The Sound Off Podcast

This episode is a little different. Over the weekend, a 22 people lost their lives in a mass murder spree that covered 100 kilometers in Nova Scotia. Monday morning, Q104 in Halifax and a number of Stingray radio stations came together to pivot programming towards the hearts of their listeners. To understand what it takes to make those changes, you need to understand the people affected. Nova Scot...

There I was flipping through Facebook and seeing Steve Reynolds comment about hearing something he felt was out of place on the radio in the era of COVID-19. This is not to be confused with the non-COVID comments about Sirius Yacht Rock playing a lot of crappy B-Sides on their channel. (He's right. No one wants to hear B-Grade Little River Band song. Ever. With so many radio people and radio shows...

It's no wonder that Kipper McGee wound up in radio have grown up in between two great radio markets in Milwaukee and Chicago. He's a broadcast consultant, author and host of the Brandwidth on Demand podcast alongside David Martin. The show has been in production for as long as this show has, and it has an A list of broadcasters appearing for what turns out to be, "not your average quarter hour". I...

Sunni Puric works weekdays apart of the Joe Clair Morning Show on Rhythmic/CHR radio WGPC 95.5FM. Her journey to radio is unlike any other. This marks the first time I have asked what it was like spending your teenage years in a refugee camp in Bosnia. While the world saw a picturesque Yugoslavia during the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, it was 12 years later that th country fell into civil war. S...

Susie Erjavec Parker knows lots about social media, blogs, communication strategy and working from home. At one point she had 3 children under 5 years old in the house while juggling clients, and appointments and everything else that comes with running a business. With so many people working from home for the first time in radio, I though it would be a good time to bring Susie on to talk about wor...

It's been nearly 20 years since radio has had to shift into crisis mode. The Corona Virus or COVID-19 has arrived and broadcasters find themselves having to write rules, redo formats, get more information sourced, while dealing with staffs that have children coming home and everyone faced with the challenge of working from home. In this episode, I spoke about the importance of working from home, a...

Josie Dye is the morning host at Indie 88 in Toronto. The longtime 102.1 The Edge personality who also did hosting duties for Cosmo TV, and W Network took a chance on jumping to Indie 88. It has paid off well. You can hear it in Josie's voice. She is having more fun than ever at a station that has all the sounds and feels of any successful alternative radio station. In this episode, we spoke about...

Dave Jackson is the Owner/Headmaster at the School of Podcasting and also a support specialist at Libsyn. He was there back in the early days of podcast and has helped thousands launch their podcasts with his talks, online tips and podcasts. Dave is a Hall of Famer and a regular contributor to Podcast Business Journal . In this episode we discussed some of the many stages of podcasting's evolution...

Radio is a lot like the mob: "Just when you thought I was out, they pull me back in." Okay, that's an exaggeration but for Carlos Benevides, leaving 91.5 The Beat in Kitchener and transitioning to Conestaga College to teach radio just made sense. So does his new lunchtime show for the Jack radio stations "Jack Up the 80's" . which can be heard in Halifax, Calgary, Smith Falls, London and Victoria....

Zenga McCurdy called me back in May of 2018 and asked for some feedback on his morning radio show. Since then I have made a point of listening to the show every once and a while to hear the progress. I meant to grab a beer with him in Toronto last year but we only had enough time for a "Hi, How are you?" and then we were off to whatever we were off to. I am very pleased that I got to have this con...

Jon Gay has a radio story that is probably not unlike yours if you have worked on the programming side of radio. It involves a little bit of the WKRP theme song, "Town to Town. Up and Down the dial...". Jon's radio career started with an internship at Kiss 108 in his hometown Boston. His stint at Syracuse University got him even closer to his dream on being a top radio personality. His tenure in V...

David Phillips from NLogic is an admitted nerd when it comes to data. He really loves it. Something he is very good at is deciphering how data should be applied to your brand, your radio stations, your strategies, and your ad sales. However, one thing you should definitely not have is a data strategy . He speaks about numbers having blind spots and becoming too attached to the data we love and not...

We invited Seth Resler back to the podcast after he penned a blog called, "Is There Life After Radio?" Many of the episodes in this series feature a moment when someone was fired and tell the story of their radio afterlife. The podcast itself was born out of my firing in 2014, the subsequent quest for work in 2015, before landing on podcast in early 2016 and never looking back. Today I have a voic...

Lori Lewis is back on our show for the third time? Why so often? Because the world of social media moves that quickly. The last time we had Lori on the show, Instagram Stories was just starting to become a thing and Tik Tok wasn't even a thing. In fact - you might have still been involved with your SnapChat account and over-posting by today's standards on Facebook. Lori is now out on her own worki...

There's a reason why Christian Hall thinks differently. He has to. He is the National Program Director for Harvard Broadcasting which is a radio company first. He oversees multiple alternative stations; a format which doesn't even exist a number of top ten markets in Canada, and he believes that talent development is about airchecks, and feedback. (We went into large detail in our first episode wi...

It's been 2 years since we have caught up with Perry Michael Simon from AllAccess.com on this podcast. He has a pretty good idea of what is going on in the radio and podcast business given that he writes about it weekly , provides talk topics on a twitter account, and attends a dozen radio and radio-related conferences annually. If you get a chance, follow his twitter account just for the joy in h...

Happy New Year from Matt at the Soundoff Podcast. If you want to have a chat with Matt - just click here and set up a time. Top 5 Podcast Episodes this year: Tom Leykis Terry O'Reilly Corey Dylan Dean Blundell Lisa Keys Bring on 2020! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Terry Dimonte loves Christmas, and I love doing a podcast with him to discuss... whatever. Sometimes we talk about radio, and other times it's just life. This year it was a lot of the latter. So many of the things we spoke about can be found on the blog page which is located at Sound Off Podcast dot com. We talked about Terry's move to Griffintown in Montreal which was a big mistake. This led to c...

I'm reminded every time I travel through Tampa on my way to Sarasota, how busy the radio market is. Equally busy is the number of sports teams that compete for media attention. By my count there are the NFL Buccaneers, NHL Lightning, Major League Baseball Rays, and plenty of college football needing attention from the Gators, Seminoles and University of South Florida Bulls. That's a lot to program...

In this episode Laura discusses the changing face of radio, building a youthful audience, using social media and the importance of being on the ground in your market. Laura was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she attended Georgia State. In college she started out in computer science before moving to a degree in journalism. Laura got her start in radio working the graveyard shift at the c...

If you want to get pointed in the right direction to break into voice acting listen to this episode.  Matt Fogarty is a name you may not be familiar with, but if you listen to the radio in western Canada you have probably heard his voice Fogarty is currently the creative director for Island Radio a group of 6 stations located on Vancouver Island. Fogarty says he loves going to work and the cr...

Shannon Burns is a familiar voice across Canadian radio. Her show iHeartRadio Nights with Shannon Burns airs nationally on 14 iHeartRadio stations , and she does evenings on the legendary radio station she grew up listening to, CHUM 104.5FM. On the podcast she talks about her career arc, how to plan a nationally syndicated show and suggests a name for the former Power 107 in Edmonton (Unicorn 107?...

Darrin Harvey and I met in late 1989 when he was going to fill in on some Christmas shifts on Magic 97 in Kentville, Nova Scotia. From the get go, I knew we would be friends. And while we never lived in the same time zone after I left in 1992, I never lost touch with Darrin. He ascended to mornings, was later fired in the early 2000's, only to return the when region got a new FM in 89.3 K-Rock. On...

I met Ross Davies briefly on two occasions. Once in Montreal in the 90's and a second time in the 2000's again in Montreal. It was little more than a "Hi! How Are You?' but there was work to be done and the radio stories were going to have to come later. Fast forward to 2018 and we finally got to have that chat. Ross spent a good chunk of his career working for CHUM in the programming, operations...

Justin Dove is really good at radio imaging. (He also admits he is an audio nerd) He started in his home province of Newfoundland and worked his way across Canada for companies both big and small. Then he started his own company, Core Image Studios. We may have used the term "radio imaging" to describe his work, but it goes a lot further than that; as Justin calls it Sound design. In this episode...