I was listening to 94 WIP on Tuesday afternoon and producer Jack Fritz was doing his “top five at five” routine. This was either before or after the seemingly-mandatory daily phone calls from Chuck from Mount Airy, O.G. Wade, Black Gritty, and Herb from the Northeast.

The topic was “awards that WIP personalities deserve.” Good topic. I’d give Howard Eskin and Angelo Cataldi the “take a fuckin’ hike” award, but that’s just my opinion. Jack got to his second bullet point here and then Pat Gallen caught a stray:


“You can roll out of bed and win a local Emmy.”

Shots fired!

There’s a lot to parse here:

  1. Marconi Awards are given by the National Association of Broadcasters. They give out station of the year, personality of the year, shit like that. In 2021, KYW won “Major Market Station of the Year” and KTCK down in Dallas won the sports category.
  2. Fritz is right about the jamokes up in Boston who always win everything. Those shows up there are overrated. They win all of the industry polls at Barrett Sports Media, too. Toucher and Rich, Felger and Mazz – it’s all horrendous radio.
  3. WIP should win a Marconi at some point. I actually can’t believe they haven’t won one yet. Have they never won a Marconi, ever? I’ll do some investigation on that, and by “investigating” I mean Googling.
  4. <Donald Trump voice> Jealous Jack Fritz should issue a public apology to Pat Gallen!

RE: the local Emmys, yes, the truth is that these are relatively easy to win. I’ve got one, so that tells you all you need to know, but I worked hard riding Walt Hunter’s coattails back then. Larry Mendte, meantime, has 47 or so and they ain’t going to polish themselves:

photo submitted to Philly Mag by Larry back in the day

The thing about the local Emmy awards is that you submit a reel to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and choose which category you want to enter. You pay an entry fee, which goes towards putting together the whole ceremony, ordering the statues, blah blah blah, etc. The rub is that any number of people can enter, so in our case, Walt was reporting live for something like 20 straight hours from Atlantic City while Hurricane Sandy obliterated the place, our photographer Jim was on scene with him, stuck on a hotel balcony, and I was pulling something like an 18-hour shift at HQ getting all of their video sorted and edited and broadcasted on television. The three of us entered the “general assignment report within 24 hours” category together, but the other two guys were on scene and did the heavy lifting, so it is what it is. I’ve seen winning groups of six or seven people all up on stage with their statues, but maybe one person did more work than the others.

Regardless, the voting is done by other NATAS chapters, so your peers are selecting the winners, which does mean something. We compete with the other Philly stations, Pittsburgh, etc, in the “Mid-Atlantic” region, while Jack and Jon are talking about national competition with the Marconi Awards, so they are correct that it’s harder to win their awards. It’s easier in television, at least on the regional level, while WIP is going up against Dallas, Boston, Chicago, and the other big city stations.

Anyway, the swipe at Gallen was unnecessary! We expect Jack Fritz to apologize on the next show. Then Ingy calls in to say something really stupid. 215-592-9494.