Stop Blaming Radio for Bad Management
What winning local teams and honest accounts of failure reveal about the business
By Joe “Crash” Kelley | The Signal | November 5, 2026
A LinkedIn post from Colan Wheat, vice president of sales at Dickey Broadcasting, stopped me in my tracks. He announced that 2026 had become an all-time record revenue year for the company. Then he thanked programming, promotions, production, accounting, traffic, the salespeople and the Dickey family for believing in local radio. In an industry accustomed to announcements about what is being eliminated, here was somebody celebrating what a team had built. [1]
That deserves more than a congratulatory comment. It deserves a serious conversation about how readily we blame the medium when the business around it underperforms. Radio has real competitive problems. But an owner’s debt problem, a manager’s weak strategy and a station’s failure to give people a reason to listen are different problems. Calling all of them “radio is dying” saves everyone the trouble of figuring out which one they actually have.
My argument is that radio remains capable of building valuable audiences and producing business for advertisers, and leadership has an enormous influence on whether that happens. When I say teams are failing, I mean the people responsible for assembling, directing and supporting those teams must be accountable. An exhausted employee covering several jobs does not control the acquisition price, staffing budget or corporate strategy.
Wheat’s announcement is a useful starting point, with a necessary distinction: it is a company executive’s report of record revenue. It does not establish record profit, reveal the revenue mix or tell us how much came from political advertising. Those questions deserve answers. They do not make the announcement meaningless. They make it an invitation to examine what successful operators actually do.
The debt was a decision
Consider Clear Channel’s 2008 buyout. Its own merger prospectus projected approximately $19.9 billion in consolidated indebtedness and warned that the borrowing would increase vulnerability to an economic or industry downturn. It also showed what the financing would have done to the previous year’s interest expense: roughly $1.63 billion on a pro forma basis, compared with about $452 million historically. Those were transaction assumptions disclosed before the deal, not a verdict invented afterward. [2]
In May 2019, iHeartMedia announced that its restructuring had reduced debt from $16.1 billion to $5.75 billion. The company continued operating, with new financial terms and ownership arrangements. That history makes an essential distinction visible: a business can have listeners, advertisers and useful products while carrying a financial structure it cannot sustain. [3]
Audacy’s September 2024 restructuring announcement described an approximately 80 percent reduction in funded debt, from about $1.9 billion to $350 million. Its earlier explanation emphasized the severe advertising downturn and broader economic pressures. Those pressures were real; the company did not present the filing as a confession of managerial incompetence. But the restructuring also demonstrates why a corporate bankruptcy cannot automatically be treated as proof that every station inside the company stopped working. [4]
Cumulus provides a further warning against treating a balance-sheet reset as a complete business strategy. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in March 2026; the company announced its latest emergence on October 16, 2026. Its recent difficulties also involved audience and advertising changes. Debt matters, but removing debt does not remove the need to build a competitive product. [5]
The practical consequence is straightforward. Dollars committed to financing cannot also be spent on reporting, promotion, training or production. Cost reductions sometimes are necessary. A permanent strategy of removing the reasons customers chose you deserves much harder scrutiny. Leadership should be able to explain how a cut preserves the business’s ability to earn tomorrow’s revenue, beyond showing that it reduces this month’s expenses.
Look closely at the teams still creating value
There is no single scoreboard for success. Billing leadership, campaign revenue, audience service and community fundraising measure different things. None, by itself, proves that a company is consistently profitable. Taken together, however, these examples show how much opportunity remains when people organize their work around a specific audience and a specific advertiser need.
WTOP has made usefulness commercially valuable. BIA estimated that Hubbard’s Washington station generated $66.3 million in over-the-air revenue in 2023, leading its national ranking for the thirteenth time in fourteen years. That figure was down 3.9 percent from 2022, so this is evidence of sustained billing leadership, not uninterrupted growth. Washington’s unusual economy also matters; another market cannot simply copy the number. [6]
The management approach is more portable. In an October 2026 Radio World interview, Joel Oxley emphasized compelling products, solving clients’ problems, working across platforms and requiring a business case for digital ventures. He also acknowledged that WTOP’s large facility would be smaller if he were making the decision again, given changes in remote work. His description of leadership was striking: “I work for the staff.” That is a practical operating philosophy. Remove internal obstacles so the people serving listeners and advertisers can do their jobs. [7]
WLEN shows that local relevance is not reserved for major markets. Julie Koehn’s Adrian, Michigan, operation combines a full-service radio approach with direct advertiser relationships. In a 2025 NAB Show interview, she said all of her advertising sales were direct. A separate Radio World profile reported that WLEN had been Michigan Association of Broadcasters Station of the Year in its market-size category sixteen times in eighteen years. Those honors are evidence of sustained professional recognition, not a substitute for a profit-and-loss statement. [8]
The community relationship has measurable substance. The Michigan Association of Broadcasters reported that the Lenawee Multimedia Network’s 2025 Thank a Vet event raised $60,882.80 for emergency assistance to local veterans. That is money raised for a cause, not station revenue. But it is an observable example of a team getting its community to respond. My inference is that such participation gives a salesperson something stronger to discuss than a generic claim that the station is “local.” [9]
WTAW supplies a smaller-market commercial example. A 2023 Washington Post report identified WTAW as Bryan Broadcasting’s leading revenue producer. [10]
Bryan Broadcasting’s own description shows the broader model: local news and sports departments, Texas A&M athletics, high school football, locally produced talk, digital properties and publications serving the Brazos Valley. The company also lists WTAW’s Small Market Station of the Year Marconi wins in 2021 and 2025. These are several ways of serving a defined community, supported by distinct editorial, creative, sales and technical roles. The lesson I take from this is that local knowledge can support several products instead of being treated as an expense attached to one transmitter. [11]
Zimmer Marketing offers a concrete example of creating something new to sell. Its Joplin-based Best of the Four States program combined on-air promotion, social posts, email and other channels with nomination, voting and winners phases. A Second Street case study reports $40,000 in revenue, more than 2,600 promotional opt-ins and more than 2,500 sponsor opt-ins. Those lists may overlap; they should not be added together and called unique customers. The account comes from the platform vendor, and it reports revenue rather than profit. Still, it describes a specific product and a specific result. [12]
What matters is the work behind it: a regional identity, coordinated promotion, a title sponsor and deliberate selling opportunities. This was a campaign a team had to develop and execute. A rate card alone could not have created it. That is precisely the kind of commercial imagination stations should be making time for.
Bold Gold offers another view of what community investment can produce. A June 2026 announcement carried by the Sullivan County Chamber of Commerce reported that the WSUL Heart-A-Thon distributed $75,000 to six local organizations. Separately, Radio Ink reported in July that Bold Gold was adding an afternoon Ciliberto & Friends program on Thunder 102 while retaining the morning show on Catskills News Talk. The described afternoon mix included country music, local news, events and interviews. [13]
Again, this is evidence of community impact and investment in local programming, not a disclosed financial return. But it makes “believing in local” concrete: putting a familiar personality and community information into an additional daypart, while organizing an event that delivers resources to local institutions. That gives us something to examine beyond a slogan on a sales presentation.
These examples span Atlanta, Washington, Adrian, the Brazos Valley, the Four States region and the Catskills. They do not prove that any operator can succeed anywhere. They do demonstrate that the industry’s difficulties have not erased the usefulness of local audiences, recognizable personalities, trusted information or coordinated marketing.
The people who have admitted what went wrong
The most revealing accounts of failure come from people willing to identify their own decisions. There is a particularly relevant example involving the Dickey name, although the companies must be kept distinct: the Atlanta Dickey Broadcasting business celebrated in Wheat’s post is a different operation from Cumulus Media, whose former executives Lew and John Dickey discussed their mistakes at the Conclave in 2019.
Radio Ink’s report quoted Lew Dickey acknowledging the problem with centralized control: “We should have pushed all the power back out to the markets with some basic guidelines.” John Dickey also discussed mistakes in centralizing sales. Their comments were more complicated than an endorsement of everything live and local: John continued to predict greater programming centralization, and Lew described difficult industry economics. This was a reported public interview, not a self-authored confession. But the acknowledgment about local authority was explicit. [14]
That distinction between standards and control deserves attention. A company can establish financial discipline, ethical rules and clear goals while letting local managers decide how to serve their markets. Accountability requires knowing who owns a decision. If every meaningful choice belongs to headquarters, blaming the market manager for the results becomes an exercise in avoiding responsibility.
For an actual first-person written postmortem, there is Ken Mills. In a February 17, 2017, SPARK NEWS post, Mills revisited K-SKY in South Dakota, which he launched in September 1982 and left in September 1984. He described promoting the station’s reach without adequately understanding the coverage problems created by its mountain location and surrounding terrain. He blamed his own pride and decisions for losing his ownership stake. In his account, the station later became a market leader after translators addressed the coverage problem. [15]
Mills’s account is a personal recollection, not an independently audited reconstruction. Its value is the willingness to be specific about what he got wrong. He could identify a promise, an operational weakness and a decision that needed correction. That is useful to the next operator. A vague declaration that the medium failed him would have taught nobody anything.
It also keeps this argument honest. A locally owned station can have a bad plan. A passionate broadcaster can misunderstand the market, overpromise coverage or refuse to confront evidence. Independence gives an owner control over decisions; it does not guarantee those decisions will be good.
Growth requires an honest scoreboard
The industry’s shift toward digital services reinforces the need for capable teams. RAB’s February 2026 release, reporting Borrell Associates’ annual benchmarking research, put radio’s 2025 digital advertising revenue at $2.3 billion, up 7.8 percent. RAB is an industry advocacy organization and this is industry research, but the direction is important: broadcasters are earning money from a wider set of services. That is a reason to develop capabilities, not to assume a familiar sales presentation will handle every new product. [16]
Townsquare’s November 4, 2026, results illustrate both the opportunity and the caution. Third-quarter digital advertising revenue increased 12.7 percent, and total revenue rose 3.9 percent. Yet broadcast revenue excluding political fell 5.2 percent, and the company reported a $4 million net loss. Its digital advertising segment profit also declined despite the revenue gain. Those results show progress in a particular business line alongside continuing financial pressure. They do not support declaring every part of the company a winner or a failure. [17]
Managers need to distinguish new revenue from profitable growth, political demand from recurring business, and a big audience from the audience an advertiser needs. Digital can extend a station’s value. It also requires expertise, fulfillment and margins worth earning. Adding products without giving employees the ability to sell and deliver them is a wish, not a strategy.
Commercial creativity belongs in the business plan
A station has two creative obligations. It must give people a reason to listen, and it must help advertisers say something those people will care about. The second obligation too often gets whatever time is left after the schedule is sold. A hurried list of products, prices and phone numbers may fill thirty seconds perfectly while leaving the advertiser indistinguishable from everyone else.
There is research behind taking the creative seriously. Radiocentre and System1’s Listen Up study analyzed 131 radio advertisements using emotional-response and effectiveness data from more than 50,000 people. It associated stronger positive emotional responses and clear branding with better advertising outcomes, and identified storytelling, character and a sense of place among useful creative features. Radiocentre represents UK commercial radio, and System1 sells creative testing; these findings deserve that context. They support a creative discipline, not a guarantee that a particular commercial will increase sales. [18]
My own business, SonicAttention, is built around this part of the job: custom jingles and distinctive audio creative that help an advertiser sound like a business people can recognize. A musical identity, a well-written scene or a memorable voice can give a campaign a point of difference. It still needs the right audience, a credible message and a workable plan. Creativity should strengthen those fundamentals.
Stretching the boundaries does not mean making every commercial louder or stranger. It means asking what this advertiser can own in the listener’s mind. A service business might need reassurance; a local attraction might need anticipation; a retailer might need a memorable reason to visit. The producer should understand that objective before the record button is pressed. The salesperson should be able to explain it when the client asks why the campaign is built that way.
AI and other production tools can make exploration faster and put more options within reach. The management decision is what happens to that capacity. It can support better writing, more thoughtful revisions and stronger client presentations. If every saved minute simply becomes another assignment for an already overloaded person, the opportunity to improve the product disappears.
Make leadership responsible for the conditions of success
A serious operating plan begins with a specific listener promise. Management should be able to explain who the station serves, what those people need and why they would choose this station when alternatives are readily available. “We play great music” needs supporting choices about music, personalities, information and presentation. “We are local” needs evidence in the actual product.
Then connect that audience to an advertiser’s objective. A client trying to build recognition has a different problem from one trying to fill appointments next week. Agree on the objective, the message, the schedule and the evidence you will review. Ask about lead quality, inquiries, branded searches, bookings or sales where those measures fit. A redemption code alone will miss some effects, but vague assurances that the campaign “sounded great” are no substitute for a useful conversation about results.
Build the team around those obligations. Production needs enough information and time to create. Sales needs training and a product it can explain. Programming needs feedback and the authority to act on it. Traffic, accounting and engineering need to be included early enough to prevent avoidable mistakes. Wheat’s recognition of the whole operation matters because an advertiser experiences the combined result, including everything that happens after the contract is signed.
There must also be room to test ideas and admit when they fail. Set a budget, a purpose and a review date. Keep the parts that work and change the parts that do not. A manager who punishes every unsuccessful experiment will eventually get a staff that brings no experiments. That may feel orderly. It leaves the business dependent on yesterday’s answers.
Finally, examine staffing as a question of capacity. Several jobs assigned to one person still contain several jobs’ worth of responsibilities. Leadership must decide which work matters most, what can be simplified and where investment is necessary. Asking for creativity while removing all the time available for it is an operational contradiction.
Radio deserves a better explanation
None of this promises that excellent management can overcome every market condition. Weak signals, shrinking local economies, changing habits and aggressive competitors can damage even good operations. The case studies here cannot isolate leadership as the sole cause of any result. They can challenge the habit of treating decline as inevitable and management choices as irrelevant.
That is why Wheat’s post stayed with me. It celebrated people doing the work across an entire company. The examples around it show different ways that work can create value; the accounts of failure show why ownership and leadership deserve examination when it does not. Both are more useful than another sweeping declaration about the fate of radio.
Before declaring radio broken, examine what listeners are being offered, what advertisers are being promised and what employees have been given to deliver both. The medium still offers a business worth building. The people entrusted with it should be expected to build one.
Sources and footnotes
[1] Colan Wheat, LinkedIn post excerpt supplied by the author, reviewed November 5, 2026. The record-revenue claim is self-reported; the excerpt supplies no dollar amount, profit figure, revenue breakdown or exact post permalink.
[3]iHeartMedia, “iHeartMedia Successfully Completes Restructuring Process,” May 1, 2019.
[4]Audacy, restructuring completion announcement, September 30, 2024.Audacy, initial restructuring announcement and management explanation, January 7, 2024.
[5]Reuters, “Cumulus Media gets court approval for $592 million debt reduction,” April 15, 2026; includes the 2017 filing history.Cumulus Media, restructuring completion announcement, October 16, 2026.
[7]Randy J. Stine, “Joel Oxley Goes Out on ’TOP,” Radio World, October 10, 2026. Interview with Oxley.
[8]Nick Langan, “2025 NAB Show: Small Broadcasters, Big Opportunities,” TV Tech, March 31, 2025.Randy J. Stine, “Koehn Is a Voice for Small-Market Radio,” Radio World, August 18, 2025.
[13]Sullivan County Chamber of Commerce, “98.3 WSUL Heart-A-Thon Awards $75,000 to Sullivan County Organizations,” June 22, 2026.Cameron Coats, “Ciliberto & Friends Doubles Up in the Catskills with Thunder Return,” Radio Ink, July 13, 2026.