I have taken this opportunity to close the chapter, as it were, because people have asked me to and because I’d like some of what really happened on the record.
In 2010, I was notified by FedEx in a letter from Mark Masters that his company, TRN, was picking up the option on my show for another three years. I was thrown into a depression that almost brought me to tears. The preceeding three years with TRN had been a nightmare. They had not effectively sold the show, affiliated it or, most glaring of all, supported the show properly from a technical standpoint. Masters, after promising me phone meetings and follow up calls, was MIA. I wanted out of his company and away from him. It was a joyless, uninspiring and unprofitable hell. I had to take work during the day, voice-over and acting gigs, to make ends meet and of course we pumped up our on line business. I was, in short, in emergency mode. And working a late night show from 10-1 pacific made work during the day debilitating and exhausting. I wound up in the hospital in December of 09. I emailed Masters and put it to him directly. Picking up my option for three more years was pointless as I didn’t like his company nor him personally. I articulated why and asked him why he would want to be in business with someone who had a professional and personal distaste for him. I received no answer and wound up angry and even more miserable. I had no choice. I had to put my head down and push on. And I did. Through horrid tech support, a lazy sales effort, no communication with the powers that be who had purposefully cut me off and money so insubstantial it’s shocking Masters could call himself a salesman. By the end of the run, true to form, Masters released his laughable statement that he had decided to end the relationship. Amusing. As amusing as him claiming he actually had something to do with rolling my show out in 2007 on 75 stations, a rollout that was the result of my name, not any effort of his. That was borne out in the ensuing years. And as amusing as his claim that he helped build our on-line presence. Mark Masters knows absolutely nothing about the digital business or new media. In fact when I visited his operation in 2008, he proudly showed me 1980’s photocopy technology that he’d used to print school books. Mark used to say that TRN ‘under promised and over delivered.’ In my case it was exactly the opposite.
Today, we see clearly in the industry news coming out of Medford, DC and elsewhere that what I suffered through was only a part of the unfolding TRN story. That company is now a shell of the already disintegrating entity it was. Mark Masters always impressed me as a man with a baffling inability to read events. Sounding cocksure, he put a horrid, straight out of the 70’s all-news format on the air, sued everyone in radio thus hastening the very disunion and infighting he complained about and alienated his talent, the hosts as he called us, the very people he needed to insure success. I am blessed that I survived that experienice and that today I have a thriving online business. Our brand was almost destroyed by TRN, something I knew was happening, but we’re bringing it back. I hope this statement clarifies some things. It’s all completely true.
