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Ryan Wrecker is Embracing Being a Hired Gun…For Now

Wrecker has found the keys to being a successful fill-in host despite sometimes not living in the city of the show he’s hosting.

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Getting fired from any job is unpleasant. However, if you get canned from Walmart, 100,000 people aren’t going to hear about it that morning. But, when you’re shown the door in the radio business, you can bet word will get around—fast. 

Veteran talker Ryan Wrecker said that growing up in Detroit, he recalls one of his favorite programs, The Drew and Mike Show, learning of their imminent departure amid an air shift.

“I’ll never forget hearing that show,” Wrecker said, who happened to be monitoring the station at the time. “All the local TV stations were reporting that the station hired a new morning show while the show was on the air. Drew told his audience ‘The show is not a charity. If they don’t want me around, then they don’t have to be forced to pay me.”

Wrecker was a loyal listener of the show and said he recorded a lot of them. “The Drew and Mike Show was legendary in Detroit. I guess they were a Zoo format, but a little different.” 

Drew Lane still does a podcast today, and his numbers are fantastic.

“Drew is one of the greatest personalities I’ve ever listened to,” Wrecker said. “Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, but I was learning so much from him.” His co-host Mike passed away a few years ago. They had immense ratings success, Detroit’s most listened to program.

Wrecker said he was one of those kids who had the Fisher-Price cassette recorder and listened to WRIF in Detroit when he was ten. Detroit is his home. He attended Central Michigan, which Wrecker calls one of the best radio programs in the state. 

“It was one of those curricula that let you in when you were a freshman,” Wrecker said. “Michigan State also had a good program, but you really couldn’t get deep into practice and production until your junior year. I knew as a freshman specifically what I wanted to do, and that was broadcasting.”

There are many benefits to going into the program immediately as a freshman.

“You get your hands-on experience, going into everything raw. You can make your mistakes early on, and nobody notices. The best part is you don’t get punished for your mistakes.” 

“I was able to get my reps in; at the same time, I could learn in a more natural way. Not so much coaching but trial and error. You’re doing what you’ve heard, mimicking people you fell in love with on the air. I don’t think listeners really get how much work goes into the job. You might not sound like the person you were emulating, but there’s always more work to do.” 

After college, Wrecker joined a classic rock station in Lima, Ohio. WUZZ.

He started with an afternoon shift, then moved to mid-day and eventually mornings. Like most things in radio, a lot of his career began with a seismic shift in the landscape. 

“We had a syndicated show out of Grand Rapids, and the decision was made to go local,” Wrecker explained. “They had me program the station and move to mornings. It was a four-hour solo show. I’d do three talk segments in an hour and play lots of music. It became quite a ratings success.”

Tiny Lima, Ohio, has experienced more than its share of notoriety. 

The television show GLEE was fictionally based in Lima. The town kept sending the production team props from Lima to be used in the show.

“If a radio station sent them a sticker, it would end up on the bumper of a car in the show,” Wrecker said. “The town had a local contestant on So, You Think You Can Dance. I guess it’s a pretty popular small town. We did a charity bike run with Dee Snider of Twisted Sister in 2010 for the March of Dimes Bikers for Babies Ride. We actually changed the named Cridersville to Snidersville for a day. It was awesome. Dee came in for a few days, he actually co-hosted the morning show with me, and we played heavy metal and hair all morning.” 

I started out this piece referring to how people can get fired from doing something they love, and after a while, that can be rather devastating. In May, Wrecker was released from KMOX in St. Louis. When I asked him if he held any animosity toward the station that fired him, I was surprised when he said he didn’t. 

“I didn’t take it personally when I got fired from KMOX,” Wrecker said. “I had a feeling things were not going right. The station was moving in a different direction and is in a transformation. Knowing this, I tried to move to a better fitting job in the cluster, which ultimately didn’t happen.”   

I know it’s smart not to bite the hand that either feed or fed you, as you don’t want to look like ‘that guy.’ However, if you bad-mouth a station, there’s a 100 percent chance every other station will hear about it.

“KMOX has such a great history,” Wrecker continued. “They have always had a vision as to where the station was going.”

For now, Wrecker is filling in for station hosts where he can, a hired gun, so to speak, at least on the firing range he loves. Until the new job offer, it’s one day at a time.

“I’d love to be a permanent host, for sure,” Wrecker said. “I’m still trying to figure out what that gig looks like. The way the talk landscape is today, I may be waiting a long time. I’m at the mercy of someone leaving a job, maybe starting that big talk gig in the sky.”

I focused on Wrecker’s recent fill-in gig in Milwaukee only because that was his most recent job. I asked Wrecker how he keeps word out there that he’s available. 

“I got in touch with Ryan Maguire, the director of content at WTMJ in Milwaukee,” Wrecker said. This was earlier in the year after KMOX. 

“He said they didn’t have anything but to send my tape. I sent him a couple of talk segments I’d done.”

Maguire liked the tapes enough to move the discussion ‘upstairs’ to  Steve Wexler, WTMJ’s vice president, and market manager. They agreed to bring Wrecker in for some fill-in work in early August.

Maguire told Wrecker to ‘be himself.’ He knew what Wrecker sounded like, and knew he’d be a good fit for Milwaukee, as long as he did that. 

“That doesn’t mean I couldn’t fill in for someone I really wasn’t a good fit with. Either way, I’m not going to change too much about the show.”

As the stations will do, WTMJ paid for everything during Wrecker’s fill-in period. They put him up at the boutique hotel. He was issued an Uber account to get back and forth from the hotel to the studios. 

“I got meal gift cards from Mo’s Steakhouse,” he said. “You tend to eat well every night, but you’ve got to be careful you don’t eat too much and pay for it on the air the next morning.”

In Milwaukee in August, it is almost a requirement to hit the Wisconsin State Fair. Wrecker did. “You’ve got to have self-control when you go there. It’s a whole different type of food. Much of it is fried and on a stick.” 

I wondered how a fill-in host prepares for a show in a town they’re not overly familiar with. Or at least a place you haven’t visited in a while.

“You’ve got to realize you’re not an expert on the city you’re going to,” Wrecker explained. “You do have to conduct some research. Perhaps get a better idea of how to pronounce nearby city names. Bone up on news that has affected that area. With Milwaukee, I was able to talk about the freshly announced Republican National Convention coming to the city in 2024.” 

Being more selective with your topics is part of Wrecker’s thinking. He said the RNC story was more universal, but you must keep your eye on the local news. 

“I don’t want to go into a city and try to sound like I know everything. The audience can tell if you know what you’re talking about. If you don’t feel comfortable with handling a story, omit it. The audience may question why you’re not talking about certain things. I think that’s better than spouting off about something I don’t really know.”

Wrecker said listeners would be forgiving if you make a mistake, but they can correct you if they feel they should. 

“But they don’t hate you for the mistake,” Wrecker said. “I’ll try some calls if the lines are open. In my experience, that hasn’t been a problem. When you fully know a topic, it’s okay to open the phones. Even in Milwaukee, I knew I could talk about the FBI going into Mar-a-Lago. Of course, people were talking about it non–stop. Then there are topics where I can see both sides. I like to get calls that offer different viewpoints. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  But if you’re onto something, you’ve got to prime the pump like crazy.”

Wrecker has learned part of his success has included making himself somewhat of a target on the air.

“I can maneuver a topic, make myself the good guy or bad guy on a subject. An audience will have a certain feeling about you and your stance. They’ll try to find a way to feel something about you. I may come in and tell the audience what a cheapskate I am, just to get the juices flowing. It might be funny, it might be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a connection with them in some way.”

He said he’s always authentic, but Wrecker will certainly try to exaggerate things to make it funnier. 

“I think to myself what can I do to make a situation more entertaining? For example, I might tell a story where it’s not technically the exact way it happened, but I don’t let the audience know. I think they can tell when I’m making something up or doing a bit. They understand I’m trying to open things up.”

Constant moving in the business clearly strains emotions and family life.

“When you have a family and kids, making more money is always appealing, Wrecker said. “It’d be nice not to have to worry about money. I feel bad for my wife and the prospect of moving again. I have two kids, and I don’t like to think of them having to make new friends. It’s not appealing. You start to think there must be a more stable way to handle those things.” 

I asked Wrecker if there was a possibility to go into management and give up the microphone. 

“It’s not far-fetched to see me going that route. When I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I had a GM that wasn’t that good,” Wrecker said. “In a way, that spoiled me for future GMs. The hard part about programming is you become so obsessed with the station and the product. It becomes an around-the-clock job. Sometimes it’s not sustainable.” 

If he was programming his station, Wrecker said a PD must have intuition, a barometer of what works, and perhaps a small crystal ball.

“You can’t manufacture a successful team,” Wrecker said. “All you can do is bring people to the same table and hope for the best. You can’t force it. If it doesn’t happen organically, it probably isn’t going to happen.”

But how can you know? If only there were a clever way to determine if a team could work well together.

“I think they should hold auditions the way they handle speed-dating,” Wrecker said. “Let them meet and talk for 10 minutes at a pop, then move to the next table. See if they have any chemistry.”

I would be surprised if Fox weren’t working on that show at this moment. 

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BNM Writers

It’s Time for News Radio to Clean Its Clock

With radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already.

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News radio is an interruptive format that swiftly moves listeners from one informative topic to
the next but over the years we’ve gotten bogged down with an insufferable amount of clutter: too many commercials, endless promos and teases, and pointless production pieces. All of it
interrupts the flow and cuts into the interesting information you promise to provide.

Let’s clean the clutter, starting with the anachronistic basis for it all: your hourly format clock.

I’ve never understood why radio stations root themselves to the clock. The show starts at the top of the hour and you bury your boring features at the end. Why? Why should the top of the hour be considered the beginning of anything? It’s not how people live their lives. Radio isn’t like TV where shows start at specific times. Hell, TV isn’t that way anymore.

But with news radio, the top of the hour always begins with a self-aggrandizing, overly-produced introduction to a program I may have been listening to for half an hour already. This is especially true with morning shows, where simple logic would suggest that people trying to get to work by the top of an hour begin listening at various times before then.

Who even owns a clock radio anymore?

The 21st century is nonstop. There is no daily news cycle, no beginning or end to anything but
news radio programmers still think of time in divisions of hours, minutes, and seconds. We still draw empty circles depicting analog clocks to plot hourly radio formats.

On news and talk stations, the top of the hour almost always begins with the hourly network
report. It’s the biggest of big-time radio, steeped in tradition, professionally detached, global. In other words, it sounds nothing like your radio station in your unique market and it contains the least interesting content you have to offer.

We cling to the networks at the top of the hour for their prestige, because that’s just how we’ve always done it. Any national or international stories of real interest to Americans, the latest Trump-Biden court decisions, for example, will be well covered in talk shows and you’ll probably want to drop it into your local programming, too. How about a one-minute segment twice an hour, 60 seconds of just the big national and world stuff, in 10-15-second boil-in-the-bag headline segments? I’m just spitballing here. You’re the programmer.

In my heretical news radio mind, the networks do great journalism but they still sound flat,
stuffy, and old-fashioned. They don’t sound like anything else on my station. I’ll dump the top-of-the-hour five minutes and cherry-pick the network sound bites. We’ll deliver them ourselves.

While I’m carving up your format and trying to get you thinking outside the box, do you need
traffic reports every ten minutes? Or, at all? Heresy, I know. Catch your breath and read on.

When we had real-time airborne local reporters telling us what they were looking at it had a gee-whiz factor and the information mattered because it was live, local first-hand reporting. I could imagine the scene as it was being described. Now we have reporters in booths looking at
computer feeds and doing shotgun-style traffic reports for multiple cities. Words without
pictures.

I knew an L.A.-based traffic reporter who did reports for Salt Lake City though she had never even been there. These so-called “real-time traffic” reports are nearly always recorded and delayed for playback. Does this practice serve any purpose at all except to deceive listeners?

Not incidentally, traffic reports are a prime target for AI exploitation. How difficult can it be to
attach state and local transportation agency traffic data to AI voice-to-speech generators? For all I know this is already being done. You can argue it’s cost-efficient but as a longtime morning news host/anchor/personality, I despise it. One of the greatest assets to any morning news team is the interaction between news and traffic people.

When Amy Chodroff and I started working together at KLIF a dozen years ago we had that human contact with remarkable radio veteran Bill Jackson doing traffic from an adjoining studio. Bill wasn’t just a voice, he was a talented news radio veteran and a valued part of our show. He was so good the company, Cumulus, put two more stations on his plate, ripping a valued team member away from us.

As hosts, Amy and I had to assume Bill wasn’t able to listen to the show anymore because he
was too busy gathering and preparing his reports for the other stations. Then he was shipped out of the building to do his work from home which made his insights and witty exchanges
impossible. We couldn’t talk to each other off the air. We couldn’t exchange glances, smiles, and hand signals or bump into each other in the hall. Our show suffered and our audience became a bit more detached.

Bill Jackson, real name Dale Kuckelburg, was also significantly detached from his career.

But I digress. The biggest problem with traffic reports is the shotgun approach I mentioned,
telling everybody in our listening area driving to their unique destinations how traffic is snarled thirty miles away. Good god, we have apps in our cars that do a much better job in real time.

How about the weather? What the hell, we’re swinging the ax here. Let’s be realistic.

There isn’t a day in my life that I don’t wake up with a fair idea of what weather I should expect. I don’t need someone on the radio telling me to carry an umbrella. If it’s iffy the immediate and highly local details are now available at the touch of an app. When the weather becomes of critical and life-threatening importance it’s a major news story and that’s when local radio news shines, making it the center of our continuous attention, not just a regular feature at scheduled times.

It’s your radio station, do what you think is best. I’m only suggesting that you might want to
reevaluate all the things we’ve all taken for granted for far too long.

News radio has always been an interruptive format. We promise listeners “the news you need” in the time it takes them to drive to work. They understand that they’ll receive useful and
interesting content in exchange for frequent subject switching and sponsorships. The great news stations know how to capitalize on that agreement but too many have sold their souls to
commercial clutter that chokes a news team’s ability to serve the promised meal.

As if 22 minutes of inane and repetitive commercials per hour aren’t bad enough programmers, struggling to do their work in a hurricane of increasing spotloads, add to the clutter with recorded promos that simply beseech listeners to keep listening while offering nothing of substance. Meanwhile, the same programmers tell talent to tease, tease, tease the subjects they’ll talk about six, twelve, and twenty minutes from now.

I know the business reality. Radio — especially news radio — is struggling to meet the profit insistence of corporate boards and the overhead needs of staying afloat locally. But at some point, we must answer the question, who do we have to serve first, our clients or our audience?

Station managers and their corporate masters have to stop issuing profit mandates without
offering programmers the opportunity to do their jobs, to provide more valuable content while
limiting commercial minutes, sponsorship rhetoric, and eliminating distracting bells and
whistles.

Clean your clock. Stop filling empty circles with stuff that made sense 50 years ago but is merely clutter today.

The only way to think outside the box is to get rid of the box.

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BNM Writers

AM 680 WCBM Leapt Into Action As the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapsed

Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners.

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As Americans woke up to a cargo ship hitting Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Tuesday morning, the crew at AM 680 WCBM was already hard at work gathering the facts.

Just before 1:30 AM, a cargo ship lost power exiting the Baltimore harbor, striking a support beam that toppled the 47-year-old structure. In the wreckage, six people working on the bridge died, while drivers were rescued from the rubble in the chilly waters of the Curtis Bay.

The AM news/talk station — which celebrated its 100th anniversary Thursday — went wall-to-wall breaking coverage, something most outlets now avoid because of budget concerns. 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director Sean Casey told BNM in an email exchange how his crews handled the breaking news.


BNM: When did you guys hit the air with breaking news coverage?

Sean Casey: We first broke in with updates at 3:30 AM, approximately two hours after the bridge collapsed. Breaking news updates continued every half hour until 6 AM.”

BNM: How did you coordinate coverage in those moments?

SC: Full wall-to-wall coverage started at 6 AM and included full newscasts as well as interviews with state and local law enforcement agencies, eyewitness call-ins, and our national news partners. Our producer made call-outs and our news department shifted to full-blown local coverage.

BNM: How much experience did you have in putting together coverage of an event like that on the fly?

SC: Having been on the air during 9/11, I used the same formula that listeners want to know: Who, What, When, and Where? The why will come later.

BNM: How does your coverage show the importance of both local radio and AM radio?

SC: In times of breaking news events that impact our listeners, local AM radio stations are more in tune with the local listening audience. Our employees live and work here and know what’s important to our listeners. We also know the local players and officials and can get immediate reaction.

The talk component of our news/talk format offers listeners a chance to vent, share, and communicate with each other in good and bad times. This is why AM radio is still relevant. In some emergencies you can lose your cell service or have too weak of a signal, AM radio remains viable for in-car listening and at home with battery backup.

The AM 680 WCBM morning host and Program Director concluded his thoughts by noting the importance of a team effort, not only in coverage of breaking news events but also in operating a successful station and business as a whole.

“One of the biggest concerns we have is budgetary. More and more AM stations are abandoning the format because of its expense. Very few can afford a live and local news staff and show hosts,” Casey told Barrett News Media.

“Now more than ever, it’s vital that there be synergy between ownership, sales, and programming to maximize ratings and revenue so that we can continue to deliver vital information to listeners in our market.”

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News is the Only Thing Missing From Election Coverage

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected?

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The first thought I had when I heard NBC had hired Ronna McDaniel as a commentator for $300,000 a year was to wonder how many actual journalists they could have hired for that money. Then, I recalled that NBC had laid off dozens of news staffers just a few months ago. Then, I remembered that I had just recently written a column decrying news organizations throwing pretty much anybody on the air as a “pundit” and this….

This was worse. It’s one thing to grab some rando who happened to be a minor functionary for the Executive Branch. It’s another to hire someone whose job was to promote election denialism and pretend that her opinion is something valuable for viewers. And, yes, it’s just as ridiculous when news organizations hire former presidential press secretaries (that’s you, Jen Psaki and Sean Spicer), their very jobs were to spin everything in their bosses’ favor and now you’re going to pay them big salaries for, um, what? Because they “have a name” or you’re afraid someone else will snap them up? Why them?

The McDaniel deal lasted five days, one completely unilluminating interview, and one unexpected Chuck Todd spine-growing outburst, so it’ll all blow over soon enough. The problem is, though, the part about having fired several news staffers, and what it means in an election year on both the national and local levels. If you have the money to hire an alleged pundit – any alleged pundit – you have the money to hire reporters, and I don’t mean anchors or opinion show hosts.

Coverage of the election is, as we’ve discussed, still very horse-race-centric, and there’s been, of course, coverage of the various Trump court cases, but where is the coverage of exactly what the candidates plan to do if elected? Who’s probing Project 2025 and why isn’t it front-page, first-segment news? Who’s pressing the Biden administration on Gaza? Is anyone reporting on the candidates’ record on climate change?

Beyond prescription drug prices, is anyone digging into the broken healthcare system and demanding answers from the candidates about what they’ll do to fix it (and not letting Trump get away with “I’ll have a better plan, a beautiful plan” without a single specific detail, like they did in 2016)? Why didn’t anyone focus on, for example, the GOP candidate for governor of North Carolina and his incendiary past comments well before the primary?

Pundits are not going to do the legwork on the issues; they’ll just talk about swing states while John King and Steve Kornacki point at their touchscreen maps. We need reporting on the things that matter (and can affect that horse race, even if most people have made up their minds). It shouldn’t just be Pro Publica and scattered independent journalists doing the dirty work.

Honestly, I don’t want to hear the complaints about the quality of the candidates or how this is a rerun or any of that. (We’ll leave that to The New York Times.) We are a horribly underinformed electorate and we got the horse race we deserve. It might just be idealists like me who think that, just maybe, the news media can play a role in educating the public and bursting the bubbles and echo chambers. This country has survived and prospered for a few centuries with the press shining a light on injustice and corruption.

Now, when we need that most, they’re more concerned with what they think will bring them ratings and money (although someone will have to explain to me who thought having Ronna McDaniel as a paid commentator would draw a single viewer to NBC).

Here’s a thought: Don’t lay off reporters, especially in an election year.  Assign them to dig deep on issues that matter to the voters.

Let the pundits talk about that.

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