Lew dickey biography

In 24 months, he turned a failing station into the market leader and began to expand. Lew Dickey had a profound effect on my entire Broadcasting Career. He was a great man and expressed great vision for the Broadcasting Industry. He will be missed. Lew Dickey will be missed. He had a procound effect on my entire career. Lew was a Mentor to many.

I personally, do not leave comments on web sites. This is an exception, maybe a first. All right. So you finished the startup years. You finished your early seed years. How did your normal day change compared to the early years? You understand the game, if you will. That comes with experience and seasoning. And was, I said, you have two jobs, you have to run the stock and you have to run the company and you just get better at both.

And we were very aggressive, you know, continued to push and continued to grow and innovate wherever we could, whether it be new structures, deal structures, or continued to work on the technology platform.

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Did your original team change just a little bit or significantly from the early years to more of the middle years? So you think about the C-suite yes. What were some of the focus points that shifted from the early years to the middle years? What were some of the priorities that perhaps changed as the business grew and there were different challenges that needed to be addressed?

Lew Dickey: Well, all businesses go through challenges. Something like CRM or an ERP system, the various checks and balances that you would need for timely reporting sales training. These are things that were really done ad hoc. And so in essence, to professionalize and try to create standards and best practices and drive those through the organization.

So you could effectively scale it and leverage your management structure and create something where you could have upward mobility within the company, which I thought was an extremely important part. And if you had a very small market, if you were in Macon, Georgia, or Albany, Georgia, and you wanted somebody to be in a position to be able to run Atlanta, the skillset required to do it is essentially the same.

The people who ascended to roles in markets were generally people who came up in those markets rather than people who came from a smaller market or a hub market and moved up. Could be a sales manager, could be a key account manager, program, director, music, director, chief engineer, whatever role you would think of within a radio station, marketing promotions director.

So those are the things that we wanted to create.

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Lew Dickey: And as I mentioned, it caused an awful lot of consternation to get folks to buy into that. And just simply because people are very, very, very resistant to change. And so that was the bane of my existence in trying to do that. But over time, people self-selected. And we actually went outside the business because we were systematized to that extent, we were able to then hire outside of the business and bring some people in from other industries, from hospitality, from other business services industries, into the broadcast business, which also I think was helpful in growing the talent base.

So I think that all of that was very necessary and it was just a lot of hard knocks and scars to get it there, but that started to change over time. And then a lot of industries, particularly as we see now, more prevalent than ever, particularly through the pandemic, the broadcasting business, as well as traditional media, beginning with the newspaper industry, started to experience serious disruption by digital technology.

And it happened to them first and they obviously missed the boat by allowing their content to be shared for free. And so in doing so, they devalued their content and consumers really began to believe that information was free.

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And I talked about this in my book, only a couple of newspapers really, successfully, have survived this; the New York times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and others are working hard to do it. And then when they tried to erect a paywall consumers just moved on and there were plenty of others places they can find free information.

Lew Dickey: So in my judgment, had the newspaper industry adopted the paywall approach early on…they never handed out New York times or Atlanta Constitution Journals free on the street corner. You had to buy them. And so I think they should have been much more careful about that early on. And clearly I think the motion picture industry was, and to a great extent television and the sports leagues, they understood the value of their content.

And on the broadcast side, it was really the competition for digital advertising. Our model was obviously distribute free to consumers and the advertisers pay for it. And there really was no digital competition for local radio per se. You had music services, but you always had record players and cassette players and CDs in the cars. So your music collection already had a separate outlet anyway that competed with broadcast.

They now had another choice and that was search and obviously social, which is why those behemoths now between the two of them, Google and Facebook, now have multiples probably 10 times, if not more, it could be as much as 15 times, the entire size of the radio industry, just in those two companies. So that dollar started moving in that direction.

And so you saw dollars go there, that business was gutted. And then it started to pick up steam, the shift in dollars away from local media into digital. And obviously that never used to be the case. So how do you handle the pressure as a CEO with all of these different changes that occur in your industry? How do you lew dickey biography the pressure of the media of public opinion, your own employees when making these decisions?

Some of these things, you have to take them as they come. The landscape is changing. You might be able to see a little bit around the corner, but nobody has perfect vision into the future. I certainly did not at the time predict the speed with which the shift would go to digital, the acceleration and the rate of it, that it lew dickey biography go.

And anybody who says they did would be fooling you because if that was the case, if anybody knew, then everybody would have put their companies up for sale five years earlier and been on top of it. So I think we worked very hard to innovate and saw some things coming to our credit. And we looked very hard at commerce and we had a commerce initiative, which was to in essence, look for a different revenue model from the reach.

Radio always had great reach and still does have great reach. And so you have to look for incremental ways to monetize an audience, which as I mentioned earlier, and as everybody knows, gets it for free. Lew Dickey: And so you have to look for smart ways to monetize. And commerce is a very interesting way to do that. We sell our ad units to help other people make money with their businesses.

You can opt out anytime. He holed up in his office for several months to do his homework, and the result is the recently published book The New Modern Media: Remaking Media for a Mobile Culture. These industry-wide changes have led consumers to expect more in the digital age. Online marketplaces like Amazon, which tick all four boxes, are more likely to succeed.

That disruption has caused old media to rethink its business model in several ways — advertising is no longer the legacy cash cow it once was, as 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising in the first quarter of went to Google GOOGL or Facebook METAThis makes industries like radio, which are percent dependent on ads, more vulnerable.