Dollars and sense is a column about Chicago sports business and media.
In the last week of his career at WGN-TV, Dan Roan knew he was a big target.
“They’re doing their very best to get me to break down,” he said.
In the first “this is your life” segment WGN producers made for Roan, who is retiring after 38 years at the TV station, they ended with his grandchildren declaring it was time to get off TV and spend time with them.
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Roan, of course, almost started crying. I almost started crying.
Roan, 69, is lucky in that he’s going out on his own terms, having done his final show Thursday night. He went from Champaign to Chicago in 1984, a dream promotion for a kid from Keokuk, Iowa, who grew up loving the Cubs. Of course, back then, you couldn’t catch it all on WGN. Not in Keokuk, which is located in the southeast corner of Iowa.
“There was no cable,” he said. “Where I grew up, we had two television stations. One was a CBS and one was an NBC, and that was it.”
He was a Cubs fan because his grandfather was a Cubs fan and his father was a Cubs fan. And when he came to Chicago as a 30-year-old sportscaster, he knew where he wanted to work.
“I had interviewed at Ch. 2 and WGN on the same day, and I thought when I left the interviews, I probably could have had either one,” he said. “But I wanted to go to WGN, simply because of the Cubs. And then as it turned out, you know, we wound up with the Cubs, the Sox, the Bulls, the Hawks and even the Bears every now and then. So it’s been a full-service job, that’s for sure.”
WGN’s Dan Roan interviews Joe Maddon after the Cubs clinched the 2016 NL pennant at Wrigley Field. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)WGN became a superstation and kids in Iowa could watch Roan live out his dream. WGN was a regional sports network before they become popular, and that put Roan on the field and occasionally in the announcing booth, as he filled in for Harry Caray, Len Kasper and more over the years.
Roan was known as a strong writer and an unflappable broadcaster. To the ink-stained wretches like me, he was always there, always friendly and knowledgeable, and almost always dressed in case an emergency golf tournament broke out.
Shortly after Roan got to town, the Bulls drafted Michael Jordan. It was a big deal at the time, but it’s not like reporters were five-deep around Jordan at practice.
“I used to go up to the Angel Guardian gym up on the north side, they used to practice and there were days I would be up there talking to Kevin Loughery and I’m the only guy there, no other media people were there,” Roan said. “And after a week or so of watching Michael in practice, Loughery said, ‘You don’t want to be talking to me.’ He goes, ‘That’s the guy you want to be talking to right there.'”
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It was a different time. Roan, a basketball player at Illinois State, would later play in a three-on-three game for charity that saw him teamed with Jordan and Otis Wilson against Patrick Ewing, Dominique Wilkins and James Worthy.
“I mean, I’m like pinching myself,” he said. “What is going on here?”
One thing I’ve noticed in talking to reporters from Roan’s cohort: The Jordan years remain the gold standard in their minds and nothing has ever compared to that time, when they were front and center for the greatest story in sports.
“If you’re looking at it as kind of a period or a little era, you’d be hard-pressed to say that covering Michael and all that went with it wasn’t the highlight of anybody’s career, really,” he said.
The business has changed. TV reporters don’t get the access they used to get. The pandemic made it even worse. Roan was happy to be working, but not thrilled to be doing sportscasts from his basement. In the old days, the business was more cutthroat.
“Chicago, when I first began, was really a competitive market,” Roan said. “A lot of the sportscasters didn’t like one another, to be perfectly honest. I never had a problem with anybody and I don’t think anybody ever had a problem with me. But there were some guys that didn’t like each other. And it was ultra-competitive. Because really, back then that’s where everybody got their sports news. I mean, you could wait until the paper came out the next day, but in terms of immediacy, it was television. And now you know, you can get the same stuff live on your wristwatch that you’re gonna get on the 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock news.”
Roan lasted long enough to report on Walter Payton and work with Jarrett Payton. And he covered the White Sox’s World Series and was in the locker room as the Blackhawks celebrated their Stanley Cups, a perk of the TV job.
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And there’s the Cubs. He began his career covering the magical 1984 team that erased a playoff drought of nearly 40 years and his last big story was the Cubs winning it all again in 2016. Like millions of other Cubs fans, he thought about family members who didn’t live to see it happen. But Roan was there with a mic in his hand, a familiar face to Chicago sports fans.
“Kind of a fitting beginning and end, especially for a guy who was a Cub fan his whole life,” Roan said. “So it was great.”
And yes, by his last show, they got Roan to cry on air.
For a TV channel known for its tennis coverage, the Marquee Sports Network sure committed an unforced error this weekend.
As Paul Sullivan first reported in the Tribune and Jeff Agrest later followed for the Sun-Times, Marquee edited and censored reporters on a Cubs topic for its new talk show, “The Reporters,” on Sunday. Marquee general manager Mike McCarthy apologized for the decision in the Sun-Times and said the show, which was taped, will now be live. A Marquee spokesman confirmed it will air live at 10:30 a.m. Sunday.
“What happened was a decision was made on the fly,” said McCarthy, who was out of town during the taping. “It wasn’t indicative of scripting anybody at the network, in general. In fact, the show itself in previous episodes had some, you would think of it as fairly critical moments about the Cubs. A judgment was made and now we’re making the long-term decision of pivoting to live so people know there isn’t an intention to edit anything.”
In this episode, two reporters were debating GM Jed Hoyer’s “transparency” and “honesty” about the Cubs’ rebuild. As hot takes go, this was pretty mild. A Marquee employee stopped the taping because of a supposed technical problem and then said to drop this angle when taping resumed. That was a mistake that has tarnished the station’s credibility in the market.
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Hand up, “Dollars and sense” got beat on this story, which broke as I was driving to the South Side for a Tim Anderson column. I probably should have changed gears because messy media stories generally perform better than White Sox columns. (That’s a little inside media for you.)
I suppose I’m also compromised because I appeared on an earlier episode of “The Reporters.” In fact, Agrest theorized in a follow-up column Thursday this is all my fault. He thinks that I might’ve touched a nerve when I joked about Hoyer not liking that we call it a rebuild. He recorded the show and has me saying, “I know Jed doesn’t want us to call it a rebuild. He might come in here and hit the censor button on me.” (The show aired right after it was taped.) In my subsequent conversations with Marquee employees, that didn’t come up and I’ve been invited back, but, heck, I’ll always take credit for rabble-rousing.
Did the handsome reporter on the right offend the Cubs on a Marquee talk show? (Screenshot courtesy Marquee Sports Network)Honestly, I didn’t feel pressured about what we couldn’t say on the show, though I obviously came into it knowing I was going on the Cubs’ network.
What’s the future of the show? And should reporters, like me, be doing it? The answer to the first one is it will go on as planned. As for the second, if it’s going to be live, I’ll probably go on again and I’ll say what I feel.
I’ve been critical of Marquee from the beginning and will continue to crack jokes at its expense on Twitter. About half of my Cubs tweets are making fun of the station’s ubiquitous (and dubious) “medicine” sponsor, Prevagen and now I’ll throw some editing cracks in there. And who can forget my important work ridiculing the network for forcing its broadcasters to wear dress shirts, ties and jackets? The station later made commercials making fun of itself for that decision, which was rescinded before the 2021 season. As a part-time media critic, Marquee is a part of the beat.
After years of buildup, Marquee has been only slightly more successful than the team it covers. Its first season was the 60-game pandemic schedule. In its second, the broadcasters still couldn’t travel with the team because the Cubs weren’t 85 percent vaccinated. This season, they have to broadcast an awful Cubs team.
Marquee has its share of issues (for those who didn’t get the joke in the lede, Marquee shows a lot of tennis for a baseball station), but the biggest burden it carries is the promises made before its inception.
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It was implied and outright suggested that a standalone network would provide the Cubs with that mythical wheelbarrow of money to spend on players. Instead, after it launched (albeit in a pandemic), the Cubs stopped spending, traded their good players before free agency, and now field a subpar team barely worth your attention.
Our old columnist Andy Dolan, who has his own subscription newsletter, makes a good point in his recent column. What does this editing/censoring decision say about the rest of Marquee’s programming? For instance, how critical can they be on the postgame show? Maybe there’s no directive on what they can’t say, but what’s the overall vibe like when it comes to harsh criticism of a frustrating team?
My advice to Marquee would be: Cubs fans are your audience and they want honesty. Fans are going to watch the games on your network because they have to, but they’re only going to watch what’s on before and after the games if there’s trust that they’re being told the truth.
I don’t watch enough of the pre- and postgame shows, but Marquee is getting the reputation of having more homers than Patrick Wisdom — Boog Sciambi and Jim Deshaies notwithstanding. It was welcoming when guest color man Rick Sutcliffe took a break from his own boosterism to rip the Cubs’ sloppy play on a recent road trip.
I don’t think the intention of Marquee was to invite people like me on to sing the praises of the Cubs. But it also wasn’t to have people come on and torch the Ricketts family for being cheap or weird. In truth, if I’m going to do that, it’s going to be for The Athletic. The main purpose of me (aside from remuneration) appearing on shows like this is to market The Athletic and, yes, myself. I’m sure my peers feel the same. I was on a panel with the Sun-Times’ Chicago Sky writer Annie Costabile, who could use the extra attention on her beat. (Marquee is the new broadcast home of the Sky.) Because of this mess, Sun-Times sports editor Chris De Luca has banned his reporters from the show, according to Agrest’s story.
“The Reporters” doesn’t have to be like the old Sports Talk Live show, which was known informally as “Kap’s show” because the boisterous David Kaplan took it over after the early days of it being a Chicago Tribune marketing vehicle. I actually like the idea of a more low-voltage conversational show about sports — I once tried to pitch something similar to WBEZ — though I’m not sure that’s what viewers want these days. On ESPN, “The Sports Reporters” is long gone but “First Take” is a juggernaut.
Can this show survive this journalistic blunder? I think they need to address it on the show this week, which will have 670 The Score’s Danny Parkins serving as the host/panelist. A conversation about sports journalism (and ethics) would serve as a cleansing agent and, honestly, would be more interesting than talking about the Cubs, who, as you might’ve read or heard, are pretty bad. They lost to the Reds 20-5 on Thursday afternoon. I wish Marquee would’ve edited out Andrelton Simmons’ pitching debut. That was offensive.
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This story reminds me of the Cubs’ pre-2015 penchant for viral blunders, back when they couldn’t throw away old birthday cards or cakes, or introduce a pantless mascot, without it becoming its own news cycle. For years, it seemed like everything the Cubs did backfired. And I’m not going to lie, it was fun to write about.
In this case, I think Marquee had the right idea with its reporters show. But now it has to deal with the consequences of its own screwup. The cover-up, as they say, is always worse than the crime.
Not long ago, on a day that ends in a “y,” Marc Silverman was going on vacation. So, with “Silvy being Silvy,” he didn’t want to take a vacation day when he was flying out to Tahiti or Bora Bora or whichever exotic locale he was going to, so he asked Carmen DeFalco if he wanted to switch shifts. DeFalco, the Italian mensch of the station, agreed.
So Silvy hosted with John Jurkovic, and DeFalco joined Tom Waddle for the afternoon show. And this got Danny Zederman thinking.
“It was kind of refreshing,” he told me. “Every day I hear the same two guys talking to each other. Now I’m hearing two totally different conversations.”
Zederman, who was promoted to the station’s director of content in late January, replacing market manager Mike Thomas, came up with the “Spring Trading” idea. Every Wednesday in May, ESPN 1000 hosts switched spots and formed new tandems. Up was down, left was right, Silvy was hosting with Kap. Pandemonium.
“The reaction from the fans was outstanding,” Zederman said, noting Twitter, the station’s phone line and their Twitch stream as proof.
We had to make a few minor adjustments. Here is your NEW Spring Trading lineup for next Wednesday (5/25). Can’t wait! LFG! @thekapman @WaddleandSilvy @TWaddle87 @Jurko64 @CarmenDeFalco @chrisbleck @AdamAAbdalla pic.twitter.com/tpV2zmGQ4R
— Danny Zederman (@DZederman) May 20, 2022
No, he wasn’t trying out new shows. But maybe he should. ESPN 1000 is known for its stability, but if I were in Zederman’s shoes, I’d think about changing things up for longer than a day.
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“Listen, I’ve always said we have to keep evolving as our business changes,” Zederman said. “I want to pivot to more podcasts, streaming, video. I have big-picture thoughts about where the station should go. But the idea of this wasn’t to see what Waddle sounded like if he hosted with Jurko three hours a day. Once a week is a lot different than 20 hours a week.”
Zederman said his favorite pairing was this week’s show with Waddle and Jurkovic. I only listened for a little bit, but it was fun. I wasn’t thrilled with the conversation about Jurko’s body hair, but I did enjoy hearing about his aversion to online shopping.
“They had a plan going into the show, but what we planned and what came out on the air were two different things,” Zederman said. “They had great energy and chemistry.”
I’ve always enjoyed when those two do cross-talk, particularly when they talk football during the Bears season. I wouldn’t mind a weekly show with them in the fall, and I bet the listeners would agree.
Zederman thinks he might’ve overhyped “Silvy vs. Kap” because the two didn’t really spar when they hosted together this week on Kaplan’s morning show. He did think that Adam Abdalla came in with a strong plan to challenge Kaplan when they hosted earlier in the month.
“Abdalla knew exactly where he wanted to go with the Bears,” Zederman said. “He had the topics, stats, the backup. He knew exactly how to go at Kap and challenge him and have Kap go back at him.”
As a producer, Zederman, who joined the station 16 years ago, was famously opinionated, so it’s not like he’s Radio Jim Boylen on a power trip now.
“As a producer, I’d tell you if the show sucked,” he said. “I still do that as director of content. That hasn’t changed.”
He just has the power now to shake things up. As the new boss, Zederman has already moved one show, “Carmen & Jurko,” from 10-to-noon to noon-to-2 to give “Waddle & Silvy” a better lead-in. (Sorry, he can’t cancel Mike Greenberg’s show.) And he’s added a new Saturday morning show with Dionne Miller and Peggy Kusinski.
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“That’s been very well-received,” he said. “I go places and everyone is telling me, ‘I love that show, I love that show.’ You know both of them, they’re so great to work with. They’ve really embraced the show. It has their voice. They’re not doing an everyday sports talk show. It’s unique to themselves.”
As for what’s next, Zederman said he has big plans for the Bears season. Given how bad the team looks, he’d better have some pretty bold ideas. What’s Marc Trestman up to these days?
(Screenshot of Dan Roan: Courtesy WGN)
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