It’s often said that success has many fathers. The problem is that it can make it a challenge to determine who was really responsible for a great innovation. That’s what makes this week’s RMI profile so rare; a major radio innovation that is clearly credited to one person. Emmis Communications Founder and CEO Jeff Smulyan is responsible for the first ever all-sports radio station, WFAN in New York. (The idea for the name actually came from the wife of its first PD, John Chanin.)
Today, there are hundreds of 24-hour sports radio stations throughout the U.S. and the world. But back on July 1, 1987, when WFAN signed on, the station’s success was very much in doubt, and the skeptics included many members of the Emmis team.
In this week’s edition of “Radio’s Most Innovative,” Jeff was kind enough to share the story of how the station came about, how it evolved, and why WFAN started a radio revolution with the launch of the first all-sports format.
JM: This was really your idea, wasn’t it?
JS: This one was. It’s funny, because if you look at the 35 years we’ve been doing stuff, this is the only time where I really said “I want to do this.” And it was also the only time where everybody said, “You’re out of your mind!”
JM: So how did it come about?
JS: I wanted to do it and Steve Crane, one of my original lifelong best friends who joined Emmis at the very beginning, wanted to do it. But we had a manager’s meeting and there was no mandate to do it. So Steve asked me what we were going to do, and I said, “It’s dead because you can never lead where no one will follow.”
And the next day Doyle Rose and Rick Cummings came in and said, “We owe you one and we know you love this idea. We want to go on record saying it’s stupid, but we’re doing it for you.” And that was really the genesis.
JM: What was your reasoning behind wanting to do an all-sports format?
JS: We were a company focused on FM radio stations that inherited an AM when we purchased the Doubleday stations in 1986. At the time, it was the home of The Mets, and it was the number one Country station in America in terms of cume. But that meant it was 18th in New York and we never thought it was going to go any further.
We wanted to be the place where people went for sports. In those days everybody went to WINS and WCBS for sports at 15 and 45. And after like nine or ten months, the research showed they still had like an 80% preference. But about a year after that, it was like 90% The Fan. So, it became the place New Yorkers went for sports.
JM: That brings up an interesting point. A lot of people don’t remember this was not an instant out of the box success.
JS: Oh, gosh. No. You’ve got to have staying power. We were able to endure a couple years of losses. I still remember when we bought the NBC stations in 1988 and all of our bankers said, “How long are you going to keep this up?” And we said, “Well, you know, we’ll see.”
I also still remember the comments. Like John Dilly, one of my oldest, closest friends, who said, “I used to think you were a really smart guy, and then I watched you do sports in New York and I realized I was just wrong.” Or in the office at the end of the day somebody would say, “Gosh, it’s almost 5 o’clock. That means we lost another $21,325 today.” We are a classic group of needlers; it’s part of our culture. We tease each other and that’s what’s makes it work.
JM: So one of the articles I read talked about bringing Jack Trout in early on. And one of the big takeaways from that meeting was to not think about WFAN as a sports news service, but to think about sports more as entertainment. Was that a turning point in terms of philosophy and content?
JS: Yeah, I think it was. I mean it clearly evolved. Early on it was like a big network news operation; big voices, big names. And it was clear pretty quickly that wasn’t working. And we always sort of knew it had to be entertainment, so I think we drifted more in that direction as time went by.
JM: And was that part of the move to Don Imus in mornings?
JS: The ironic thing is the first morning man we targeted was Don Imus because we thought he had a 25-to-54 year-old male audience, and he was knowledgeable about everything. He wasn’t a sports maven but we thought we had to do something different in the mornings. Of course he was at WNBC at the time, we were on 1050; he had a contract and we couldn’t get him. So we put Greg Gumbel on. And Greg is one of the most talented sportscasters in America, but there are more people on this call than listened to Greg the first six months on the Fan.
JM: Today a lot of sports radio PDs and consultants say that you’ve got to have two-man shows all the time. But that wasn’t a given until Mike and the Mad Dog, right? Can you talk a little bit about how that show developed?
JS: A two-man show wasn’t a novel idea. We always talked about that instead of relying on callers or someone doing a monologue, it would be easier to have someone to bounce things off of. I think intellectually we always knew that.
But from the day we started the station, Francesa was dying to work there. He was in research at CBS and he said, “I want to do this,” and the guy was really persistent. He was knocking on the door all the time. So finally they gave him a weekend talk show, and he was just a genius about sports.
I think Imus found Russo. I can still remember him saying, “You’ve got to listen to this guy. He’s like Donald Duck on steroids.” I don’t know who suggested putting them together — I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, I think I would remember that — but we paired them up in the afternoons and it just clicked. They were perfect counterparts for each other.
JM: Over time, the format evolved from an information and entertainment source to really becoming a kind of town hall meeting and an influencer. Did you feel that growing?
JS: Oh yeah. In some ways it changed the dynamic of sports teams. It used to be that when you got ripped, it was in a column in the morning paper. With sports radio, you got ripped 24 hours a day in your home market. Everything you do is analyzed all day.
And we were close to the Mets, but when something is said on the air, well, my next call is going to be from the anchor tenant. Even today, Emmis has a sports station in Indianapolis and I see it with the Pacers, the Colts and the 500 in Indianapolis. I’m very close to the owners of the teams and I can tell you they bristle. But that’s the nature of the beast.
In fact, my favorite story is from when I was in baseball (Smulyan and Emmis owned the Seattle Mariners for three years starting in 1989) and there was a sports radio station in Seattle. There was one afternoon host who absolutely loved me and the other guy just ripped me. Another owner was driving around Seattle one day and heard me get ripped. He said to me, “I’m not a religious man, but I knew there was a God when I heard the guy who invented this miserable format is now a major league baseball owner and he’s getting ripped all day long like the rest of us.”
JM: You and Emmis are no strangers to innovation. There’s Power 106 which was the first Hip Hop station, the FAN, NextRadio, the Broadcast Traffic Consortium. You guys have thrown a lot of long bombs. What’s your best advice to people out there in radio who have an idea and wants to make it happen?
JS: Look, when you’re right, you’re a genius; when you’re wrong, you’re an idiot. It’s a very thin line and if you’re taking chances, you’re gonna fall on the idiot side sometimes. Just appreciate that and keep moving forward.
It’s also about having the staying power to get there. I look at USA Today. That was 20 years of Al Neuharth’s passion and it had staying power year after year. And then I look at the all-news FM stations that Randy Michaels did. You have to know you’re going to need a long time to build and it’s hard to have that patience.
But the world is never changed by doing the same things everybody else does. It just never is. It’s changed by doing what is different. I think if you want to be an entrepreneur, you’ve got to look differently than everybody else. That’s the most important thing I can say.
JM: Sure, you can’t be an innovator unless you’re willing to take some serious risks, but I think the other piece of it is that people do tend to forget your stupid ideas as long as you’ve got enough good ones.
JS: Sure. And that’s why we have wives and children who will always remind us of the bad ones.
Thanks to Mike Stern for his work on this week’s RMI.
INNOVATION QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“You’ll always miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
Wayne Gretzky
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Great interview. Kudos to Mr. Smulyan from a proud WFAN employee since 1989.
Thanks for checking in, Paul.
As someone who competed in New York around the time of the launch of WFAN, I always admired the commitment Emmis displayed in creating this format out of “thin air”, and the impact it had on many others in the marketplace. It also generated more new listership to radio by stealing from the newspapers. By the way, as a future choice for “radio’s most innovative” should find the first programmer to go all CHRISTMAS music for the holidays. Do you know?
Thanks, Steve. Your perspective on WFAN is excellent because you remember how Emmis stuck it out. It makes you wonder whether there would be this much patience in today’s more hyper-paced environment.
As for the Christmas music “innovation,” it was one of our earlier pieces. Here’s the link:
https://wp.me/p1JoKy-42Y
Great interview. I love picking brains behind guys in the sports radio industry. This was awesome for a sports radio nerd like myself. Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words, Zach.
Jason, thanks for the kind mentions of our Radio’s Most Innovative feature on Jefff Smulyan as part of your post, “Is Sports Radio Ready For The Future?” It is an excellent piece about the changing needs of sports fans as they voraciously consume content from many different sources – not just radio. This is an area that we’ve been talking about since the expansion of Techsurvey that now covers more than 10 formats, including Sports Radio. You’ve made some smart observations here, and I recommend JacoBLOG readers click on Jason’s post. Thanks again and good luck to you as you move forward to the next phase of your career.