Jeff Blumenthal over at the Philadelphia Business Journal has a good story up on their site right now, an interview with Entercom CEO David Field, who now oversees the former CBS radio station cluster from new digs at 2400 Market Street.

Entercom now controls  94 WIP, 1210 WPHT, KYW News Radio, and the other stations that were operated by CBS prior to the 2017 sale.

Blumenthal’s two-part story is behind a paywall, but I’ll share three quotes and then you can go check out the rest and perhaps subscribe:

On whether the company is making money from podcasting

Podcasting, with the combination of Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Studios, we now have a business that is representing 150 million downloads a month. It includes some of the best and highest-rated podcasts in the country. The marketplace is now a $600 million market. And the estimates are that it will be a $1 billion market by the end of 2020 or in 2021. And we will have a nice chunk of that. We announced that the businesses we purchased are now doing $48 million to $50 million a year in sales. But that market is growing by a 25% rate. Those are public analyst estimates. So we feel we’ll be able to grow nicely as we continue to build on that business. What’s really nice is how it works symbiotically with our core business. Pineapple Street and Cadence have done great work. But they have not had the benefit of a discovery platform that we have. So when you think about the crowded world of podcasting today and how you get new podcasts discovered, how do you build audiences? And there’s no better place to build audiences than broadcast radio.

Not sure what any of that really means, but sounds like there’s a lot of room to grow with podcasting, to the point where they can fine tune a revenue model that makes sense.

On the future of terrestrial radio with the growth of other technologies

We think it’s a real opportunity for us. Think about the world was like three or four years ago. If you missed the Doug Peterson interview, you missed it and you never get to listen to it. Today, as a Radio.com subscriber, you would get a push notification coming down to alert you that Doug Peterson is about to come on the air. So if you are like many, you would say thank you, you click on and you listen. But it turns out you’re busy with a conversation with me or someone else and you can’t listen. So you go back. Or maybe you listen to one of the podcasts you have. Or maybe you go back and rewind and listen to the show.

Yeah it’s a good shout. Radio.com now lets you fast forward and rewind during a broadcast, so if you’re listening to Jon Marks and Ike Reese, for instance, and you missed Ross Tucker at 3 p.m., you can pull up the stream and go listen to that without having to wait for the station to post the audio separately. Social media also helps the interfacing with traditional terrestrial radio.

On a succession plan for WIP morning host Angelo Cataldi (who has since signed a multi-year deal with Entercom)

I’m a huge fan of Angelo and WIP and the whole morning show and a regular listener to the station. We are blessed to have some great personalities like Angelo and many of the others that work on our team across the country. I certainly hope Angelo is here for many, many more years but when the time comes for him to move on, I am certain our programming folks will have somebody outstanding to come in and continue on the journey.

I have no comment on this.

Here’s Jeff’s story: