Merry Christmas to my radio brothers and sisters. It’s been a tough year, as radio guru and blogger John Gorman outlines here.
Too many very talented radio folks got the shaft this year, making me personally even more thankful to be spending my Holiday employed by one of America’s few stable, successful, money making and yes, fun, radio stations.
When talking about firings, layoffs, and other employment tragedies with a friend recently, he remarked that I should share my own unusual radio employment history on the blog. I’m reluctant because I don’t want the talkradioreport.com to be too much about me and my life but since I am truley thankful for my life in this business, I’ll give a brief outline:
I have worked full time six days a week bona-fide full time real radio station work for the past 26 years, and I have NEVER been unemployed! Radio; 26 years; never unemployed. Wow, I’m blessed.
Only once while working as a talk show host at WAKR in Akron, Ohio the station flipped formats and I was let go, but I was give two months severance pay, and 3 days after being fired I was working as a fill in host at WKBN in Youngstown, and over the next few weeks I filled in at WHIO in Dayton, Ohio too! So for the duration of my “firing” I actually made double my usual pay! Then I landed my next full time gig, and so on and so on.
I don’t quite understand why my life on the radio turned out so stable while others in the industry are caught in a whirlwind of instability and short term employment. Again, I’m blessed…and prepared. I hope you are prepared for the worse too, I want you to survive and thrive should the worst happen at your radio station.
So that’s it. I’m weird.
Peace joy and Merry Christmas.
Tags: John Gorman, radio employment, radio salaries, radio unemployment, wakr, whio, wkbn
