Mike Roberts, Class of 1979, is one of the people who helped kept WJPZ alive in the early days. With the station's founders having graduated, Mike empowerd a team to run radio station, passing its educational lessons forward to the next generation of broadcasters.
Arriving on campus in 1975, he quickly found WJPZ 1200 AM in the Spectrum Records building and told Bill Bleyle that he wanted to be involved. In addition to his airshift, he learned how to do everything - down to changing the needles on the turntables. In the early days, the industry was noticing the station more than the locals. But soon, they had staffers working professionally in the market (WAER did not). Mike shares some stories of alumni who went on to great success.
As for Mike, he took the tight formatics he learned at WJPZ and went on to work in Syracuse himself, at WNDR (briefly) and WHEN. Eventually he went to work for Reagan Henry, where he was on to Cincinnati, and eventually Atlanta.
After turning around some small AM stations, Mike went to the top dog in a major market - becoming morning show host at the legendary urban V103 in Atlanta. They were one of the first urban stations to do a talk-centered morning show, and the first urban station to bill $1 million - monthly.
Mike shares a story about the power of radio - one of the proudest moments of his career. He was at V103 from 1986-1988. During the Rodney King uprising in 1994, V went to an all news format, bringing on community leaders and stressing the need for Atlanta to stay peaceful. They were later recognized by local government for keeping Atlanta from exploding. Not coincidentally, that's when V103 had its highest ratings ever.
Mike soon got the ownership bug, and as the hip hop scene was exploding in the late 90's, today's guest was approaching 40 years old. V103 was also getting competiton on both ends of their demo. He bought several stations in nearby Macon, Georgia, as he wound down his time in Atlanta. Today, he owns one, WQMJ, Magic 100. It's an R&B oldies station that does its own newscasts, several times daily, to superserve its local audience.
Mike takes us through his typical work week, and reflects on the current state of radio, and its need to stay local to stay relevant. And we conclude with the story of a classic prank pulled on him while live on the air at WJPZ.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. Today's guest has been on my bucket list since we started the podcast. He is a legend in Atlanta Radio. He is a WJPZ Hall of Famer, and he's been described by classmates as someone who saved the radio station after the original founding fathers from the class of 1979. Mr. Mike Roberts, welcome to the podcast.
Mike: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. That's very kind of you.
JAG: There's so much to cover here with you. You are on the Mount Rushmore of WJPZ and so much to talk about in your amazing career since, but we'll start at the beginning. How did you find out about Syracuse and then how did you come to the radio station?
Mike: I actually applied for about four or five schools. Syracuse being the main one I wanted to go to. Fortunately, I got accepted at all of them. So I chose Syracuse because I'd heard about the mass communications course. That was the main reason why Syracuse was on my list. I can't remember how I'd heard about WJPZ as well.
I'm this kid who had a radio station at his high school. I had a radio station at my house that I built. And so the fact that Syracuse had not only the traditional, FM you know, I think at the time it was a kind a hybrid of jazz and all kinds of other
JAG: Yeah. WAER.
Mike: Yeah. WAER. But WJPZ was doing Top 40.
I'm this kid who grew up listening to WKBW in Buffalo, CKLW in Detroit. ABC, WLS. That was in my wheelhouse, the whole idea of being in the top 40 station. So that's what was one of the main things that drew me to Syracuse. We had a security guard at the high school who told me either he knew somebody in Syracuse or had been to Syracuse a number of times, and he volunteered to drive me to Syracuse to visit.
JAG: Oh, wow.
Mike: During the summer before I was supposed to start there. And my mission was to find the radio station when we got there. I don't think we found it because I think the station actually, that it was relatively new at the time. I think it was summertime. So the campus was kinda quiet. And nobody was there, but I knew it was at Spectrum Records.
That's all I knew. And so I was just excited to be there. My grandfather always also lived in Syracuse at the time.
JAG: So my math is right. So you graduated in 79, so this would've been 75 that you got there.
Mike: Yes, it was 75.
JAG: And the radio station is in its infancy on the AM dial. Just, duct tape and bubble gum in the Spectrum Records building. Fall comes, you get to campus and then you, I imagine you found it very quickly after getting there for class.
Mike: Yes. I found the radio station right after I registered for my classes, and got my dorm room and all that stuff. I met Bill Bleyle and said, hey, I wanna come work with you guys. I guess the rest is history.
JAG: That's the history I wanna get into with you today. What stuff did you do with the radio station? What was your involvement once you met Bill and got there?
Mike: When I first got there, I just did an air shift. I wasn't in management or anything like that, but I told Bill I was interested in helping him run the radio station and he was more than willing to teach me everything he could.
And so I did my air shift on a regular basis. I was there whenever, I didn't have any classes to do anything, just hanging out in the building just getting to know everybody on staff instead, trying to absorb as much as I could as far as knowledge. And I learned everything. At the radio station, I learned everything from where the transmitter was located, to how to deal with any technical issues at the studio. If I had to change a needle on the turntable.
Cause we were still spinning 45's by the way at the time. And we had cart machines for the commercials. And we actually were a commercial station at the time, right? We had, maybe three or four clients. That was about it. But it was still a functioning competitive radio station in my mind against WOLF and WNDR, which were the big top 40 stations at the time in in Syracuse.
When I got to the station, I believe the program director was Brian Miller. That's not his real last name.
JAG: Never is.
Mike: But that was his on-air name. He was a huge fan of WCFL at the time, which was WLS's major competitor in Chicago. And I used to listen to CFL a little bit on Skyway, but I could pick it up.
And it was a better radio station than WLS, but it wasn't nearly as successful. So Brian actually formatted the radio station after WCFL. That was the original format. The station was modeled after CFL as a top 40 station in its early days. And I don't think it really ever drifted much from that.
Very scary moment for us at WJPZ because CFL, as I mentioned, was struggling in the ratings against WLS and decided that they would be sold. Cause I think CFL stood for Chicago Federation of Labor. And I don't know if they still owned the station at the time, but the station was sold to a Christian broadcasting group.
Which of course decided they were gonna change the format. So of course, for weeks we were all nervous. The WJPZ was gonna end up switching to a Christian format because Brian was such a big fan of CFL itself. Of course that never happened. And we survived and went on and the rest is history for the station.
JAG: So this is 1200 on the AM dial?
Mike: That's correct.
JAG: We've talked to Bill Bleyle and Greg Hernandez in the podcast. Talked to your classmate, Mitch Reiter from 79, who talked about once you got into the leadership role, Mitch said you quickly recruited him and empowered him. And this is the tradition that's carried on for 50 years of the radio station is once you ascended the ranks and saying, Hey, you know you can do this.
We want you on the team. It seemed like you had those leadership qualities early from what your classmates say.
Mike: I appreciate them saying that. I don't know if I would agree with that, but that's kind, I just loved radio. Yeah. And I think for me it was always trying to find other people who also lo loved radio. I think that was the key.
JAG: And I imagine you worked pretty intently with Rick Wright in those early days too.
Mike: Oh, yes. Rick became a friend, of course after graduation and one of my favorite people from Syracuse. When I got inducted in the Hall of Fame for JPZ and he was there, I was just thrilled to be able to sit at the table with him. We had a great time. I love Rick to death.
JAG: What other memories and things you remember about your time at Syracuse and at the radio station? Mike?
Mike: One of the things I think that frustrated me was, some people didn't take us very seriously. It was funny. We weren't taking as seriously on campus as we were by the industry itself.
People in the market were paying attention to us and then that was more gratifying than anything else. So within just a handful of years, by sophomore year, I think we had maybe six people on the air working in commercial radio in Syracuse that came through WJPZ. And AER had none,
JAG: I'm really glad you got that little swipe in cuz we love a good swipe at WAER.
Mike: So that was my biggest memory, was that we just weren't taken seriously on campus by the communications folks. Yet we were, cranking them out and then, and before you knew it. We had some pretty talented people on in the marketplace. That's one memory I would say I had, as far as just the vibe around us and then people started taking us seriously when they started seeing us get people hired.
JAG: Yeah, there you go. That'll do it, won't it? Do you remember who some of those people were that were working the market were and other friends you had and the radio station?
Mike: Two of the most prominent would probably be Chris Tyler. Whose real name is Chris Tilley.
And Chris was hired by WHEN to do nights, and WHEN was one of those, at the time was an AC station during the daytime that it got really young at night. And so they put Chris on to go after the young people and the teens. And at that point, the two dominant top 40 stations in Syracuse were WOLF and WNDR.
And by the time Chris got there, he actually made WHEN number one in teens. Much to the frustration, by the way, I should say, of the program director. But WHEN also had the best signal at night, so it made sense that, if they were playing the music. That's where the kids would go.
And then there was also Todd Parker. Who eventually ended up going over to WFBL. FBL had been this station that was just all over the planet musically over the years. And when they hired Todd, Mike Josephs, I don't know, he's a name in radio history for being one of the architects of Top 40 Radio.
And they actually literally played the same records every 90 minutes. It was the same handful of records, and Todd was all into it. So Todd became a star. And I think eventually became the program director of FBL l as well. And they made some noise cuz they, you know what, were a two three share radio station.
And when they switched to Top 40 format, they became a six-share station. And they had a better signal than WOLF, so that hurt WOLF as well at the time. So those would be two people who exploded early on in the early years of WJPZ.
JAG: Any other classmates of yours and names haven't come up already that you have maintained friendships with over the years?
Mike: Yeah, I haven't talked to Chris or Todd in a long time, but of course, Mitch. There was Rick Wilkinson who ended up going over to ABC and now he's an independent videographer who does a lot of stuff all around the world. Tony Rizzo, who eventually ended up, he was our news director and eventually ended up over at WTVH, Channel Five.
He ended up over there in the newsroom there. I wanna say he either became news director there, or WHEN at some point. Before he went to DC. So those are a few of the people that I still know, and at least we're Facebook friends, even if we don't talk all the time.
JAG: Gotcha. I wanna turn to your career in just a minute, Mike, but before I do that, you talked about that underdog mentality of the radio station where maybe some folks, as you said to your frustration, didn't take you seriously, but you're getting folks hired in the market. What other lessons from your time at WJPZ do you feel served you well throughout your career in life?
Mike: Learning formats certainly from a career standpoint, learning formats for radio has served me very well because, I've always been accused as a broadcaster of taking a lot of top 40 formats to any radio station I've programmed. And most of the stations I've programmed were urban.
So they were always tight with short playlists and all the stuff that came from top 40 radio. But to me, the camaraderie, the teamwork, which is why I'm flattered when people say kind things about me, but I couldn't do things by myself. And so I grew to expect that kind of loyalty and camaraderie at every radio station I went to.
And I always looked for people who were as hungry as I was. Now, it's hard to do, it was always important to me to try to have people on my staff that were committed to doing it just the way the folks at JPZ were and the fact that we were able to stay on the air. I remember the first summer we stayed on the air because usually when classes were out the station would just sign off of the summer.
And I'm like WAER doesn't sign off the summer. So we were able to stay on, I think once we stayed on one summer, I don't think the station ever signed off it. But again, it was teamwork and loyalty. From student staff.
JAG: And the technical hurdles that I'm sure you had in those days on what's been described as borrowed Radio Shack turntables, and a little transmitter at 1200AM
Mike: Yeah, we had our challenges. Keep in mind we were an AM radio station that was supposed to be a hundred milliwatts. And obviously a hundred milliwatts doesn't get out very far. I'll leave it at that. But we were able to cover the campus in the in the early days on the AM dial. And the back then you didn't have the kind of interference back then that you do have today for AM Radio.
It was still bad. It was rough in some of the dorms. You turn on a vacuum in the station, there would be all this noise in the background. So we had to deal with that. And then there was the psychological challenges of being on AM. Because even though, again, in 1975, AM was still a major factor in the ratings and radio, there was a growth of FM.
But at Syracuse, the FM station was automated, so that helped. The top 40 FM. So that helped a lot for everybody else to survive in the marketplace on AM. You had students who just didn't think it was cool to listen to an AM station, so that was starting to happen as well at the time.
But I think we were able to persevere because I think we were running a quality radio station. And we were putting people in the marketplace.
JAG: It's funny how things come full circle 50 years later. If I'm following what you're saying that automated radio doesn't do as well as radio that has personality between the records.
Mike: That's, yeah. There was no such thing as voice tracking back then. Now they kind of fake it with the automation.
JAG: Exactly. Exactly. So let's turn to your career now, Mike, you've had this amazing run down in Atlanta. Take me through your journey since graduating Syracuse.
Mike: Well from Syracuse I ended up working for WHEN and then I actually worked at WNDR for about three weeks.
But I couldn't take the moat, going across the moat to get to the studio. And nor could I take Randy, who had a habit of running around in the studio, Randy was a mouse. So I just didn't last that very long over there because there were those kind of issues. So I went to HEN and then you remember Disco? Frank and Beverly Harms owned WSOQ at the time, which was an AM Station, daytimer, that nobody listened to.
Okay. And they decided to put disco on it, and I wanted to be a part of it. So I left WHEN to go help them do disco radio for about a year and a half, two years before. Steve Dahl blew up all the records in Chicago and ended the format.
JAG: I was gonna say, that was right around the time that Disco ended. Okay.
Mike: Yep. Yeah. It was close to, we were late comers. So I did that. And then Reagan Henry was a visiting professor at Syracuse was close to Rick, and he needed some staff. He wanted to bring in some young students to run some of his radio stations, and he had stations in Cincinnati, Atlanta.
And I can't remember what other market. So I got hired to go to Cincinnati. And spent a couple of years there and then came to he was still around, but I didn't come work directly for him at the time. In Atlanta, I found out about another AM station. I don't know what it was with me and AM radio stations back then, but I had to stay about going to AM stations that were not doing very well and having some success.
So Q we went from a 0.5 to a three share. Went to WIGO. That station had not seen anything higher than a 0.4. We took it up to the mid threes within two years, but again, it was all about, applying those Top 40 formatics and playing the hits. So did that and then eventually ended up at the big FM in Atlanta, V103. And stayed there for 12 years as the morning man and also as program directors for several years.
JAG: It's funny to think your roots at W J P Z where you talk about going to an AM radio station that was struggling and making that thing sing, and then also, yeah, it's come up in the history of JPZ, the idea of making JPZ a top 40 station.
The theory being that if you can handle the top 40 format, you can take that with you, to your point, Mike, to run any other format.
Mike: I've always believed that. I tell people to this day, one of the reasons top 40 is still remains my favorite format, is that if you can do top 40 you can do any other format.
You really can. Yeah, you can always bring it down. It's hard to go from a progressive rock space station and try to do top 40, but you can always start at top 40 and then change your approach. Do country radio, do an album, oriented rock or whatever. You can definitely do the other formats and urban radio, for example, which I think, I kinda proved. You can do urban radio as well.
JAG: So what year did you get to V103? Was it 86? I was talking to your LinkedIn earlier.
Mike: Yeah, it was, yeah, probably. I stayed at V for 12 years. I left in 98, so yeah, do the math.
JAG: All right. There we go. 86.
Mike: Yeah, I did that and then before I got the bug, but I wanted to be a radio station owner, which is, currently what I did.
I left in 98, bought my radio station during my last year at V. So I did both for a year. And then decided to retire and then devote full time to my own thing.
JAG: So before we come back to your owning radio stations, you talked about these Underdog AM stations, you go to V103 in Atlanta, which is just a legendary radio station in the industry.
Talk to me a little bit about your time as Morning man program director at that Top Dog radio station.
Mike: It was fun. Probably some of the most fun years I've had in broadcasting. V has always been an institution in the market and at that time it was still, one of the top ranked radio stations in the market.
But we always fought against ourselves. It wasn't really about competing against everybody else. Cause we were, we've gotta be number one, right? So it was, can we do better than the last book? That was the whole premise behind the station. But I did the morning show back then.
A lot of urban FM stations were really more about music than anything else. And we really focused our morning show as a personality driven show. Eventually we got to the point where there would be hours and days where there was no music at all in the morning if everything we were doing and talking about was compelling enough.
So we were, early in doing that, in urban radio, which now it's, pretty common now that the personalities, especially the syndicated shows, the personalities are more dominant than music in the morning. So I think we developed that. We were one of the first urban stations to do a major cash prize giveaway on the air.
I remember us shutting down the AT&T phone lines in downtown Atlanta which did not go over very well with the hospital downtown. And we were asked to never, ever do that again.
JAG: Problems of being too successful a radio station.
Mike: Yeah. And keep in mind, there were no cell phones back then, so everything was land lines.
And the land lines could only hold, handle so much. And we were very community driven as far as the stuff we did in the community. I remember one of the highlights of the radio station in one of its highest rated periods was during the Rodney King uprising in LA. And we stopped the music.
And for eight hours we became a talk station with, Maynard Jackson and key political leaders coming on the air to keep the city calm and the city at the time. City government credited our station for keeping Atlanta from exploding. Wow. Right that time. Ironically, if you do the right thing, it pays off. The station had a 13 share, I believe 13 or 14 share.
It's never been higher rated than that. I think the number two station in the market had half the numbers. Yeah. It was an incredible period, but more importantly, it was a period where we proved the power of radio and serving community. And it was also one of these urban stations that had a full staff news department as well. It was an interesting experience and a fun experience and a impactful experience for me, in my broadcast career.
JAG: When you have a dominant station like that in the market and you can serve your audience and have that kind of power that, that's really incredible. I worked briefly in New Orleans. Q 93 had a little bit of a similar feel to that when I was at iHeart and they were in our building.
What you can do with that radio station, like you said, the power of radio, I can see from Syracuse. Rick Wright is nodding as he's listening to you speak right now, Mike.
So if my math is right, if you were at V103 till 98, would that have been around that time that booming hip hop scene in Atlanta was coming up with Ludacris and Usher and all those folks?
Mike: Yeah, in fact, I left right before it really exploded. In fact, to be honest with you Jon, that was one of the reasons why I left.
JAG: Really?
Mike: Yeah. Because I want, not only did I wanna do my own thing, by then, I think I was around 40 years old. Or getting close to 40 if I hadn't turned 40 quite yet.
And, I was aging out of where radio was going musically. Okay. So I said, it would be better to let somebody younger come in. And then Frank Ski came in and replaced me at V, and then I went to Macon and put on my own hip hop station, but I didn't have to be on the air, so I could tolerate it that way.
But yeah, that certainly was the time. When hip hop was really exploding, then the competitive situation was changing in Atlanta, because that was also the time. About a year or two before I left, V got its own hip hop competitor. And V again was one of those urban stations that, for decades had been all things to all people.
But by the time the hip hop station came on and an urban AC Station had come on going after our older end. So it became a bit of a challenge for me to become this very broad radio station.
JAG: Understood. So was station ownership something that was always on your mind, or was it something you really started thinking about in that time as you were winding down at V in the nineties?
Mike: No, it was always on my mind. The fact that V103 was one of the first urban stations in the country that was billing over a million dollars a month. I said, Geez, if I can help make this kinda money for the radio station, why don't I just do it myself? I gotcha. Little did I know that I really don't like sales, so that was a struggle for me early on.
Trying to get my head wrapped, my head around the whole sales side. Now that's, my primary focus. But back then, I just wanted to program, the best radio station. I could, wanted to own it and figured I could hire some people to sell it for me and we'd make a lot of money. That part really never happened. So got great ratings, but never got rich off of it.
JAG: I always liked working for GMs and owners that came up through the programming side cause I felt like I could relate to them better. But you make a good point there about the programming versus sales.
Mike: During my last year or so there at V, I bought four radio stations. Underperforming stations, all licensed to the suburban areas of Macon.
We were trying to serve Macon with some signal challenges with a couple of the signals. We got two AM's and two Fm's. Okay. The station I had to do with the best signal was the one we turned to hip hop. And it covered the Macon market pretty well. And it was the flagship. So I did that for a number of years until the economy got rough. And I decided to sell it and use the money from that to pay off the station I still own.
JAG: So what's the station that you own now, Mike?
Mike: I own WQMJ. It's Magic 100. It's an R&B oldies station. And it's a little older than most R&B oldies stations because Macon's a very crowded market.
So we wanted to create a niche for the station and we have a couple signal issues in the downtown area of Macon, but most of the market we cover with no problem. So we just focus on our own niche and we've got a pretty loyal audience as a result of that. Been running that one by itself for the last oh geez. 10, 12 years. Cause I sold the hip hop station about 10, 12 years ago.
JAG: What does your typical day look like now? I don't know what two days are alike, but can you gimme an idea of what your day looks like nowadays?
Mike: I'm at home right now. I work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays until around one o'clock in the afternoon, then I, get myself together and head down to Macon. And then I'm at the radio station on those two days no later than four. And the first thing I do when I get on the station is work on the newscast for six o'clock. We do a two and a half, three-minute news updates five times a day.
They're all prerecorded. So this morning's newscast, for example, was recorded last night. And we're the only station in the market of any format that does its own local news. Everybody else uses a television station to do news, if they do news at all. We produce our own newscast.
It's a combination of both local and national. That's what I normally do on those two days. And then the other days of the week I'm there and I get up and I head into the station by 8, 8:15, 8 30 and update the newscast for the nine o'clock hour. That's the first thing I do. And then it's about scheduling music.
Dealing with clients and visiting some clients. I spend a lot of time collecting money from clients.
JAG: That's not bad.
Mike: Yeah. And I don't mean a lot of money. It's a lot of time collecting money. So I'm constantly running around the market. Like Monday I was running around the town collecting money from several different clients and most of our clients are local. We do have a national rep but most of our clients are local and a couple of regional clients as well.
JAG: And your air staff? Local? National? Combination?
Mike: I don't have an air staff. I had an air staff when I had the hip hop station.
My only station's automated. So there is no air staff, but the music is all programmed locally. And we do, like I said, we do a lot of news coverage on the station. Public service stuff that's, about it. It's primarily late sixties, seventies, and the early to mid-eighties. So you know lots of Michael Jackson, lots of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, stuff like that.
JAG: I'm up here in Motown, so I can certainly appreciate that.
Mike: You can appreciate that. Yeah.
JAG: It's funny because I was going to ask as you were taking me through this, if you missed being on the air, but it sounds like you're getting the best of both worlds cuz you're owning the radio station, you're doing the newscast, you're on the air, you're scheduling the music. It sounds like you've got the perfect gig.
Mike: Yeah. I don't miss necessarily being on the air on a day-to-day basis, doing a music show. Or being the DJ for example. I miss the people who were always very kind. The listeners. But in today's world of social media, I don't know if I'd handle that. Now, that's part of the requirements. You can't just be an on-air personality, right? You have to have a heavy social media presence. And I think the last time I updated my Facebook page was in 2020, something like that.
JAG: Ah, the before times.
Mike: Yeah. So the social media part would try be nuts.
JAG: Understood. Yeah.
You're teeing me up. I have to ask you someone that I ask all of our guests that still work in the industry, what is your perspective on where radio is at now and the challenges that it faces and what it has to do to stay relevant?
Mike: The typically answer for relevancy for radio is to stay local. Yeah.
That's always our ace in the hole when it comes to everything else we're competing against. I'm not a big fan of national voice track shows, right? Frankly, you might as well automate the thing with no jocks if that's what you're gonna do, but I still believe in an air talent that's locally based.
But in smaller markets, that's becoming the rarity. In a typical radio station, in a market like Macon, just about every morning show, not all of them, but just about every morning show is some sort of a syndicated show. And there might be one local talent who's either doing midday or afternoons, and then the rest of the time the station's automated.
I think for me, watching major markets like Atlanta move away from 24x7 live local talent, which V 103 still does. But most of the stations, even at Atlanta especially after 10 o'clock at night, there's like nobody there on the air. With the exception of a handful of stations, it's automated and I think that it hurts us competitively when it comes to survival.
And I understand the reasons behind it, being a station owner, you're trying to watch your costs and all that stuff. And the pandemic certainly created its own set of problems for revenue, for radio stations. I talked to stations that, I was complaining that our revenue was down 35% during the height of the pandemic.
And I talked to stations where their revenue was down 70%. How do you survive doing that? So that did not help matters because, that forced a lot of stations to move their talent to either, voice tracking or they were broadcasting from home or just to switch to automation. And in some cases, those that switched to automation and certain dayparts never came back.
And we're still trying to grow revenue back to where it was. I think it's close. I think a couple of political cycles certainly helped us in that regard, but I think we've gotta stay local, we've gotta stay relevant and we've gotta stay connected to our communities. And we've gotta be the place where people come to find out what's going on around the corner.
If we don't do that, then you know we're gonna be in the same position as newspapers. If we're not careful. But I will say right now, the last survey I saw showed that 91% of Americans still listen to commercial radio every day. So we're still doing well.
JAG: Before we wrap up, Mike, I do wanna bring it back around to WJPZ. I'm curious for your perspective on the radio station. You came to Syracuse for your Hall of Fame induction. You were doing this thing when it was on the AM dial in the late seventies. Here we are now 2023 as we record this, and the station has survived for 50 plus years now. I'm curious for your perspective on how it's done and how it's survived and what you've seen.
Mike: I think certainly moving the FM band played a huge role in that survival, which was probably inevitable as well. Wasn't that a class project or something like that?
JAG: We've got episodes with a whole bunch of the class of 84, 85, 86 that were real big parts of that. Getting it moved over.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. That kind of, that, that they went through the whole process of applying for a license, so that was alert learning experience in itself. Other than switching to FM. I'm not surprised by the survival of the radio station only because, it always had a mission. This being, the greatest classroom in the world for broadcasting for radio. I think that mindset from the early days has certainly, given the station the opportunity to flourish over the years. And more importantly, you talk about 50 years for JPZ, we're talking basically 50 years with the same basic format. And that in itself is amazing.
The station certainly went to those periods where it would lean more rock or lean more urban, or dance or whatever. But it's always been a top 40 radio station. What do they call it now? Contemporary hits radio?
JAG: Yes. CHR. Yep.
Mike: Yes. But it's always been that kind of a radio station that sought to stick to a mission of consistency in a format. Again, that would lend itself to teaching everybody the basics where they could survive in any format. So to survive 50 years. I think sticking to the initial goals probably is what has contributed to that greatly.
JAG: Excellent. Mike Roberts, before I let you go, any stories you care to share with the audience? Funny things that happened back in the day?
Mike: I remember one of my early days on the air, one of the announcers who will remain nameless taught me a good lesson about how radio pranks are always gonna be part of what you deal with. I'm on the air live and the mic's open and I'm talking, and he was the program director at the time.
He walks in the studio and drops his pants, while I'm on the air, live. Butt naked from the waist down, and I'm trying to figure out. How do I handle this on in air? And I think I just started busting out laughing. And to this day, I don't think anybody understands why I was laughing. And that funny moment for me personally, but it also said to me, okay, you're gonna have to deal with this as the years go by.
Radio people are crazy. Not the wildest story, but it was one of the things that kind of cracked me up.
JAG: An example of the world's greatest media classroom. That's probably a first for the a hundred or so episodes we've done on this podcast. Mike Roberts, Class of 1979, Hall of Famer, and just legend in Atlanta and in the Urban Radio community. I can't thank you enough for coming on and being part of this podcast.
Mike: Oh, no. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun.