‘Jeff and Jer’ continue to search for home in faltering radio industry

The traditional media world has been turned on its head by the Great Recession and radio is no exception. It’s a simple equation really. Fewer advertisers equals less revenue, which equals smaller budgets, which equals cutbacks, resource reductions and eventual layoffs.

In August, the news that longtime morning show duo Jeff and Jer (Jeff Detrow and Jerry Cesak) were leaving Star 94.1 after a contract dispute,  left a tangible example of just how deep the struggles of the industry are.

“A struggling industry or a dead industry?”

That’s the question that was posed to me during a recent interview with Chris Cantore, former morning DJ for 91X, who a little more than 18 months ago, was left with the same fate as his colleagues.

“My contract had expired and wasn’t renewed,” said Cantore. “It’s no different than the Jeff and Jer situation, but it’s kind of a microcosm of what’s going on in the entire radio industry. Jeff and Jer are in a whole different league in certain respects as far as how much their operation cost the company versus mine. But it doesn’t have anything to do with ratings and numbers anymore. That’s the old game when the industry was based on talent. Now, it’s based on the bottom line.”

The hosts of the popular “Jeff and Jer Showgram,” Detrow and Cesak said that contract negotiations with Star stalled when the station’s parent company, Clear Channel Communications, decided not to renew the contracts of five of the show’s regular on-air contributors: “Little Tommy” Sablan, Randy Hoag, Laura Cain, Delana Bennett and Emily Griffiths.

See related: Longtime Jeff and Jer team leave Star radio station

“They were a great team. We negotiated and I thought we made a great offer, but weren’t able to reach an agreement,” said Debbie Wagner, market manager for Clear Channel San Diego.

Cantore said that despite his show’s popularity, 91X simply found itself in a financial ‘Catch 22.’ Re-sign a popular DJ, who was reaching every performance-based bonus, engaging with the community and bringing in listeners, or try and save what little money that the floundering ad revenue model was generating by cutting one of its biggest sources of overhead.

“[Those decisions are] not easy, but we also have to look at what makes financial sense for us also,” said Wagner. “You have to look at what you are paying for contracts against the revenue and determining the value and the ratings, all those things that help you position in the market.”

John Lynch is the president and CEO of Broadcast Company of the Americas, which operates two local AM stations (XX 1090 Sports Radio and San Diego 1700 AM) and one local FM station (105.7 The Walrus). He said that while all stations are feeling the pinch of the economy, there is a difference between independent stations and the larger companies.

“Clear Channel has specifically, adopted a strategy of limiting the amount of local programming and replacing it with national or syndicated programming,” Lynch wrote via e-mail. “We believe radio is all about being local and will continue to be a local medium.”

“The money just isn’t coming into these stations anymore like back in the day when DJs like Jeff and Jer were signing their big, crazy contracts,” Cantore added. “There was a time (at 91X) when we wouldn’t take certain advertisers. But you tune in now and you hear ads for strip clubs, marijuana collectives. That right there shows you how hurt the industry is. [Stations] are taking money wherever they can get it.”

Chris Carmichael, owner and editor of SDRadio.net, an informative site that keeps tabs on the industry throughout Southern California, said it’s not that stations don’t want to renew their high-priced talent, it’s more that if they’re not bringing in the money, they can’t payout.

“It just goes back to basic economics of scale,” said Carmichael. “If you have 60 percent less ad revenue, you have to pay for the staff and the transmitter and the music fees and the leasing space. Those things are typically a set price, so the only place they can really make cuts is in the on-air talent.”

Jeff Detrow (left) and Jerry Cesak are still without a radio home after leaving Star 94.1 FM in late August. (Courtesy photo)

Wagner didn’t give projections that dire, but she did say that the radio industry as a whole is showing diminished revenue of about 20 percent since the first of the year. She also said that San Diego is “somewhere in the middle of the pack” as far as markets go, and that while some markets are doing much better, some are also much worse.

But Cantore also said that the problem started way before the downturn in the economy, and it wasn’t solely about dollars and cents. He said that one of the things he loved was having the platform to interact with San Diego, an aspect that has seemed to diminish.

“I can’t even listen to the radio now, just because how disconnected the medium is,” Cantore said. “It’s about content, content, content. [Radio stations] love to blame the Internet [for the decrease in popularity], but all the Internet did was prove to people that they can get better content than what they were being force fed for…well, ever since the beginning of the medium, really.”

He said that the Internet now just simply does it better.

“Radio stations didn’t listen to their consumers and now the consumers are out there with the birth of new and social media. People are more interested in what a blogger has to say about music, pop culture, and entertainment, than what the radio has to say,” Cantore said.

And he should know.

When Cantore’s contract wasn’t renewed in December 2007, he couldn’t find a job in San Diego, saying, “they didn’t exist, and they still don’t.” His attempts to land radio jobs in Seattle, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, didn’t pan out. That’s when he said he knew that it wasn’t just a San Diego problem, but an industry-wide epidemic.

He started his own firm, Cantore Creative,  where he manages social media networks in town, providing content, running events, doing media consulting, shooting video, blogging, and helping manage platforms and social media databases.

Despite this shift in the content structure, shows like Jeff and Jer’s still have captive audiences that they entertain every morning. Their own fans have been pining for any word of where the duo (and their “on-air family”) might eventually land. Earlier this month, one of the show’s producers, “Little Tommy” Sablan, sent out an e-mail newsletter to fans dated Sept. 19, which stated:

“I’m pretty confident the next time or two you get an e-mail from us, it will be to announce our new radio home.  We’re not keeping anything from you at all.  We just aren’t 100% okay to announce anything at this moment.  Please know we miss you and are really wanting to get back on the air and all of us are working towards that. Jerry said the other day in a message to you that it will be next month, which isn’t that much longer.”

However, those plans may have fallen through. A quick sweep of the Showgram’s Web site, showed that that specific post has been removed. All posts indicate that they are still waiting for a new home.

Lynch, however, thinks that the wait may be longer than the duo may have anticipated.

“The market has changed,” Lynch wrote via e-mail.  “The Jeff and Jer’s will not receive huge contracts in the immediate future and possibly ever. You will see more performance-based contracts and ensemble shows cutting back to the core players. I doubt that Jeff and Jer will be hired unless they lower their demands significantly.”

Sablan declined to comment about the show’s future. In the meantime, the unemployed radio personalities are now sitting at a card table in Cesak’s garage, doing their show on the internet.

“Sitting around a table with a microphone and having fun is what we’ve always done best,” said Cesak. “Getting back to our roots in the garage while we find a new station to call home just makes sense.”

The first episode of “Live From Jerry’s Garage” is available on their newly-redesigned Web site now. Another episode is scheduled to stream live Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 6:30 p.m.

“Once we get back on air full time, we’re going to continue to have fun with our online connections with our fans” said Cesak.

According to the August 2009 Arbitron PPM (Portable People Meter) rankings, which are used to calculate a radio station’s market share and ratings, Star 94.1 finished sixth.

“With the new rating methodology, PPM, the big personalities have not done extremely well,” Lynch wrote.

Former 91X radio personality Chris Cantore started his own social media management company to accomodate the shifting change of the industry. (Photo courtesy of Chris Cantore)

Carmichael, who worked with Armed Forces Radio and Television for 12 years, and also as a reporter for the North County Times, said he still thinks that radio plays an important role, even in the ever-changing media landscape.

“I think that as many people are still listening to radio, and watching TV and reading newspapers, but it’s just that they’re not spending as much time doing it,” he said, “because you have various other technologies have taken shape — iPods, Internet radio, etc.

“But the next time we have a fire or earthquake, some kind of natural disaster, or even, God forbid, what happened eight years ago (9/11), radio is where it’s at. Fortunately, those things are pretty rare. So the main role now is to inform, and more so, to entertain. That pie is getting pretty sparse though.”

Cantore isn’t so optimistic. He said he doesn’t fully believe radio is dead, but its survival depends on how well stations are ready to integrate new media avenues into what they do. He said that, in order to survive, they have to adapt to something completely different than the current model.

“Management today doesn’t have balls, they’re not willing to take any risks,” he said. “They just continue to ‘exist,’ and continue to operate based on a structure that worked in a time frame that isn’t relevant anymore. And I’ve kind of watched the trickle-down effect from the sidelines for more than a year and a half now. Personally, I have to laugh because I’m watching these people, only now, trying to compete in an online medium that they know nothing about.”

When asked about what the future of the industry is, Cantore was at a loss.

“Dude, seriously, I don’t know, and I’m not kidding you when I say that,” he said. “Pursuing a job in radio seems like a dead end.”

But Lynch offered a much more optimistic prognostication.

“First, business is beginning to turn around. Radio has always led the country out of recessions in the past. It is doing so again,” wrote Lynch in an e-mail. “Secondly, the digital side of our business is the brightest part of the radio future, and is expanding rapidly. I continue to believe, unless the industry is hyper-local it will not succeed. In the next seven years, analysts are projecting the digital and non-spot revenue to grow from $2 billion to $10 billion.”

Eric Yates is SDNN deputy managing editor. E-mail: eric.yates(at)sdnn.com. San Diego 6 contributed to this story.

Tags: 91X, Chris Cantore, Clear Channel, Debbie Wagner, jeff and jer, John Lynch, Radio, SD Radio.net, SDNN, Showgram, Star 94.1, struggling industry

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