Lochlin Cross is the morning show host at Cruz 95.7 in Edmonton along with Grant Johnston and James White. He spent time in Winnipeg and Edmonton programming two heavy hitter rock stations in Power 97 and K-Rock 97.3. Which got switched back to K97 at some point but we were too lazy to look it up. He also did on air stints at other rock powerhouses like 100.3 The Bear in Edmonton and the Max in Prince George. And why doesn't he play Rush? And what's the deal with the Harmonica he whips out at co...
Jul 06, 2020•41 min•Ep. 209
Abe Hefter and I finally crossed paths in 2002. I recall hearing him on CJFM (FM96) in the 80's, and in 2002 we convened on Fort Street at that station when CHOM, Mix96 and CJAD merged itself into one entity. Abe began to transition into academia in 2003 when he received an opportunity to teach part time at Concordia University. There's something about teaching that brings out the energy in Abe. Very simply, you can hear it in the episode when we talk about inspiring the next generation of broad...
Jun 30, 2020•53 min•Ep. 208
Mistress Carrie spent 22 years on air and a handful more working in promotions at WAAF. She spent most of her life before that listening and loving the station. She figured one day it would all end with her "moving on" as many in the business do. But what she and many did not expect was for its parent company to sell the frequency to K-Love for ten million dollars; something that also happened to the Sound in Los Angeles. On February 20, WAAF ceased to exist, leaving Boston without the Active Ro...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 207
Heather Osgood is the founder of True Native Media and answered all of our questions about podcast advertising. I first met Heather back in 2017 and was fascinated with the vision she had for her company. While the idea of media buying was not new, being a media buyer for podcasts was. It is believed that podcast advertising will hit a billion dollars by 2021, and I took interest in the methods used to connect podcasters with podcast ads. A few weeks later, I shifted this podcast to a new podcas...
Jun 16, 2020•33 min•Ep. 206
Jillene Khan is the afternoon host on Magic 98 in Madison, Wisconsin. Her story to radio is rooted in Minneapolis. From growing up listening to great personalities like Tony Fly from KDWB and Tom Bernard on KQRS to a time when her family was apart of Dave Ryan's Christmas Wish back in the 90's. Jillene is an ideal guest to bring on at a time when many people in her hometown are struggling with death of George Floyd at the hands 4 Minneapolis police officers. In the episode, you'll hear about Jil...
Jun 08, 2020•46 min•Ep. 205
I met Carrie Doll in the late 90's at CFRN Television in Edmonton. She was a reporter and later a news anchor. She covered the events of 9/11 from the anchor desk in Calgary and learned how to report without a script. The youngest of ten children from Fairview, Alberta, Carrie was a natural when it came to communicating and public speaking. She had an incredible run on CFRN-TV in the anchor chair alongside Daryl McIntyre. We spoke about "the Chair" in the physical and metaphorical sense. With so...
Jun 01, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 204
I met Kim Blair back in 2013. He was looking to make a change in his radio career and was leaving Australia behind in search of a more a country that was going to offer more of a challenge for him. Consolidation has caught up with Australia and Canada as well. In the months after we had dinner together, he found his new home in Auckland, New Zealand, where the radio is as competitive as any radio market names New York or Los Angeles. Kim grew up in Perth, Australia and started his radio career t...
May 25, 2020•36 min•Ep. 203
Evo Terra is the host of Podcast Pontifications . A short form podcast providing insights into the future of podcasting. As luck would have it, news of the Joe Rogan signing to Spotify broke the day before recording of the episode. I met Evo in Orlando at Podcast Movement last August and he shared some of his tips and tricks with me regarding how to refine solo podcast presentation. There were also some things I didn't know about Evo, including that his son was a hockey goalie. That's only surpr...
May 20, 2020•39 min•Ep. 202
Jason Barrett returns to answer my sports related questions. Normally I don't bring Jason on until this first week of September when we look forward to the new NFL football season and talk about Sports broadcasting. However, these are not normal times for Sports radio and now is a good time to unpack what's going to happen. Jason's company, Barrett Sports Media has unveiled two initiatives to help us through, including a podcast called " Managing the Crisi s" and his Membership Directory which c...
May 11, 2020•29 min•Ep. 201
Dana Marshall loves radio, loves the music of Prince, and has found the perfect audio life balance with both. He does mornings and is program director at 103.3 WKFR in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is currently seeking a co-host for that morning show, so if you think that is you - apply within. Much like Melz On the Mic , who was a guest on the podcast in June 2018, Dana knows local, social and vital. Our meeting at the Conclave in 2018 led to a discussion about podcast which then led to the creation ...
May 06, 2020•46 min•Ep. 200
This week, Sheryl Worsley from KSL Radio in Salt Lake City. While being a news director for around 20 years, she shifted in 2015 to audio and audience development in the Bonneville cluster's digital space. Sheryl and her team saw the value in podcast when a news series they were putting together was better suited for podcast than radio. Thus the hit podcast COLD— a true crime series covering the case of Susan Powell, was picked up by podcast powerhouse Wondery and soared up the podcast chart ran...
Apr 29, 2020•34 min•Ep. 199
This episode is a little different. Over the weekend, a 22 people lost their lives in a mass murder spree that covered 100 kilometers in Nova Scotia. Monday morning, Q104 in Halifax and a number of Stingray radio stations came together to pivot programming towards the hearts of their listeners. To understand what it takes to make those changes, you need to understand the people affected. Nova Scotia has had more than its fair share of disasters in the last century, and radio has been there to we...
Apr 22, 2020•37 min•Ep. 198
There I was flipping through Facebook and seeing Steve Reynolds comment about hearing something he felt was out of place on the radio in the era of COVID-19. This is not to be confused with the non-COVID comments about Sirius Yacht Rock playing a lot of crappy B-Sides on their channel. (He's right. No one wants to hear B-Grade Little River Band song. Ever. With so many radio people and radio shows in flux Steve is good person to bring on right now to talk about our new surroundings. We also got ...
Apr 14, 2020•38 min•Ep. 197
It's no wonder that Kipper McGee wound up in radio have grown up in between two great radio markets in Milwaukee and Chicago. He's a broadcast consultant, author and host of the Brandwidth on Demand podcast alongside David Martin. The show has been in production for as long as this show has, and it has an A list of broadcasters appearing for what turns out to be, "not your average quarter hour". In this episode, Kipper and I spoke about his years in places I have never been to. Des Moines, San D...
Apr 07, 2020•27 min•Ep. 196
Sunni Puric works weekdays apart of the Joe Clair Morning Show on Rhythmic/CHR radio WGPC 95.5FM. Her journey to radio is unlike any other. This marks the first time I have asked what it was like spending your teenage years in a refugee camp in Bosnia. While the world saw a picturesque Yugoslavia during the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, it was 12 years later that th country fell into civil war. Sunni was open about sharing her times in the camp, and about her family's pathway to America. In thi...
Mar 31, 2020•26 min•Ep. 195
Susie Erjavec Parker knows lots about social media, blogs, communication strategy and working from home. At one point she had 3 children under 5 years old in the house while juggling clients, and appointments and everything else that comes with running a business. With so many people working from home for the first time in radio, I though it would be a good time to bring Susie on to talk about working from home now - and planning a marketing strategy as it pertains to your recovery strategy. Her...
Mar 24, 2020•27 min•Ep. 194
It's been nearly 20 years since radio has had to shift into crisis mode. The Corona Virus or COVID-19 has arrived and broadcasters find themselves having to write rules, redo formats, get more information sourced, while dealing with staffs that have children coming home and everyone faced with the challenge of working from home. In this episode, I spoke about the importance of working from home, and get down to the nitty gritty of what it means to be a broadcaster during a pandemic. Here’s the a...
Mar 19, 2020•13 min•Ep. 193
Josie Dye is the morning host at Indie 88 in Toronto. The longtime 102.1 The Edge personality who also did hosting duties for Cosmo TV, and W Network took a chance on jumping to Indie 88. It has paid off well. You can hear it in Josie's voice. She is having more fun than ever at a station that has all the sounds and feels of any successful alternative radio station. In this episode, we spoke about her early days studying at Ryerson while working at Mix 99.9, which was at its peak with an 8 share...
Mar 10, 2020•48 min•Ep. 192
Dave Jackson is the Owner/Headmaster at the School of Podcasting and also a support specialist at Libsyn. He was there back in the early days of podcast and has helped thousands launch their podcasts with his talks, online tips and podcasts. Dave is a Hall of Famer and a regular contributor to Podcast Business Journal . In this episode we discussed some of the many stages of podcasting's evolution including its early days, the advent of iTunes, Serial, radio's entry into the podcast space, the g...
Mar 03, 2020•43 min•Ep. 191
Radio is a lot like the mob: "Just when you thought I was out, they pull me back in." Okay, that's an exaggeration but for Carlos Benevides, leaving 91.5 The Beat in Kitchener and transitioning to Conestaga College to teach radio just made sense. So does his new lunchtime show for the Jack radio stations "Jack Up the 80's" . which can be heard in Halifax, Calgary, Smith Falls, London and Victoria. As we recorded this episode, Carlos had been a dad for one week and was settling in to life post mo...
Feb 25, 2020•49 min•Ep. 190
Zenga McCurdy called me back in May of 2018 and asked for some feedback on his morning radio show. Since then I have made a point of listening to the show every once and a while to hear the progress. I meant to grab a beer with him in Toronto last year but we only had enough time for a "Hi, How are you?" and then we were off to whatever we were off to. I am very pleased that I got to have this conversation with him about his Kitchener/Waterloo upbringing where he confesses he wasn't always on th...
Feb 18, 2020•28 min•Ep. 189
Jon Gay has a radio story that is probably not unlike yours if you have worked on the programming side of radio. It involves a little bit of the WKRP theme song, "Town to Town. Up and Down the dial...". Jon's radio career started with an internship at Kiss 108 in his hometown Boston. His stint at Syracuse University got him even closer to his dream on being a top radio personality. His tenure in Vermont, Detroit, and New Orleans all ended with radio cutbacks - which later became known as "restru...
Feb 11, 2020•39 min•Ep. 188
David Phillips from NLogic is an admitted nerd when it comes to data. He really loves it. Something he is very good at is deciphering how data should be applied to your brand, your radio stations, your strategies, and your ad sales. However, one thing you should definitely not have is a data strategy . He speaks about numbers having blind spots and becoming too attached to the data we love and not challenging it enough. A couple of times a year, I'll get together with David and we will catch up ...
Feb 06, 2020•18 min•Ep. 187
We invited Seth Resler back to the podcast after he penned a blog called, "Is There Life After Radio?" Many of the episodes in this series feature a moment when someone was fired and tell the story of their radio afterlife. The podcast itself was born out of my firing in 2014, the subsequent quest for work in 2015, before landing on podcast in early 2016 and never looking back. Today I have a voiceover business and a podcast company that helps people, businesses and brands build through podcast....
Jan 28, 2020•31 min•Ep. 186
Lori Lewis is back on our show for the third time? Why so often? Because the world of social media moves that quickly. The last time we had Lori on the show, Instagram Stories was just starting to become a thing and Tik Tok wasn't even a thing. In fact - you might have still been involved with your SnapChat account and over-posting by today's standards on Facebook. Lori is now out on her own working with radio groups and teaching them all about the ways to engage their listeners on social media,...
Jan 22, 2020•30 min•Ep. 185
There's a reason why Christian Hall thinks differently. He has to. He is the National Program Director for Harvard Broadcasting which is a radio company first. He oversees multiple alternative stations; a format which doesn't even exist a number of top ten markets in Canada, and he believes that talent development is about airchecks, and feedback. (We went into large detail in our first episode with him which you can find here) This time around we spoke about the rise of alternative radio in bot...
Jan 14, 2020•37 min•Ep. 184
It's been 2 years since we have caught up with Perry Michael Simon from AllAccess.com on this podcast. He has a pretty good idea of what is going on in the radio and podcast business given that he writes about it weekly , provides talk topics on a twitter account, and attends a dozen radio and radio-related conferences annually. If you get a chance, follow his twitter account just for the joy in hearing about all the goings on at these conferences. He is also the host on the Evening Bulletin pod...
Jan 07, 2020•36 min•Ep. 183
Happy New Year from Matt at the Soundoff Podcast. If you want to have a chat with Matt - just click here and set up a time. Top 5 Podcast Episodes this year: Tom Leykis Terry O'Reilly Corey Dylan Dean Blundell Lisa Keys Bring on 2020! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Dec 31, 2019•4 min
Terry Dimonte loves Christmas, and I love doing a podcast with him to discuss... whatever. Sometimes we talk about radio, and other times it's just life. This year it was a lot of the latter. So many of the things we spoke about can be found on the blog page which is located at Sound Off Podcast dot com. We talked about Terry's move to Griffintown in Montreal which was a big mistake. This led to conversations about the poor designs of all cities including Montreal and Winnipeg. And we shifted ou...
Dec 24, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 182
I'm reminded every time I travel through Tampa on my way to Sarasota, how busy the radio market is. Equally busy is the number of sports teams that compete for media attention. By my count there are the NFL Buccaneers, NHL Lightning, Major League Baseball Rays, and plenty of college football needing attention from the Gators, Seminoles and University of South Florida Bulls. That's a lot to program and keep track of. John Mamola is the program director of Sports Radio 95.7 WDAE in the Tampa-St. P...
Dec 18, 2019•32 min•Ep. 181
