Kirk and Callahan: Done
- Thread starter Vinho Tinto
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Looking again, I see that the guy we're talking about only has a part time TV job to go with his radio gig. What would you suggest as the proper terminology for such an individual?
Sports broadcasting, maybe?
First Fred Toucher, now John Dennis backs down from a fight with pitbull Kirk. Is Minihane some type of legit badass?
But that's only a 6 month gig, and not fully time hours at that. Right?
They only logical reason for Dennis not going to work on Friday is that he has always sucked so why stop now. That would have been great radio during a dead sports period, but he's above all that now.
Why be a prop in Minihane's latest look-at-me stunt? What's in it for Dennis?
I hope Kirk locks himself in the studio with Mike Adams until John Dennis agrees to a tag-team* fight in the parking lot. That would fit so well with all the other 1990s nostalgia inherent in this show, and station.
*Dennis can have a METCO gorilla as his partner because, well, you know.
There's nothing in it because he's always been checked out. He's openly counting down until he stops working. That they could parlay a genuine off air issue into something to talk about on air doesn't matter to him because he's a short timer. I loved Howard Stern's dressing down of their show because he perfectly described JD. Just happy to coast even when their ratings were in freefall.
We have radically different ideas about what is and is not entertaining radio. If you think John "I Don't Give Two Fucks" Dennis and Kirk "Fake Radio Tough Guy" Minihane mewling at each other about their working relationship would do anything for the vast majority of listeners, you're nuts.
Bullshit radio stunts are fucking lame. YMMV. I'd rather listen to Mikey Adams lock himself in the studio for three weeks than listen to three minutes of Dennis and Minihane having a snit.
The reason it's the 7th (or is it 9th?) best rated morning show is because they don't talk about sports enough. There are many mornings where I'd gladly tune out of Fred moaning about whatever Fred moans about to hear someone talk about the Sox - even if that someone was as generic and boring as Mut.
I really hope you're not a radio executive, but it would explain a ton if you are.
Bullshit radio stunts are fucking lame. YMMV. I'd rather listen to Mikey Adams lock himself in the studio for three weeks than listen to three minutes of Dennis and Minihane having a snit.
The reason it's the 7th (or is it 9th?) best rated morning show is because they don't talk about sports enough. There are many mornings where I'd gladly tune out of Fred moaning about whatever Fred moans about to hear someone talk about the Sox - even if that someone was as generic and boring as Mut.
I really hope you're not a radio executive, but it would explain a ton if you are.
You should drop it down a notch Toughie. If you want nothing but sports in the morning, Mike and Mike are broadcast coast to coast and are always easy to find on the dial. I don't listen to D&C or work in radio. I used to listen when they were the only sports morning show on during my work commute, but my schedule changed and I haven't missed listening regularly to the show.
One thing that always bugged me is that they were so lazy. Jon Meterparel never challenged any of their dumb opinions. He was happy to be a buffoon. Their show was in a ratings slide when Sports Hub started competing with them. I have no doubt if they stayed static the show would have been cancelled. Why pay a premium for two hosts on a show that is tanking? The ratings stopped dropping once Minihane entered the picture. If I had a lucrative contract extension due to a dickhead being added to my work life, I'd appreciate that and not pretend my prior naval gazing was the root to my success.
One thing that always bugged me is that they were so lazy. Jon Meterparel never challenged any of their dumb opinions. He was happy to be a buffoon. Their show was in a ratings slide when Sports Hub started competing with them. I have no doubt if they stayed static the show would have been cancelled. Why pay a premium for two hosts on a show that is tanking? The ratings stopped dropping once Minihane entered the picture. If I had a lucrative contract extension due to a dickhead being added to my work life, I'd appreciate that and not pretend my prior naval gazing was the root to my success.
Your reading comprehension sucks and your lame assertions that you don't listen after posting about how you thought two idiots fighting about their workplace tension would be "great radio" are transparently full of shit.
I'm glad you stopped sending me weird PMs and took it back to the board. Have a good weekend.
Looks like I was wrong about the stopping part.
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I had dinner with my Uncle last night who is retired and is a starter at Old Sandwich. He was telling stories of the celebrities he has met, who were super cool and who were blah. He said that far and away, the single most deplorable person that he has dealt with, and the singular person that EVERY person that works at the course despises is John Dennis. And that it isn't even close.
That is all.
That is all.
Listening to people, especially two people that I don't really "like"*, fight on the radio is boring. Even if it's not a ratings grab, it's pathetic and smells like one. "Ooooh Dino doesn't like Minihane?" Who gives a shit? John Dennis is a complete nonentity in the Boston sports media world in 2016. So is this going to be the Simmons playbook, become an iconoclast, shit all over the guys who went before you and then become part of the machine?
I've seen this story. A lot. It's boring. Watch wrestling, they do it a lot better.
* I don't know either of these guys, so maybe their okay in real life. But I don't like their on-air personas. They're assholes. And when two assholes fight, no wins.
I'd rather listen to Mazz pretend to know NBA than Minihane talk about anything. Minihane is everything that is bad about not just sports radio, but radio in general. i really don't care what his view's are he's just awful on the radio. Unless you're a RADIO TOUGH GUY or SPORTS DEBATE! type of person. I often turn on D&C during commercials in traffic and it's amazing how much of a shit show it is. Minihane actively is campaigning against Dennis, Callahan and Minihane are boys and they just yell at each other about personal stuff. Then you get Gar-Bear in and it's 10x worse. Never mind they're 50% politics again.
You can hate T&R and the rest of the 98.5 stable but at least with 98.5 their shows have a plan, a format and the hosts like each other generally. You can call them trolls or disagree but as JMOH said D&C is basically the WWE. It's awful awful radio. Still amazed that T&R is "shock jock" or "dumbass radio" when 90% of the time D&C is in the gutter. Unless they're talking high brow topics like Blue Lives Matter, Blacks should stop killing each other and making fun of Katelyn Jenner. Meanwhile Dino is a recovery alcoholic, Minihane I believe is a recovery alcoholic as well and Callahan is just himself. But they're ruthless on other's problems.
I honestly don't mind Ordway's Midday Show and i like Dale and Holley. D&C&Douche is the worst though, next to Planet Mikey and the entire weekend staff (not named Arcand)
You can hate T&R and the rest of the 98.5 stable but at least with 98.5 their shows have a plan, a format and the hosts like each other generally. You can call them trolls or disagree but as JMOH said D&C is basically the WWE. It's awful awful radio. Still amazed that T&R is "shock jock" or "dumbass radio" when 90% of the time D&C is in the gutter. Unless they're talking high brow topics like Blue Lives Matter, Blacks should stop killing each other and making fun of Katelyn Jenner. Meanwhile Dino is a recovery alcoholic, Minihane I believe is a recovery alcoholic as well and Callahan is just himself. But they're ruthless on other's problems.
I honestly don't mind Ordway's Midday Show and i like Dale and Holley. D&C&Douche is the worst though, next to Planet Mikey and the entire weekend staff (not named Arcand)
They got me to start listening again because of Deflate-gate.
I thought they did a very good job covering that rabbit hole of a topic.
Ive all but lost interest the last few months. Anything Tanguay related is awful. Even when he isn't there they talk about him.
I thought they did a very good job covering that rabbit hole of a topic.
Ive all but lost interest the last few months. Anything Tanguay related is awful. Even when he isn't there they talk about him.
Just replying to the most recent post on Minihane compensation...
I have been at times peripherally comnected with the broadcast industry, and have a little firsthand knowledge of what some contracts and payscales typically look like for local radio and TV personalities.
I have no idea what the 3rd chair at D&C is currently worth, but I would be shocked if it was more than $250k/year. I would not be shocked if it were less than $70k.
The market value a broadcast personality brings is theoretically tied to marginal increase in ad revenue. To over-simplify, a portion of WEEI's morning ad revenue comes from its spot on the dial, and from carry-over of last night's listeners. Another portion is due to format, sales&marketing, and other management-level decisions. Another portion is due to the headlines and news segments. Another portion is due to regular celebrity appearances such as the Brady interviews. Other portions are due to D&C, to their personalities and individual ability to attract listeners. Finally, there is some portion of ad revenue that is attributable to Minihane's presence, i.e., advertisers who would pull their slots if he left.
About to make some assumptions, any of which could be wrong, but all of which are approximately the right order of magnitude:
- Assume each 30-second ad spot nets WEEI $100, after breaks and discounts (I think this is extremely generous for local radio: very few real-world advertisers pay anything close to book rate, and most stations give away huge percentages of slots as promos to repeat customers)
- Assume each spot is fully-paid at that rate, and that there are 8 spots per break, 3 breaks per hour, times 4 hours per day, times 260 weekdays per year.
- So the whole entire show is worth (maybe) $100x8x3x4x260, or about $2.5MM in total revenue.
That's $2.5MM with which to cover real estate, broadcast licensing, 50,000 watts of constant broadcast amplification, marketing, management, equipment, interview payments, staffing, technical, and all the rest of it.
So how much of that $2.5MM in max hypothetical revenue is attributable directly to Minihane, and not to the slot, format, Sox carryover, listener inertia, other hosts, Brady interviews, news updates, etc?
Remember, the question is not how much do you like his contribution to the show, but how much advertizing revenue would they lose if he disappeared and/or was replaced with some replacement-level jobber like Mut, Meterperel, Wallach, Tanguay, etc...
You can't convince me that management believes he is worth more than a 10% loss in ad revenue. My guess is that show is probably worth closer to $1.5MM per year, and that Minihane's contract value is more like 5% of that, or about $75k per year.
I have no idea what they make. I can speak only to the general terms of broadcast contracts, and that only tangentially.
If their current contracts were executed when they were the #1 morning show and the only meaningful sports-radio in town, then they may have been "worth" a million per year for a minute, with an open question as to whether that included bonuses and incentives, not to mention whether the person who signed them really had a pulse on the market, or just picked the local yokels to make it big with a pats-sox-B's-C's dynasty happening concurrently.
The nature of a monopoly is to grossly inflate profits (what economists call "rent"). The nature of efficient competition is to reduce profits to zero, and to reduce prices to the cost of production.
It is possible that the personalities in a one-sports-radio-station town were worth a million dollars (although I doubt they were worth a million each). But my guess is that, in the new two-station reality, guys like Dennis, Callahan, Toucher, and Rich are worth somewhere in the ~$150-300k/year range, with things like sponsorships and ratings bonuses taking them to maybe $300-500k potential, with $1MM per year being a "best year of your life" type scenario.
It would not surprise me if D&C talked up their pay package, while T&R talked down theirs. Part of the schtick.
I mean, when Fred Toucher talks about flying Spirit Air or having his whole family stay in the same cheap hotel room, do you we think he is lying, or that he is deliberately making his weekends and vacations worse for the sake of a radio bit? Of course not. He's a guy who makes a comfortable living for a Newton homeowner with a stay-at-home mom. Which is considerably more than the median working income in America, but not some Great-Gatsby or Led Zeppelin lifestyle where he's got swimming pools filled with Dom Perignon.
T&R tend to downplay their vacations. When Rich went to a super-exclusive resort in the desert after his wife had cancer, it was a $1~2k/night kind of place: well outside the budget of most family vacations, but within aspirational "once in a lifetime" striking distance for median-income households. When Fred Toucher talks about his family vacations, the only difference between him and a $40k/year guy is that Fred's family seems to take about 3-4 times as many miserable vacations per year as the working schlub.
Broadcast contracts often include steep bonus curves for things like #1 ratings or specific listenership numbers. Each additional viewer/listener above baseline tends to be more valuable. T&R give some vivid clues about their lifestyle and income, which do not indicate seven-figure incomes, nor anything close to.
Assuming that the number seven morning show hosts make seven figures each requires not only a vastly inefficient market in sports talk radio, but also some crazy assumptions about the value-per-minute of sports talk radio in the Boston media market. If D&C each made a million dollars a year, there would be at least two more sports radio stations. I mean, national spots on ESPN are not worth that much.
@yep - tremendous posts, man.
Part of the reports on Dennis's refusal to report last week mentioned advertisers and his work as a voice-over/pitch-man for certain products/services as part of his deal with WEEI. He has been in heavy rotation advertising the upcoming PGA event at a CT golf course recently, and he's spoken on-air and in-ad about his "close friend Dennis Drinkwater".
I guess, but don't know, that advertisers select their pitchman and that Dennis is the most-sought after "personality" at the station (given he seems to do the most). For example, Callahan has the read for Shea Concrete (owned by his brother-in-law) and not much else. Even as Dennis has indisputably "quit" giving an effort over the past few years on the air, he has presumably continued to help pay his contract (whatever it is) with his advertising work.
I wonder if Phil Zachary "can't" fire him because of the advertising situation. I cannot wait for the next @Chad Finn column on this situation.
Part of the reports on Dennis's refusal to report last week mentioned advertisers and his work as a voice-over/pitch-man for certain products/services as part of his deal with WEEI. He has been in heavy rotation advertising the upcoming PGA event at a CT golf course recently, and he's spoken on-air and in-ad about his "close friend Dennis Drinkwater".
I guess, but don't know, that advertisers select their pitchman and that Dennis is the most-sought after "personality" at the station (given he seems to do the most). For example, Callahan has the read for Shea Concrete (owned by his brother-in-law) and not much else. Even as Dennis has indisputably "quit" giving an effort over the past few years on the air, he has presumably continued to help pay his contract (whatever it is) with his advertising work.
I wonder if Phil Zachary "can't" fire him because of the advertising situation. I cannot wait for the next @Chad Finn column on this situation.
Wondering if this is while he was a drunk and if JD is seemingly nicer after his recovery? That said, that's a shame.
Have you read his tweets since he's become sober?
He seems like a bigger prick than before. At least he could blame his assholetry on booze.
He seems like a bigger prick than before. At least he could blame his assholetry on booze.
Being out of town, I'll listen every now and then because they're able to post podcasts early in the day, but they are terrible sports-wise. Stale opinions and hostile to any kind of new statistical analysis. Strangely, they have contempt for sports talk and their listeners, but they don't spend a minute educating themselves or their audience on ways to bring fresh air to sports talk.
They were really good and worth listening to while covering Deflategate, but that glow is long gone. With the elections, they barely talk sports and Callahan is a font of Fox News. He complains about Black Lives Matter incessantly on how the movement isn't concerned about black on black killings and then when a caller informed him that their are plenty of other activist groups that deal with that issue and BLM focuses on a different set of problems, it was conveniently forgotten next time BLM came up. Listening will only make you dumber.
They were really good and worth listening to while covering Deflategate, but that glow is long gone. With the elections, they barely talk sports and Callahan is a font of Fox News. He complains about Black Lives Matter incessantly on how the movement isn't concerned about black on black killings and then when a caller informed him that their are plenty of other activist groups that deal with that issue and BLM focuses on a different set of problems, it was conveniently forgotten next time BLM came up. Listening will only make you dumber.
The only number I ever heard was the Big O was making a million a year, then took a payout to $500k then got fired. I'm assuming he's making about $70k now a year.
I turned on Ordway and the MF'ers today and they were talking about Norman doing some show without the Skins knowing. What drives me nuts about the midday show outside of sucking, is that they can go 5-10 minutes without using any pronouns
"Can you believe he did that?"
"I can't imagine that as a player he'd do that to the team"
"Did you realize when he did this that they'd be mad?"
"He went to the media without telling the coach"
"Did the organization know about this?"
"He's a corner! He's not a QB"
I'm not an expert in radio but they went at least 5 minutes using "him, this, that, they" without actually mentioning anyone or any team they were talking about. I actually just kept listening trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about and how long it'd take for them actually name what they were talking about. For the first 5 minutes it sounded like a Patriot went to the media and did a show without telling the team. I did miss the first 1-2 minutes, but i can't imagine it's good for ratings to go 5-10 minutes on a topic and not name what the f' you're talking about.
Yeah, it's a real problem for them. And I can't even blame Merloni or Fauria – they weren't hired to "run" the show; they were hired to chat(ter) about sports. And they do that, pretty well - except they fail to use Proper Names often enough, leading to some confusing conversations where one, or both of them will be using he and him over and over, while they keep talking about him and you've forgotten who the fuck they're talking about.
That's Ordway's fault. He's not there to talk sports. He's there to read the time and temperature, the call-in number, the sports flash, and to transition into and out of breaks. Ordway has to use the Proper Name when he speaks, just to keep the listener on the same page as the jocks. Ordway sucks at not being the ringmaster; he's just a cog in the machine now and he doesn't do basic cog things well enough.
if you listened for 5 minutes extra to figure out what they were talking about, then they did their job: kept you listening
Having someone listen for 5 additional minutes might be winning the battle, but annoying the listener to the point of no return is clearly losing the war.
So sounds like Ordway taking over for Dennis. Fauria joked about it yesterday, and now Minnihane ended show saying the powers that be suck, that "they will get the show they want, and it will be as boring as the afternoon show." Then said he's probably be on a "two week that they'll call vacation."
Anyone listen to Kirk's latest podcast with Tanguay? Sounds like Kirk wants him to get the job but it would be up to Comcast to let Gary do it if offered.
Unfortunately, you'd probably get a Steve Sommers in return. I mean look at this drek that litters the Talkers 100. Mike Salk is in the top 25!
Good lord. If WEEI was smart they'd try to bring in some fresh blood to sit third chair.
Instead they're trotting Tanguay back out?
Among others, Dino is very tight with Giant Glass and Jackson Lumber; two big WEEI advertisers. That's a big variable in how all of this plays out.
His tweet/pic the other day of Jackson Lumber delivering his wife's new cabinets is a classic passive aggressive JD move.
His tweet/pic the other day of Jackson Lumber delivering his wife's new cabinets is a classic passive aggressive JD move.
Minehane retweeted my NESN tweet last night and I so wanted to respond with a "Delete your account" or "Go fuck yourself"
I'd take The Schmooze in a heartbeat over some of those others.
LeBatard at #6: that show is absolutely listenable, both on radio and on TV.
Utterly insane. I'm not really a fan of the Big O, but he would be roughly 32389478238948902384 times better as the regular third chair over Tanguay (as would just about anyone.)
Does everyone hate Dickerson? He's actually been pretty good on TSH. I've never listened to him before on sports radio so SSS.
Feller really needs to stop calling him "Slick" though all the time.
Feller really needs to stop calling him "Slick" though all the time.
