being she is, the woman was actually trying to get me fired from 2,000 miles away because I was critical of her management. It also reminded me how powerful blogging has become in just a few short years.
Leveque was also responsible for the hiring of Elliott Lerner, a former WXYT sales hack who went to DFN and promptly starting writing fake orders and reporting false billing while the stations revenue was drying up. He did all of this under Til Leveque's nose, it was a scandal that DFN wouldn't never recover from, the station was basically dead last December because the notoriously absent Leveque wasn't minding the store.
The Big Picture
In the big picture Clear Channel is dead because the company that took it private doesn't want to own it. Bain Capital made an offer for Clear Channel when the stock was up but tried to kill the deal when the economy started to sour, they were forced to complete the deal and are now stuck with a dead radio company, consequently they decided to strip is bare and let it rot in the sun, they are cutting their losses because they are pissed that they own a terrible company with declining revenue.
A brighter tomorrow
There are brighter days on the horizon for radio. When the Clear Channel breakup is complete there is a chance that the consolidation of the 1990's will be reversed and local ownership will return to radio. We would then have healthy competition among radio stations with the best, smartest and hardest working station's reaping the rewards. Right now with only three or four owners in the largest markets, there is no competition and no incentive to win.
If you have any question, thoughts or comments on WDFN, please leave them in the comment field and I will answer them.
