The past two years of economic downturn have created a lack of funding and specific sponsorship for Bob Haynie’s radio show here at WNST-AM 1570. It’s a financial reality that we need sponsorship dollars to make any programming or content viable here at WNST. And our listeners – and now our readers and our community at WNST.net – are the people who are the ultimate arbiters of our success by supporting our local sponsors who count on the business to support their families.

The bottom line: despite our love of Bob and his excellent radio show, sponsorship to Bob Haynie’s radio show on WNST was down significantly and despite our best efforts to change that in partnership with Bob, we couldn’t reach terms on an arrangement moving forward.

When you, as the reader of this blog or this site, actually financially support the local businesses you see here, the employees of WNST get to keep their jobs and feed their families doing sports media with us. We don’t talk about it much – actually we probably don’t say it nearly enough – but this is the reality of our media world in 2010 and our local sponsors are the reason we’re here. Period!

As much as this might come as a shock to some it’s also an opportunity to educate our WNST.net community as to how our new media sports business works circa 2010 — and it’s evolved far beyond a “ traditional radio” model:

Local sponsors spend money with WNST to promote their businesses and events. When they spend that money, I keep our lights on, our bills paid and our website up, running and improving. We then redistribute the money to employees like Bob Haynie, who feed their families and keep you constantly entertained and informed about Baltimore sports on the radio and on the web.