I would like to thank Nick Anthony for his contribution to this web page. Nick was the original Program Director at WWDJ. Read below to see many of his other accomplishments.
NICK ANTHONY SHARES SOME WWDJ MEMORIES
When WWDJ took over WJRZ, Pacific Southern Broadcasting was operated by Kent Burkhardt and George Burns. It was a great company to work for and one whose approach was more programming oriented than sales, an early indication of what may have been the problem. The company had gained a great deal of respect for its programming and promotional approach, and owned stations in Cincinnati, (WSAI AM & FM), in Denver (KIMN AM & FM), and in Atlanta, (WQXI AM and FM). All were Top 40 Stations and each was a dominant station in its respective market. I was the program director at WSAI in Cincinnati when the opportunity to go to New York was offered. It was the move that every program director dreams of and one that I was very excited about. The deejays were all pumped up and everyone wanted to do well, and they did, for a while. The vision was to compete in the New York market with a sound that was very tight, yet zany. Many of the announcers had been together in other markets. Prior to WWDJ, Bwana, Al Brady, Gary Russell, and I had been in Cincinnati. Bwana, Mike Phillips and I had been at KJR in Seattle where Mike was the P.D. Bill Bailey was imported and Sean Casey had worked at WOR-FM. All were excellent jocks. It was a very good group of deejays that came together for the New York run. As I recall, there were two stations that were on the disc jockeys’ mind,WOR-FM(WXLO), because some had a come up through the Drake ranks, and of course, the monster of the mid-way, WABC. Teens were a primary demographic for WWDJ along with 18-24 females and 25-34 male and females. An approach of WWDJ was to take many of the promotions that had proven successful in other markets and use them in New York. This worked, and the station scored immediately with teens. We also did things on the air that were designed to cause people to do a double take. We called them “exotics”, vignettes that were well produced and funny to hear. We did our share of promotions in the city, in Central Park, and at Carnegie Hall. We did the basketball bit where the disc jockeys teamed with really good basketball players and went out to schools to play basketball against the faculty. We were all over the place with promotion - Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island. Those early days were fun and the community was very accepting. On the on-air promotions and contests worked; the music list was more interesting than what was being programmed by other stations in the marketplace. It was a fun station with lots of listener involvement.In the perfect script, WWDJ would have taken the place of WMCA and would still be pumping out the hits from Hackensack.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. WWDJ had a signal that didn’t cover the market adequately, and for an AM station competing in the Top 40 arena, that spelled death. After two years, it became evident that the aspirations of the station from the standpoint of revenue were not in sync with reality. What your viewers might find interesting was that WWDJ didn’t do badly in the ratings. It scored where it was suppose to score. The problem was that it didn’t score in the volume some would have liked.
After WWDJ, I went on to become Vice President of Broadcasting for Globetrotter Communication in Chicago. Our family settled in Los Angeles when Globetrotter sold its stations to Gannett Broadcasting. When I found I was spending as much time traveling to the airport as it took to fly from LA to Denver, It was time for a change, we moved to Visalia, California. We owned KSEQ FM radio and sold it to Buckley Broadcasting about ten years ago. We have a very good Public Relations Company, Nick Anthony & Associates, which specializes in marketing, market research for broadcasters, and event marketing. We are just moving into the e-commerce frontier. My how the years fly by…
For now, and after all is said and done, WWDJ was a great experience with a great group of guys.