Mike Dudding, the former licensee of KDSN-AM & FM in Denison, Iowa, recently retired after a most successful 40-plus years on the air and in broadcasting. “Unlike so many licensees who simply pulled the plug and walked away, Mr. Dudding realized he had a valuable property he had developed over the years,” notes Media Information Bureau Ken Benner.
He also salutes the licensee of KLQP-FM, serving the Minnesota towns of Madison and Dawson.
Here’s what Ken has to say about Mike:
With assistance of the nation’s largest and most prominent broadcast brokerage firm, Dudding sold his combo and retired to enjoy his life-time hobby of beautiful artwork.
It was he who coined the phrase, decades ago: “Serve well your communities’ coverage area and they will serve you well in return.”
He deserves Legendary status, because with his coverage area his bottom line proportionally put his operation at or close to the top of any other broadcast operation in the country. I know this for fact, because he has shared his bottom line with me several times. Indeed, we are the best of friends.
His entire staff was always treated just like family. His clients and listener audience also felt a part of the family. At the County Fair and other events, everybody had a chance to be on the airwaves for the first time in their lives — one moment all of us will never forget.
Birthday greetings, greetings for wedding anniversaries, extraordinary school children awards were frequent, all call-in items for sale included everything imaginable, and things really got sold fast as the phone lines lit up fast for each program.
Over the years there have been many traveling “self anointed experts” roaming the country offering to advise stations’ the means to build sales and improve management decisions while mainly promoting themselves. I have long urged Mike to develop the “Mike Dudding Academy for Professional Broadcast Management.”
I hope he takes me seriously. We’re already prepping a text book for it.
I now take you to Madison, Minn., the city of my childhood. It has a population of 2,000 and is located about 15 miles east of South Dakota.
Another of the nation’s most successful Legends in Radio Broadcasting is Maynard Meyer, licensee of KLQP-FM, Madison/Dawson. Meyer also serves as a member of the city council, as a member of the Fair Board, and as a member of just about everything else. He is known and loved by everyone in his approximately 30,000 listener signal coverage radius.
To listeners, Meyer is known as a rapid-fire comedian heard every early morning in West Central Minnesota and a good part of Western South Dakota. In fact, KARE-11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, sent a crew out to cover his broadcast operation. It was one of the most beautiful tributes ever made for a radio station.
You have got to punch up the KLQP website. There, you will find the most illustrious coverage of absolutely everything happening in his coverage area. You can even listen to his station 24/7 and enjoy every minute of a well-balanced mix of news, sports, weather, music and the most enjoyable humor Maynard brings to the airwaves. You’ll find almost every business in both Madison and sister-city Dawson tuned to “Q-92.1 with 25,000 wonderful watts 24/7.”
Maynard’s tower is located just a few yards from the 45th global parallel. I once playfully voiced a liner ID for him. It read:
You are listening to KLQP-FM, Madison/Dawson – operating from the 45th parallel, midway between the Equator and the North Pole!
How’s that for implied coverage?
At a time when big companies dominate the headlines, lets salute Maynard Meyer and Mike Dudding, and put them in the “Broadcasters’ Hall of Fame.”
Ken Benner is an independent Alternative FCC Compliance Certification Inspector and a research analyst for the Coalition for Transparency, Clarification and Simplification of Regulations pertaining to American Broadcasting. Benner has more than 55 years of experience providing service to the broadcast industry.
The views expressed by Media Information Bureau columnists are those of the writer only and not of the editorial board of the Radio + Television Business Report or its parent, Streamline Publishing.
