My Love Letter to Valentine
Valentine, Nebraska is a town of just 2,640 people. It’s surrounded by bison in Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge, home to Nebraska’s highest waterfall, receives 38-inches of snow a year, has a median home value around $149,000, and is just 2.6 square miles.
Mike and Kim Burge own KVSH 940AM in Valentine. I met them while in Lincoln, presenting to the Nebraska Broadcaster’s annual convention last week. They were absolute delights and radiated pride for the radio station they own, manage, and are on.
Spend five minutes on industry websites and you’ll find news about layoffs, consolidation, endless debates about our industry’s “monetization challenges” (thank you Bob Pittman for the re-frame) and radio’s future. Spend five minutes with Mike and Kim Burge and you’ll remember why radio still has a future.
Mike McVay and I were asked by Jim Timm and Jenna McKain, both with the Nebraska Broadcasters Association (NBA for short – go have fun with that!), to do the programming sessions this year. We both marveled at the energy we found.
We sat next to each other at their Hall of Fame banquet. Mike knew one of the four honorees. I knew none of them. But at the end of every speech, I fought back tears at the pride in the room as each celebrant thanked their families and those they met along the way in broadcasting that helped them be immortalized.
When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to get to the Big City. As my coaching career matures, I’m increasingly amazed by how radio is done in markets few of us know and by people whose names we’ll never hear. Mike and Kim (and the many like them) will never be mentioned in RAMP nor profiled on Barrett (hey Jason – profile these people!). But they still have inside of them the thing we all felt when we got in the business.
I’m lucky to coach shows in smaller markets. They have a commitment to growth and their talent in ways you’d never know.
Mike and Kim Burge aren’t outliers. Across the country, I see and work with broadcasters in smaller markets making the same commitment:
- Fort Myers Broadcasting and Sun Broadcasting in Florida know that without talent, they can’t make money. Mark Gilson and Jim Schwartzel are deeply committed to live and local all day and the growth of their people.
- Jay Chapman owns Woof Boom Radio in Muncie, Indiana. We recently put a two-hour talk show on their oldies station as a differentiator in the marketplace. The show’s goal is to “elevate and celebrate Madison County”. Woof Boom’s mantra is “we use our voice to build and connect our community.”
- And kudos to Kurt Johnson, Jared Willig, JB Wilde and their team at Townsquare. I get to work with live and local shows for them in markets like Binghamton, NY, Portsmouth, NH, Rockford, IL, and many others. Shows that know that live and local ain’t just a marketing slogan. They live it and take care of their communities in ways that’d shame many larger markets.
KVSH 940AM, Valentine, Nebraska makes me long for those glory days of radio when we all did it for the right reasons – in every market size. It’s still being done like that in many places we don’t pay attention to. Visit KVSH’s website and you’ll see they have everything from obituaries to agricultural news to a trading post, where someone needs to get rid of a piano in very good condition (yours if you haul it away – call Cody) and someone is selling a galvanized chicken feeder for $25. Quaint, cute, and very about the community.
Meeting Mike and Kim, going to the NBA’s Hall of Fame dinner, and doing the work with the companies I noted above is emotional hygiene for me. It reminds me that, while corporate-owned radio stations can sometimes serve up bad news and taint our perception of our own industry, there are so many people in markets we know nothing about who are truly committed to their communities.
Sometimes the future of radio isn’t found in a conference keynote, a consultant’s deck, or a corporate strategy session. Sometimes it’s found in a town of 2,640 people, on an AM station, where two owners still believe their job is to serve a community. That’s where radio’s soul resides.
Spend time with people like Mike and Kim Burge. You’ll remember why you started. And you might just remember where radio’s future really lives.