Williams: You were initially offered the job to replace Howard Stern when he went to satellite. Did you turn it down?
Craig Carton: No, I wanted it very much, and I accepted it, but the station I worked for at the time, NJ 101.5, the manager got in the way of that happening. But it was a blessing in disguise. This turned out to be a better job. I don’t think I would have been as successful if had I taken that job.
Little bit more from Living in Media's sit down with Craig Carton.
LIM: When did you first get involved in broadcasting?
CC: I did broadcasting at school, but I didn’t know that I wanted to do it. I knew what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to wear a jacket and tie, go to the same place and sit in a cubicle every day. I couldn’t work in a place with strict rules or anything like that. I had no grand plan. I had done some radio in college at Syracuse. I was teaching baseball at a camp in Naples, Maine and I’d made a tape from when I was in college. A buddy of mine’s mom was in a wedding in Buffalo. Long story short, she goes to the wedding and there’s a general manager of a radio station in Buffalo there and they were looking for a sports talk radio guy. She told him that a close friend of her son was looking to do that. I sent the tape to the radio station and I ended up getting the job in Buffalo. I made $12,000 a year. August 24, 1991 was my first day on the radio.
LIM: Do you still have the tape from that show?
CC: It’s probably somewhere. It wasn’t good. Those jobs don’t exist anymore. That’s why there’s not a boatload of young guys coming up that will be the future of talk radio.
LIM: What do you mean by that?
CC: You don’t just wake up and get good at it. You have to understand some of the nuances of radio. What I was good at, without knowing it, was I could always reach a male audience. I could talk to guys, but I couldn’t do updates or read from a script. I was terrible at it. But if you turned on a microphone and just let me go, that was my skill set. And I couldn’t get enough of it, so I wanted to do it as much as possible.
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