Good Morning, Arkansas!
Neal Gladner prepares to sign off after decades in broadcasting
It only takes about four words in any conversation with Neal Gladner, executive director at the Arkansas Broadcasters Association, to reveal a God-given tool kit for the airwaves. Gladner’s voice, a rolling baritone in a mahogany barrel, was made to be heard, and heard it has been.
In fact, if Gladner’s life had taken any different turn — if he had never been involved in broadcasting, never sat in a booth to deliver the news, never felt the microphone millimeters from his lips as he ran through headlines or gave weather and traffic every 10 minutes — it would have been a criminal waste of resources.
Yet it came dangerously close to happening
“I grew up in New Jersey, and WABC was the radio station I listened to as a kid, but I didn’t grow up wanting to be a disc jockey or anything like that,” he said. “We moved to Seattle when I was 14, and I went to high school in Redmond, which is a suburb of Seattle. I got involved there with the yearbook and with the high school newspaper, and that’s really where I got a love of journalism.
“I got into radio by mistake. I wanted to be a journalist.”
Gladner was born at a flashpoint in the history of American media. Radio had been the dominant mass communications medium for decades before a nondescript new technology, television, began to seep into American homes in the 1940s. By the time Gladner came along in the 1950s, TV ownership was exploding coast to coast.
“When I was a kid, I liked both radio and TV,” he said. “We had, as did many families at that time, a small black-and-white TV, and there’s certain things you just remember. I remember being out somewhere as a family and having to rush home on a Sunday evening, Feb. 9, 1964, to see the appearance of a British band on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was my first introduction to a big event on television, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but I didn’t care that much. I was only 9 years old.
“I remember Saturday morning cartoons and Superman, which was a black-and-white series that was not a cartoon. I remember when the teachers wheeled a television into our classroom when President Kennedy was assassinated.”
After high school, Gladner landed at what was then Bellevue Community College in Washington, where he made a beeline to the advisor of the school newspaper and made a pitch to be sports editor. It was a fateful play that would forever alter his career path.
“I still remember, it was a fellow named Craig Sanders, and he was also responsible for what was brand new at the college, which was the radio station, KBCS,” he said. “I told him I wanted to be the sports editor of the paper, and he just kind of said, ‘Well, you know what? I need more people to take radio classes. If you’ll take a radio section, I’ll let you be the sports editor.’”
Gladner fell in love with being on the air in college, and his enthusiasm for the medium and drive to be a news reporter soon landed him an internship and then employment at a station in a Seattle suburb and then a big market gig in the city itself. It was not, however, a journey without its growing pains.
“I remember taking a tape I put together, a newscast, to a guy at a rock station in Seattle. He was doing news there, and by this time, I was getting interested in doing news,” he said. “I put together one of my college newscasts, and I took it over to him. Not only did I think it was outstanding, I thought, boy, this guy’s going to listen to this and say, ‘We’ve got to hire this guy. I’m going to go find the news director right now.’ Instead, he just laid me low and let me know in every way possible just how awful I really was.
“That was a long drive home after that very first session, but I was lucky in that he said, ‘If you want to come back, you can,’ and he and one other person there helped me get better. I didn’t realize how bad I was until people who I admired were kind enough to pretty much tell me I stunk.”
Gladner proved an apt pupil and got jobs on the air at stations in Seattle and Spokane, at both stops moving from anchor-reporter positions to various supervisory roles, including news director and programming director and even the occasional stint in sales. Along the way, he also experienced the facts of life in the business, that of stations being sold, which brought new formats and new upper management cleaning house from time to time.
“When I was director of news and programming in Seattle, we got a new general manager, and he had somebody who was his news director somewhere else, so he wanted that guy to be the news director, which was not uncommon,” he said. “That was my first experience of being terminated in the business, but back then, you wore termination as a badge of honor. I mean, everybody got terminated and went on to a better job, and that’s what happened to me. I became a news and program director in Spokane.”
Eventually, the call came from 102.9 KARN in Arkansas, and Gladner landed in the Natural State as news and program director at the station in 1984, moving to general manager three years later, and stayed there until 2008. KARN was purchased by Citadel, which was, in turn, purchased by a Wall Street group, retaining the name but not the culture, which led Gladner to seek other options.
His long stint at KARN had created a number of connections and relationships, which resulted in jobs for people he knew, including auto magnate Larry Crain Sr., who had diversified into radio stations in Arkansas; a Little Rock colleague who had set up shop in Louisiana; and, finally, returning to a media company based in Hot Springs before taking over the Arkansas Broadcasters Association in late 2023.
“That sounds like a lot of moving,” he said, “but for a radio career, it’s not that many moves.”
Gladner said the association job was another payoff of his years spent in the local market and the many relationships he forged in previous gigs. He said as he approaches the end of his career, he likes the symmetry that the executive director’s role represents.
“This, to me, was a tremendous opportunity to really be of service to the industry that had treated me so well,” he said. “There were some things that the association needed, such as significantly improving our annual convention and to be of better service to our membership and to bring radio and television together as broadcasters.
“We addressed those through a combination of improving member communications, expanding some of the things the association was already doing for its members and then making sure members knew that those services were available.”
Gladner said it was understood up front that he was a short-term hire and plans to retire this fall. As he approaches full-time golf and family time, he is as convinced as ever of the important role traditional broadcasting plays in the rapidly evolving world of media. At the same time, he said the challenge for the broadcasters in Arkansas is to think progressively to maintain that relevance.
“I think you still have to remember, No. 1, whether you’re a radio station or a TV station, what brings us together is that we’re content providers first and foremost,” he said. “Our essential role is to develop great content, which starts with knowing your audience and then developing content that your audience wants. Then we need to remember that there’s different ways of delivering that content.
“There are television stations that have these secondary channels that are available on the internet or on smart TVs or on your phone that have content that they build, something they might not be able to use on their linear channel. It’s not over the air; it’s over the internet, but it’s delivering content that people want. I think the biggest thing that’s impacted the industry is the desire to listen to something or watch something when you want it, not when the station wants to give it to you. That’s the business we’re in today.”
As for radio specifically, it is clear he believes something has been lost to the decades of consolidation of Main Street independent stations into vast corporate warehouses, driving efficiencies at what he sees as the cost of local connection. For every person in society today who fears being replaced by artificial intelligence, there is a handful of radio lifers who have already had a taste of something similar in preformatted playlists and voice tracking, created and piped in from well outside a given market.
“I remember, I think it was ‘97, but it might’ve been ‘98, where radio companies might turn over twice in a day. They might get bought in the morning and then bought again that afternoon,” he said. “I remember at the National Association of Broadcasters meeting, one of the most popular buttons that people were wearing said, ‘Are You My Boss?’
“As this has happened, you get things like voice tracking, which is a computer program that allows you to lay down your voice tracks. Let’s say you’re doing 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. or 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. or whatever your shift is. Voice tracking allows you to do that whole shift in under an hour. You’re playing three or four songs, and then you talk, and then three or four songs and then you talk. You add in your breaks. What’s happened with some of the bigger conglomerates now is that it might be a midday person on a corporate radio station in Little Rock is really in some city in Tennessee or some city in Texas.”
Despite all of the changes in format, platforms and business plans, Gladner said he still sees, however faintly, the strands of magic that first attracted him to the broadcast booth, elements that still separate the most successful stations from merely the largest.
“From the time I got into radio until today, you look at the people who are super successful — one of the things they all exude is authenticity,” he said. “The days of being a great announcer are long gone. The days of being a personality who has relatability, has relational experiences with the audience, those are the people who do really well. When I was evaluating talent, I always evaluated what I referred to as the three P’s: pleasant, presence and personality. They don’t have to have great 1950s pipes, but their presence just emanates out of the radio, commands your attention, makes you think ‘That’s somebody I would enjoy going to have a beer with.’
“Radio done well is still very personal, you know? It’s a lot more than just free. The very best radio stations are the ones that still talk about the things that matter to people in their community. I’ve talked to a lot of mayors, and they don’t get calls about the five-year strategic plan or the city budget. For the most part, mayors get calls about trash not getting get picked up or potholes in the road. People still want to know what’s going on in their communities, and radio has the ability to deliver that uniquely.”
NEAL GLADNER ON MENTORS
“I would tell anybody who’s getting into business, whether it’s radio or television or whatever, to get some mentors. Get some people who don’t work in your building who can be truthful with you about yourself. I was blessed to be born with a decent voice, a good set of pipes, as they like to say in our business, but I didn’t know how to use them when I was starting out. The mentors I was fortunate to have taught me how to use them, and they taught me better news writing. I mean, they were really, really kind and generous with their time to just take me under their wing, so my advice to anybody getting into any business — obviously, you’ve got to listen to your boss, but also to get some mentorship from somebody who’s not in your building if you can do it.”
NEAL GLADNER ON TRANSITIONING TO LEADERSHIP
“I remember as a reporter thinking to myself, ‘What’s the news director doing in his office all the time?’ Then, when I became one for the first time, the station sent me to a management seminar put on by the Radio and Television News Directors Association.
“I’m paraphrasing, but the guy leading it said, ‘Let me start out by saying this to you new news directors: Most of you don’t belong in this room. You got here by either being the best anchor or the best reporter, and you don’t realize yet that you’ve been through a complete career change. It’s no longer your job to be the best reporter; it’s your job to get the best out of other people, and you should not think that because you got promoted, other people are going to start working harder.’
“I still remember that as a real wake-up call. You find out pretty quickly that success in management is success through others. It’s no longer your success; it’s your success determined by what your team does.”
NEAL GLADNER ON SECRETS OF SELLING
“Lots of different organizations will train, in their own language, on, ‘If you take care of your customer, your customer will take care of you,’ meaning spend a whole lot less time wondering what you can sell them and a whole lot more time wondering what they need that your product can solve.
“I think all those years as a reporter helped me become more successful as a salesperson and then, later, a sales leader because I was good at asking questions. You can ask people about their business in a truly curious way and understand which part of their business is strong and which part of their business needs help. An established business has a different set of needs than a startup, so there are different answers to those questions.
“When I was hiring folks, give me someone who knows how to really serve a client, how to relate to a business owner and who cares about the business owner’s challenges, and I’ll teach them the radio business. The key to success is solving a problem.”
NEAL GLADNER ON DEALING WITH CHANGE
“When [102.9 KARN] was first sold to Citadel, that was a massive change from being an individually owned radio station. One of the things I learned is when change comes about, study and understand the change before you react to it. Try to put off the emotional desire to react to it right away because I think people would often find that the change does not turn out to be exactly what they thought it was at first.”
NEAL GLADNER ON RESILIENCY
“There was a time when I was working in corporate radio that I was fairly unhappy and really thought about leaving the business. I talked to a friend who, at the time, ran an ad agency in town, and I asked him about it. He gave me some good advice about knowing your core competencies, your best skills, and knowing which ones are transferable to something else.
“The point he was making is you have to take stock of what you have, a skill that’s of value to somebody even in another industry. How can you use those skills to still take care of your family, to get a paycheck or to become an entrepreneur with some backing or something of that nature?
“For me, tenacity has been a great characteristic to have, and the time to have tenacity is when you don’t need it so that it becomes a habit. Then, when you’re facing a roadblock that seems insurmountable, you’ve got your tenacity to fall back on.”
Photo provided by Neal Gladner
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