Jon “Stugotz” Weiner appears to have turned down his one-time dream job of running WFAN.
With Spike Eskin set to leave the program director job at the iconic sports talk radio station to become an afternoon drive host at WIP in his native Philadelphia, the search for his replacement eventually reached Weiner, the longtime co-host of Dan Le Batard’s show.
Weiner grew up on Long Island and previously built 790 the Ticket in Miami, a station that at one time included Le Batard’s show as well as programs hosted by current Cubs play-by-play announcer Jon “Boog” Sciambi and ESPN play-by-play broadcaster and Los Angeles afternoon drive host Jorge Sedano.
Neil Best of Newsday had taken an “educated guess” that Weiner had been offered the WFAN job, and Weiner addressed the rumors on Le Batard’s Meadowlark Media show on Thursday.
“WFAN, I have said this a number of times, is the reason that I got into this industry,” Weiner said, as covered by Awful Announcing.
“I always imagined if I went there at this stage in my career, I would go there as a host. That was not the position that was offered to me. The position that was offered to me, that I have turned down by the way, was to run the entire station. Was to be the program director — they’ve had two, I would have been the third — to be the program director at WFAN. [Dan] and I spoke about it. I gave it a lot of thought. Times have changed in our industry. That job [previously] paid a lot more than it does today.”
Le Batard and Weiner have been cohosts for 20 years as of September.
Weiner continued to list the reasons why he felt he had to say no thank you to WFAN’s parent company, Audacy.
“I decided to stay [on Le Batard’s show], in large part, because of two things. One: Boomer Esiason refused to take a pay cut,” he joked.
“The other reason I didn’t take it is I sat down, I’m thinking about this, I’m going over the positives, the negatives. My wife loves it down here, she loves the life that we have down here. But Dan, it really got down to this: Boomer not taking a pay cut, and I didn’t trust myself to not fire the people whose job I wanted at WFAN. And state income tax.”
They clarified that this was “not a bit.”
Another aspect in Weiner’s decision-making is that he has — and takes ample advantage of — unlimited vacation at Meadowlark Media, and the WFAN program director job is a grueling amount of work.
“I really, really wanted to do it,” Weiner said. “But in the end, there were too many hurdles to clear and we just couldn’t clear them all.”
He acknowledged, tongue-in-cheek but probably also with truthfulness, that if WFAN had upped its offer by another $500,000 he would have taken the job.
