QUICK UPDATE

I'm going out of town for several days so I won't be posting anything here for a week or so. Thought this would be a good time to get some folks caught up on things. If you've followed this blog from the start then you already know all this, but I keep getting more and more questions from people I meet who want to know what happened and when/if we're coming back.

Again, Bill Doyle and I decided we didn't want to stay with the CBS owned 97.1 property in Detroit when our contract was running out last year. It still amazes me how many people remain mad at the company thinking we were fired. Nothing could be further from the truth. They offered us a multi-year contract to stay (even after the format went sports) to do a non-sports morning drive show. We did that for the last 9 and a half weeks of our time there until they realized we were NOT going to re-up with them and they took us off the air after our December 7th show because local management didn't want to allow us after nearly a decade of service and good ratings to say goodbye to our listeners. It is sad and typical of the industry. So again, no, we were never 'fired'. We chose to leave and they wanted us to stay.

The next issue is why we haven't been on air since. Under our old CBS contract there was one of these onerous non-compete clauses which states that if we leave, for a period of 12 months after the end of our contract, we legally aren't allowed to accept an on-air job with another company's radio station in the Detroit market. Basically it is designed to ruin your career in a particular market by hoping the fan base will move on and forget all about you so that CBS doesn't have to compete against you. CBS made it clear they would invoke that clause, so while we entertained calls from places like Dallas, Chicago and others, Bill and I decided to tough it out with no income for one year so that we could return to Detroit. We always wanted to stay, just with a better company. Keep in mind our CBS contract technically ended on Dec. 31st of '07, meaning we cannot legally be on the air till January of '09 which is about 14/15 weeks away now. Even though they took us off the air after Dec. 7th they filled in the time with re-runs till the end of the year while they continued trying to call us about staying, so in other words that 12 month clock didn't start ticking till midnight of Dec. 31st/Jan. 1.

We'll see in January if the CBS plan worked and it rendered us forgettable and killed our careers. I hope not, because we sure haven't forgotten about all you guys!

Don't mean to bore all who already knew this. Like I said, I just get asked about it all the time and I wanted to once again clear it up. I realize people get busy and have much more happening in their lives than the goings on of one radio show.

Talk to you soon.