Al Keck Compares It To Entering The Tampa Bay Buccaneers Locker Room After A Stinging Loss : Not Something He Would Have Liked To Do, But Something He Had To Do.

Al Keck compares it to entering the Tampa Bay Pirates locker room after a stinging loss : not something he wanted to do, but something he had to do.

For Keck, once the top sports anchor at 2 local TV stations WFTS-Ch. 28 (ABC Action Reports) and WTSP-Ch. Ten (10 News) that is saying something. When he walked into the Fox Jazz Caf in Tampa one or two months ago, Keck was not reporting a story. He was selling something.

Himself.

More exactly, he was selling The Al Keck Show, a radio broadcast targeted on sports news that he was planning to host every Fri. on WTAN-AM (1340).

Shows on WTAN work slightly differently from those on commercial radio, where a big concern owns the radio stations, hires talent{ sells the advertisements and makes the majority of the profit. WTAN offers what radio insiders call "brokered" radio programs, where anybody can buy airtime for a flat fee, go sell advertising and create the show.

Whatever profit they make goes in their pockets, but the workload from gathering material to booking guests and, yes, selling commercial spots customarily falls on whoever is cutting the check.

Years back, this sort of radio was the province of churches, Realtors and gizmo peddlers ; folk with a little taste for show business who didn't mind promoting themselves directly to a little audience. But as enormous media outlets pare their staffs in challenging economic times, big names like Keck have been compelled to reinvent themselves in places like WTAN.

"Quite truthfully, I did not truly enjoy it ; I'd rather have someone else out there selling Al Keck than me," said the sportscaster, who turned to brokered radio about 2 years after WFTS did not replenish his contract. Regardless of his trepidation, Keck left his meeting at the Fox Caf with a title funding that immediately put his fledgling show in the black.

"I'm finding folk will obtain in to a vision if they know you and trust you," he said. "I know I am not on the largest radio station on Earth, but I've got a known name and a voice that is pushing a brilliant product. To a mean consumer, you're no different" than a traditional radio anchor.

Keck's show airs weekly on WTAN at 3 p.m. Fridays. 2 other names from the area's radio scene onetime SportsChix member Brenda Lee (a.k.a. B.L.) and previous Clear Channel Radio star Skip Mahaffey bracket him at two and four p.m.

Like Keck, B.L. And Mahaffey lost standard media roles awhile ago and are using brokered radio to take advantage of a private brand that still draws some fans.

"Will it work? Who knows? This is an one-man operation that I am coughing up for out of my very own pocket," said Mahaffey, who tried to find new work after Clear Channel took him off country music station WFUS-FM in 2009. He came back to Tampa in February after eight months in Oklahoma.

Now he has got a brokered show displaying at three p.m. Weekdays (except Fridays) on WTAN and two other radio stations, reinventing himself as a decidedly nonpartisan talker.

Some pros say this is a trend that may only accelerate, as the big commercial radio stations keep cutting midcareer and entry-level talent to save money.

"Clear Channel owes something like $16 bln. I do not remember anyone owing that much for anything," related Gabe Hobbs, a previous senior vice president in command of talk news and sports at the company, who was among 1,850 people fired in 2009.

"These companies are panicking over debt and the economy ; they're kind of enslaved by that," said Hobbs, who now runs his very own radio consulting firm. "They're forgetting what they used to drill into our heads when I started in this business : It's what happens between the records that counts. "

Radio 'ate itself '

After 30 years in the Tampa Bay area radio scene, WRBQ-FM morning personality Mason Dixon sees radio's current issues simply.

Dixon said big firms like Clear Channel bought up most of the mom-and-pop radio stations in tiny and midlevel markets, using computerized audio systems to feature one staffer on shows at 3 or even more stations in a day. Centralized programming eliminated masses of jobs.

Syndicated shows, for example American Idol host Ryan Seacrest's On Air, appeared to eat up huge pieces of morning and noon programming.

And new ratings calculated by information from the pager-sized devices worn by listeners have hurt DJs who talk too often during their songs, leading Cox Radio, CBS and others to make hit music-centered stations like Hot 101.5 and Play 98.7.

Once, Tampa Bay was a cooking pot for developing huge trends in radio, from the flippant "morning zoo" idea started at WRBQ in the '80s to signature skills like Glenn Beck, Lionel and Scott Shannon.

Today, name performers like Mahaffey and onetime WMTX-FM star Nancy Alexander have been laid off while younger gifts struggle for new prospects.

"The business ate itself," said Dixon, who latterly hosted a reunion of characters from WRBQ's boom time on his morning show. "At one point in time, we had between 70 and eighty employees at Q105. There are at present five full-time employees, not counting the sales staff, and three of them work on the morning show."

Longtime Tampa Bay area radio personality Jack Harris makes a distinction between shows that usually feature talk like his AM Tampa Bay programme with Tedd Webb on WFLA-AM (970) and music shows starring characters. The new ratings technology has forced more focus, he announced, as fans of music radio migrate to stations with the minimal of talk. He fears that radio will founder without the bond that local DJs provide.

"People don't say, 'I listen to (WHPT-FM) the Bone' ; they say, 'I hear Bubba the Love Sponge or I listen to MJ, '" Harris declared. "But if the corporations are faithless to the characters, listeners will be faithless to (the stations) ."

Still, there's one radio star who does not see much issue with the prevailing transition : highly rated WHPT morning personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem.

"Big characters will always have a spot. And your ratings control your destiny," related Clem, who was fired by Clear Channel in 2004 after earning record indecency fines and returned to Cox Radio's WHPT with a show more targeted on talk about politics, sports and crime. "It's raised the stakes, but if you're good and iconic and can hold an audience, you'll be okay. " as reported tagza.com.