By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
May 10, 2016
The DetroitSportsRag.com has learned that Detroit Sports 105.1 program director Dave Shore has been relieved of his duties at the struggling sports talk station effective immediately.
Shore was hired to run the Greater Media property in February of 2015 after the station’s original PD, Jason Dixon, was fired. The former Los Angeles operations manager at ESPN Radio 710 was given the mandate to improve WMGC’s anemic ratings.
But after over 14 months in Detroit, Shore had only overseen a further plummeting of the station’s rating. In an effort to brand the station as a sports property — and not a Drew Lane vanity project — Shore dismissed Lane in October of 2015 after the two sides couldn’t agree on the content of Lane’s PM drive show.
While the decision to focus the attention more on sports and less on Lane’s pop culture proclivities might have been a good idea for the branding of the overall station, Lane’s program was still the highest rated at 105.1. By far.
Lane’s replacements were doomed to fail from the moment they were promoted. If anything demonstrated Shore’s cluelessness to the Motor City market it was his replacing the Detroit radio legend with career update personality Matt Dery and toxic Free Press personality Drew Sharp.
Dery’s midday show had failed to gain ratings traction since “The Diesel” had left 97.1 two years prior and Sharp had been a failure on local radio for two decades. If Shore thought Sharp was going to be his Skip Bayless he was sadly mistaken.
People have never wanted to listen to Sharp, whether at WDFN or 105.1. They don’t hate listen to him … they just turn the dial.
It didn’t help that, mere months after Sharp was assigned the prestigious PM drive slot, the troll columnist was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal. Once again, Shore botched that controversy. Instead of making a statement and firing Sharp for his Freep shenanigans, he let Sharp back on the air without an apology. Even though Dery and his agent (Mort Meisner) were insisting on some sort of mea culpa and Crain’s Detroit Business reported one was forthcoming. A tip that surely came from Meisner himself.
Eventually Shore axed Dery and Sharp and replaced that program with former Pistons point guard Lindsey Hunter and himself. The show focused almost solely on the NBA (NATIONALLY!!!) in a town that doesn’t care to hear about that sport. At all.
A good point of reference for Shore would have been the following anecdote: The day the Pistons signed Josh Smith to a huge free-agent deal back in 2013, sports radio goliath 97.1’s hosts were discussing the news.
Now, keep in mind, this was the biggest Pistons free-agent acquisition in many, MANY years. So Mike Valenti and Terry Foster began discussing the Smith deal and opened the phone lines so the listeners could chime in.
And …. NOBODY CALLED.
Valenti came back from a commercial break and said that, predictably, nobody wanted to talk about the Pistons or the NBA so they shifted to discussion of light rail, the best pizza in Detroit and Foster’s Downriver hookups.
Remember, this was the team’s flagship station at the time and nobody called in to discuss this big news. Why?
Because the Pistons and the NBA are an afterthought in this market. Anyone locally would have known that based on 97.1’s lack of attention to the franchise.
Yet Shore thought building his program around NBA talk was a brilliant business strategy, centering the show around interviews with people like P.J. Carleisimo and Rex Chapman.
While there was rampant speculation that Greater Media would “flip” the station to a different format, the DSR has learned there is no validity to that speculation.
Greater Media plans on giving another program director a chance to right this ship. You’d have to think after two attempts at out-of-towners, the next hire will be SOMEONE with local experience.
The plan in the meantime for PM drive appears to be a mix of Hunter, Rob Pascoe and Jake Chapman. Guest hosts like Tony Paul and Neal Ruhl could also be possibilities as they filled in for Shore this week over his last two programs.
Finally, it appears that the direction of the station might not be in the hands of the local Greater Media executives. We have learned that GM Vice President/Program Development Buzz Knight will be coming to Detroit to assist in deciding who the next PD will be.