The recent passing of Michael Osterhout, the general manager who created the old (WRBQ, Q-105) “Q Zoo,” is worth reflecting upon for a couple of reasons.
Osterhout was ahead of his radio time, an auditory visionary. He rocked the broadcast world back when drive-time, FM radio was pedestrian, “time-and-temperature” stuff. He went rogue and let the witty, irreverent likes of Scott Shannon and Cleveland Wheeler have at it. They took no rhetorical prisoners and parodied everything–from local politics to race to the Bucs to their own sponsors. Political correctness was an oxymoron. Double entendres were routinely embedded during exchanges that were more like lampoon tag.
As a reporter for the Tampa Bay Business Journal back then, I welcomed any and all respites from the button-down world of business journalism and all those who took themselves all too seriously. I can still recall lingering in the Westshore parking garage until commercial break. I mean leave in the middle of a County Commission burlesque just to avoid being a few minutes late for work?
The Osterhout-inspired raillery became unprecedentedly successful across the demographic spectrum. In fact, Q-105, right here in less-than-edgy, ’80s Tampa, became a national top-10 radio station. The in-your-face, Q-Zoo formula, including putting broadcast on television, would soon go national. Think Howard Stern. Or not. But it all quip-started right here.
Ironically, there was never a mainstream parallel in print–although there was a spurt in the business-publication niche that would include, among others, the Maddux Report, along with TBBJ, the incumbent Florida Trend and beefed-up dailies.
But a sure sign of a market maturing into a sophisticated, media-savvy one is the presence of a first-class city magazine. As in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia. It’s part of a big city’s signature. A glossy monthly that can wax street smart as well as smart ass. That can cover the arts like an aesthetic insider and city hall like a political junkie. That will profile celebrities, herald fine dining and investigate the scoundrels and hypocrites in our midst. It can wind up on a CEO’s desk as well as the coffee table at home.
But Tampa never got much beyond advertorial hybrids and sham publications that sold “stories” to would-be advertisers and trafficked in page-after-page filler of the same self-important VIPs mugging through collagen lips for vanity-press cameras.
But it came close once: the Tampa Magazine of the early ’80s. No need to rehash its demise here. But the lesson learned was obvious: You don’t take on Gasparilla, expose the unflattering underbelly of Tampa bluebloods at play and expect to hold on to necessary, cornerstone advertising.
Tampa Magazine knew the formula, but it couldn’t implement it here. At the same time, ironically, that Michael Osterhout was breaking the mold and creating an FM exemplar.