Courtesy The Patroit News

(June 8, 2009) When Jed Donahue abandoned his 5-7 p.m. weekday show on WTKT (1460 AM) in January, sports talk radio in an otherwise growing media market all but died.

The gatekeeper of sports discourse in the state retained his Saturday show, heard on 12 affiliates around the region. But the rest of the week was left to the standard syndicated mouths, all yelling about national-market issues from thousands of miles away. Midstate and regional sports were left in the breach.

All of this merely extended an industry trend away from localization and toward national product.

"I just sort of got burned out, honestly," said Donahue, an Ohioan who came to the midstate in 1987 and has been involved in sports talk here in one way or another ever since.

Radio is a tough business anywhere. When you sell your own ad time and go it on your own as Donahue did much of the last decade, it can be brutal. The hours stink, the company you keep tends toward too much alcohol and not enough sleep at normal hours. It's no way to raise a family or maintain a marriage.

"I've had two relationships go boom with it," Donahue said. "You're doing stuff at night, on the weekends. It's real tough on families. It had a lot to do with why things bottomed out. I went home and went away for a while. There are sacrifices you make, no doubt about that."

Donahue has found an alternative revenue stream. He has, for the last two years, been vice president of sales and programming for fledgling TV station WHVL (Channel 29) in State College, where he now makes his home after 20 years living in Harrisburg.

Only problem is, sports talk is in Donahue's blood. He's thinking of bringing the weekday show back.

Unlike many radio hosts, he owns his show. So he can fire it up and sell it himself whenever he pleases.

For more than a decade, Donahue sold the ads himself, made the cold calls and hooked up the stations on his Sports Jam Network. That way, he couldn't be extinguished on the whim of some out-of-town consultant working for one of the capricious chains that runs the majority of radio these days.

If WTKT, owned by Clear Channel Communications, or some other local outlet will have him, Donahue could be back on the air daily by fall.

It's not easy, especially in this economy, doing the grunt work of advertising yourself. But Donahue made that call in 1997 when he saw that WTKT's parent, WHP (580 AM), could be gobbled up by a broadcast conglomerate. He has never regretted the decision.

"I knew WHP would be sold to Clear Channel. I knew I had to move to control my career path when I'd be 45 or 50. No one was going to control me but me.

"I don't take benefits. I don't take a salary. I'll make a good show.

"I didn't want some guy who'd maybe been to Pennsylvania once or twice in his life determine what was going to happen in my life. Nah-ah. No way."

Donahue is the first to say that Clear Channel's current WHP and WTKT management, especially programming director R.J. Harris, "has been good to me." Still, it's probable that only a resolute independent such as Donahue can make sports talk go in a market like this one anymore. That's because a major market like Philadelphia is usually a prerequisite to spur any station to invest in its own region in the current economy.

Ad sales have plummeted. Satellite radio and the Internet have taken slices out of the pie. And so personnel costs are being slashed at all local stations. The first thing that goes is local content.

For a station making hard choices, it's a lot easier to relinquish some of the local market, run syndicated ESPN Radio personalities such as the bland Mike Tirico or the various annoying Fox Sports Radio screamers. Or just forget sports talk altogether and opt for national right-wing rant specialists such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Their listeners are easily herded to the ad trough, their demographics are uniform and they are devoted buyers of whatever their hosts sell -- be it ideas or products.

To turn that trick on a local basis using sports talk as a lure is not as easy as getting behind a mike and yakking about Penn State football for two hours every evening. While PSU is definitely the beast of this market, the Harrisburg-Lebanon-Lancaster-Carlisle-York metroplex is fragmented among sports interest.

While, say, Hannity can zero in on a national pool of blue-collar white males from 35 to 49, what is the profile of a midstate sports fan? The demo spans a broad spectrum -- men, women; black, white; blue-collar, white-collar; urban, rural; East Shore, West Shore, Perry County hills, Lancaster County plains; Ravens fans in York County, Steelers zealots in Middletown and Highspire and Steelton; Penn State backers up 322 and pockets of PSU haters and Notre Dame devotees sprinkled throughout.

Ad sales are the basis of any product. But to sell you have to know what your buyer wants. And from a sports talk standpoint, this market is not easily pigeonholed.

All that said, the most intense and concentrated fan base around here is unquestionably PSU's. If you're going to run a sports show, Penn State football must be addressed 365 days a year.

Donahue knows this. And he's ecstatic that the Nittany Lions are again of Big Ten-champion caliber and the bad old days of 2000-04 are a speck in the rearview:

"That was the worst, when Penn State was going bad. I would take three deep breaths before the music came on. I was every caller's wet nurse.

"You started getting people who wanted to take personal shots on the air. I think people who take shots at these kids, you've got to take a look in the mirror."

Worse than the crabby audience early in the millennium was the fact that ad sales were waning and so was Donahue's affiliate pool. In 2000 and early 2001, he was down to two -- WIOV (1240 AM) in Reading and WCHX (105.5 FM) in Lewistown . Due to ownership changes at WHP, he had no affiliate in the one market he needed most -- Harrisburg.

"I was freaking," Donahue said. "I was like, 'Oh my God, is this going to make it or not?' I was wondering, are my advertisers going to hang in there?"

And a lot of people were depending on him. Donahue was divorced. His own kids were all in grade school (they are now 17, 19 and 21). And the woman with whom he had a relationship had two grade-school boys.

"I basically had five kids. It was a wild-ass existence. I was a nervous wreck. You're jumpy. It's hard to concentrate.

"There were days when I said, what am I going to do? Every day, trying to go on the air with all of the anxieties of running your own business and waiting on checks, trying to [attract] certain stations and trying to show confidence and not look desperate when you're trying to sell advertising.

"You're trying to keep an air about yourself when your life is a Category 5. It was the path I chose. But it was brutal, man."

Things began to turn around in May 2001 when Harris and the formation of WTKT's "The Ticket" gave Donahue back the Harrisburg market.

"Everything stabilized from there. Everything started to rebuild."

Including his personal life. Donahue has what he calls a "serious relationship" with long-distance partner Patty, a technical engineer at a station in Knoxville, Tenn., as well as a die-hard Vols fan.

It's going well, he says:

"Maybe it's because of the distance thing. I haven't had a chance to totally [tick] her off yet."