Stiller’s radio career began in Little Rock at Alternative station KLEC and continued at KDJE. But two-and-a-half years ago, he moved back to Ft. Wayne, Indiana to work at the station he grew up listening to, WBYR, an Active Rock outlet with an 18-year heritage. Stiller has now blended his Modern Rock background with the station’s hard rocking history to carve out a unique niche for The Bear in the Ft. Wayne market. FMQB recently caught up with the APD/MD to see how the experiment is going .
eQB presents excerpts from the FMQB July Magazine Rock Up Close featuring WBYR/Ft. Wayne APD/MD Stiller
On how The Bear is unique in the Ft. Wayne market… We’re constantly fighting ourselves because there’s not a lot of competition in this market. There’s no Modern Rock station, so we’re taking it upon ourselves to fight for the audience to listen to Rock instead of Hip-Hop or Country. I think what sets us apart is, how many stations have a heritage like this? I know there’s a few but there’s not a lot. We have an 18-year history, and we have a little bit of something for everybody.
On whether technology like satellite radio, Internet radio and iPods are a threat to terrestrial radio… I think they create competition for listeners’ time, but I don’t think they’ll pull people away from terrestrial forever. I think those things affect how often listeners visit us – not necessarily that they’ll never visit us. iPods are probably the biggest competition as far as time because everybody has their own favorite songs. That’s one of the cool things about being so open here at The Bear musically – I feel like we have a chance to program enough different songs and different types of music that we might be able to compete with that.
On what the station does to keep up with new technology… We have to be interesting on the Web site as well as on the air. We have an on-demand feature where you can hear the Top 20 songs that we play on The Bear. We also have the Top 10 new songs that you may not have heard of. We do things like that to keep people away from the iPod because they’re content with us on that level.
On the most important radio lessons he has learned in his career… One is to be kind to everyone, even the prize pigs. Everybody knows somebody and chances are that “somebody” and yourself will cross paths, so why (inadvertently) start off on the wrong foot over not handing out a t-shirt? Two is: Mondays – just get through them. And three: Never stop learning lessons.
** QB Content by Mandy Feingold **
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