Moneyball: How Deep is Your Bench?
(With apologies to the Bee Gees, of course.)
Last week’s tragic loss of WMMR’s Pierre Robert is a timely reminder that the most valuable on-air hosts are difficult (some might say “impossible”) to replace. If you were a fan of Pierre’s or work in the radio business, your social media feeds are full of tributes to him. As I write this on Sunday, there’s an impromptu celebration of Pierre’s life occurring on Rittenhouse Square in Center City Philadelphia, brought together by WMMR’s celebrated morning show, Preston & Steve (2025 winners of the Marconi Award for Major Market Personality of the Year).
Pierre was a 70-year-old unicorn. There’s no other way to describe an on-air host who defied convention, ran on his own clock (“Pierre Standard Time”), gathered his listeners together with the words, “Greetings, Citizens,” and was on the air on the same radio station for over 40 years — a station still categorized in the same format it was all those years before.
Living in Philly, you get accustomed to people saying, “Go Birds,” in lieu of “thank you” at this time of year. This week, some of those occasions have been replaced with folks muttering, “Pierre,” and shaking their head sadly. The loss has been felt deeply here.
While no one wants the task of figuring out what to do to fill Pierre’s Chuck Taylors, the folks at Beasley are blessed to have a lot of options. Ryan Shuttleworth (pictured above in lederhosen and his own Chuck Taylors) is the current producer of the show (and himself a weekend/fill-in host at the station). Additionally, the on-air relationship between the Preston & Steve Show and Pierre was a great one — not always the case across high-profile on-air personalities — which meant that the dividing line between the two shows was often blurry. At this point, Philly area radio fan groups are abuzz arguing over which station part-timer or past full-timer is the obvious choice to carry Pierre’s daypart forward.
Would your station(s) be so well-positioned if faced with the sudden loss of a host? Who’s on your bench? WMMR is fortunate to have other strong, long-term personalities who can carry the station’s cultural torch. If you don’t have the blessing of a deep bench, you need to have a plan to maintain the station’s identity in the event of a loss. The unthinkable does happen sometimes.
With smaller airstaffs, you may find future hosts you could develop from other parts of your staff. Often, the most successful transitions come from within — those already steeped in the station’s history and brand. Someone currently on your promotional team may be your next host. Or, you may need to be looking beyond radio, scouring local podcast hosts to find your next host. In an age of homogenization, radio’s enduring strength lies in its personal, authentic human connection.
I never met Pierre, but I do feel his loss, both as a Philadelphian and as someone in the radio biz. His producer, Ryan, is the namesake of a neighborhood restaurant owned by his grandparents where my wife and I are known to dine. It’s there that we’ve gotten to know Ryan and felt his passion for radio and for WMMR (a station that helped kindle my interest in radio and where my wife enviably had been an intern many, many years ago).
RIP, Pierre Robert. — Leigh Jacobs
