Mark “Fish” Fishman has spent his entire career to this point at one station in one market, KMTN/Jackson Hole, where he has been since the Triple A outlet was a Rock station in the ’90s. Fish has been a mainstay of the resort town, guiding the stations through decades as one of the defining assets of the community. Here Fish talks about keeping The Mountain true to its values while adapting to the many changes and challenges the radio industry has presented over two decades.
Fish
While the perception of a radio career is the old “moving town-to-town up and down the dial,” Mark “Fish” Fishman is the antithesis of that, having spent his entire career to this point at one station in one market. Having recently graduated from the University of Georgia in the mid-’90s, Fish planned to spend some time skiing before starting his “real life,” and headed to Wyoming, where he stumbled into a gig at then-RockerKMTN/Jackson Hole in an era where no matter market size, live deejays were on the air 24-hours a day.
While a lot has changed in 20-years (including Fish flipping The Mountain to the then-fledgling Triple A format), Fish has remained a mainstay of the resort town, guiding KMTN through decades of becoming one of the defining assets of the community. Read on as Fish talks about keeping The Mountain true to its values while adapting to the many changes and challenges the radio industry has presented over two decades.
So, you went skiing one weekend and never went home; what has kept you in Jackson Hole for twenty years?
I got trapped in the Hole! But it was the community, the town feel, the lifestyle, and – really – the people. I went to go skiing, but couldn’t get a six month lease and had to get a year lease, and then really fell in love with the summer.
Did you just immediately walk into the local radio station when you got there and get a gig?
I’d been here for about three days, and I was already re-designing the KMTN logo. I told my friends that I was going to go work for the radio station. And they said, “Alright, good luck with that,” and I then was doing the typical ski town jobs; restaurants, the ski shop, etc. Then I went to the PD at the time, and said, “I’m here to work.” And he said, “Have you ever done radio before?”
I told him yes, at WUOG at the University of Georgia,” and he asked, “Can you start tonight?” So I was on the air that night, Midnight-6, and then the following week I was doing Sunday mornings from 6a-Noon. I got offered the PD stripes in ’96 and then I did afternoons, and took over mornings in ’98.
Talk about the development of The Mountain in those two decades.
On my first day I was given a clipboard, and no instructions on what to do with the clipboard, and it had some lists of songs we were playing as currents. I can’t really remember what they were at the time, but I do remember that my first add was DAG. At the time I was going through a transition musically and I thought it was a good time to shape KMTN into its new direction. At the time Triple A was being born as well, so it was symbiotic because it was filling a void for the community, as well as me, musically.
With only one deejay listed on your site – you – who is hosting the rest of the day?
Jamie Canfield (PD of sister Triple A KSKI/Sun Valley) voice tracks from 2a-6p, and I do the programming logs for rest of the day, the whole day, with no hosts. I hope that changes. I think it’s important to have a female voice on the air and it’s important to have local talent as much as we can. But Jamie and I communicate every day about how to make him sound local, and I think it’s an advantage for him that he’s also in a resort community. There’s a lot of communication going on about local vernacular, local events and even stuff I talk about in the morning.
With only two shifts hosted, how do you make and maintain the local connection with your audience?
That’s a big challenge, at least for the non-voice tracked hours. We do a show in conjunction with the animal shelter, called Animal Tails, where we talk about animals up for adoption. We do some local medical shows that are done with the hospital and some of the doctors in town, which also gives us local content.
You’re the morning host, you program the station, you’re the MD, you sell and you coordinate promotions. How do you manage your time to stay effective at all aspects of your job?
I have a lot of lists that I have broken down into those particular departments. When I get off the air at 10 a.m., I do what production I have from the previous day. I do music calls two days a week. I do my sales calls when I can, but we’ll hopefully have a new sales person here shortly. A lot of the promotions we’ve done, we’ve done before, so they fall into place and it’s just managing them. With downsizing, the challenge to us is how to pull off promotions that we’d typically have staff going to, since there isn’t any staff. But as far as the management gig goes, like everyone else in small markets, it’s usually an eleven or twelve hour day, and then I go home and I try to really “go home.” But I’m pretty confident that my day has been done correctly.
What are the challenges of putting together promotions for a small market station with limited staff?
Well, technology has certainly helped out. We don’t actually have to be on-site doing the remote at the time when we broadcast the remote. That’s been very helpful. We just try to invent things as they come up, and we take each challenge individually and figure out a way to do it with limited staff while still servicing the community. Our big promotion that we’re about to start is our Ski Free On The Mountain, where we give away season passes to the local ski areas. There’s a big party at a local brewery in November, and it’s a huge, huge, deal for this community, because to this community, a season pass is way more important than a 401K or life insurance. They want a $1500 season ski pass. So we have to figure out how to do the promotion the way we’ve always done it, or invent a new way to do it and get it across the same way. Another big deal for us that we do in the summer is our annual Fish & Chip Golf Tournament, which is also executed simply.
How important is it for the station to be socially active in the community?
Well we try to be involved with as many things as we can. There’s a big community non-profit fundraiser that just happened a couple of weeks ago, called Old Bill’s Fun Run, put on by The Community Foundation of Jackson Hole. Over the 17-years of this event we’ve raised over $100 million locally that has been distributed to over 220 non-profits in the area. We’re super involved in that.
We’re super involved in any music that comes to town, like with the Targhee Music Festival in July; it’s a great weekend festival. We’re also involved with the free summer series in Jackson, called Jackson Hole Live, which features a lot of Triple A artists. This year Johnnyswim played. We advised on that, also I advise on another three summer concert series, which are in Victor, ID, which is a 25-minute drive over Teton Pass, where we’re also heard. We’re involved in that community as well.
Do you still experience the joy of music discovery and are you still able to share that with your audience?
Even more so now, because I’m doing a new feature called Fish’s Catch of the Day. I actually get to play more new music because I’m doing the feature every day of the week. Our adds are limited each week, based on availability of space, as you know. But discovering new music is still a huge part of the job and can’t be neglected if we’re going to “drink the Kool-Aid” and follow the Triple A mantra. We have to have fresh content where people want to come back every day and know that they will hear something today that they didn’t hear yesterday.
How did adding fewer records and getting the station more focused change your process of previewing, reviewing and then considering music for the radio station?
I look at charts a lot more than I did before. Prior to now, it was gut, having to provide different kinds of music for a variety of listeners we have here. People come here from different cities, different backgrounds, and in a small market like Jackson Hole, where we don’t have lots of radio options, we try to provide a little bit of everything.
Are there stations in the format you watch or follow musically?
Ever since I got home from Boulder (August’s FMQB Triple A Conference), I’ve been talking with Jamie and Brad Savage(WCNR/Charlottesville). I picked up a few things listening to those two radio veterans. I’m being a little more selective on some of the adds. I’m getting more information to make smart adds. I also look at stations in other resort communities like KTAO/Taos,KFMU/Steamboat Springs, KSPN/Aspen and WUIN/Wilmington, NC for a perspective different from a larger market.
What changes do you hope to see in the radio and music landscape over the next few years?
The music industry needs to figure out how to define the habits and procedures of the listener. I certainly miss the album, the art and the liner notes, but that’s just not the way people buy music nowadays. It’s not the way artists are recording anymore. There’s not going to be another Dark Side of the Moon, or Quadrophenia or something like that. So the industry needs to figure out how to serve both the artists and the consumer.
As far as radio’s responsibility, our big challenge is the available audience is growing thinner and thinner. Between Spotify,Pandora and satellite radio, you can listen to any radio station anytime, anywhere. It really will go back to what radio used to do in its heyday, which is turn people on to music they had never heard before. Even though people like to hear songs they’re familiar with, they have to get there eventually, and our job, at least in Triple A, is to expose them. If we continue to expose and support artists, the listeners will become familiar with them and our stations will be successful.
[eQB Content By Jack Barton]
