Forget Your Resume, Send Your Rap Sheet To Mike Buxser At West Virginia Radio Corp

Michael Agnello is returning to WCHS radio 580.

Former conservative radio talk show hosts who damaged their stations' brands by driving drunk, driving on a suspended, being arrested for assaulting their girlfriends or having affairs with women at churches they pastored should send their rap sheets to :

Mike Buxser
West Virginia Radio
1111 Virginia Street East
Charleston, WV 25301

See the story at  :: http://wvgazette.com/News/201106301029

For more on returning conservative talk show hypocrite, Google search terms "Michael Agnello" plus "South Central Regional Jail", "cash-only bond", "suspended license", "revoked license", "arrested", "affair with another minister".

16 January 2010. What Jeff Foster Gave Lexington. What Bobby Nelson Offers Charleston

Higginbotham At Large Saturday 16 January 2010:

In This Issue:

- Jeff Foster Organized It. Will Lexington Join His Job Club?

- What Charleston Needs: Former Huntington Mayor Bobby Nelson’s Radio Show

Jeff Foster Organized It. Will Lexington Join His Job Club?

My Lexington readers are going to want to know Jeff Foster. When Jeff emailed me to say that he was a fan of the things I’ve been preaching about how to find a better job and that he has organized a “job club” (Jeff is looking for a cooler, less generic name) I just had to help him spread the news.

I don’t want to steal all of Jeff’s thunder but during last night’s phone call Jeff told me he plans for his job club to be a real, roll up your sleeves and get something done workshop at each and every meeting. No venting about your bad boss who hates you and plans to fire you. No complaining about your company. While those things may all be true, one of the first things a job seeker has to learn is that employers tolerate no negativity at all so the job club should be a place where job seekers learn how to purge negativity from their speech and learn to restate or recast all negative info as a positive.

Jeff’s job club isn’t a place where the unemployed and the underemployed go to sip coffee and shoot the bull. Jeff wants recruiters and headhunters and other employment experts in the meetings to help job seekers “get inside the heads” of employers and recruiters and learn to think like the employer thinks in order to offer what the employer wants.

Jeff is definitely the right man for the job. Jeff is blessed with more clear-eyed empathy than almost anyone I know. I’m using the word “empathy” the way Asperger’s researchers use it. You see, people with Asperger’s are “mind-blind” meaning that they lack the ability to imagine how others feel, what others want. Empathy is the antonym of “mind-blindness” and if there is one thing all job seekers need it’s empathy, the ability to understand what an employer wants.

When I was serving as an “expert panelist” at a University of Kentucky career night event, I told the crowd that employers don’t give a damn what applicants want. They don’t care about your hopes and dreams. They don’t care how much money you want to make. They don’t care that you want “work / life balance.” All employers care about is what they want so as a job applicant you have to know what they want and assure them that you will give them what they want.

Jeff understands this better than almost anybody I know and he is blessed with more of that kind of empathy than almost anybody I can think of.

Jeff is also a proponent of what some of us have been calling “the transparent resume” which I have defined as a resume that reveals more than it obscures. Let me call out my Lexington friends Beverly Clemons, Deb Hildreth and John Meyers in connection with “the transparent resume.” Traditional, reverse chronological resumes with rigid rules about dates, employers and job titles don’t work for every job candidate. As some of you know, I have experimented, with some success, with the “press release resume”. Deb Hildreth has blogged some interesting resumes. Beverly Clemons once reminded me that a resume should be an “advertisement” for the product (the candidate) and, as we all know, there is no one right ad formula.

Most of all, Jeff understands that job seekers are most likely to find their next job by networking. Networking doesn’t come naturally to some people so if you don’t have the networking gene, Jeff can give you a gene splice. And he can show you how to effectively use social media. Jeff once wrote the following comment on my blog post about how a job candidate with a resume is no match for a candidate with a relationship: “First tech job - I was friends with a VP's son. I got in. Second tech job - I had a friend that was a team lead on a different team. I got in. Third tech job - One of my team mates moved to a new company and opened a door for me. I got in. Fourth tech job - Back at the 2nd company - I listed 20+ references that worked there. I got in.”

Jeff gets networking.

So far, Jeff has a diverse group. He has attendees who are re-entering the job market. He has young professionals with slim work experience. He has “older workers”.

By the way, if you’re in your late 40s or early 50s, yes, you are old enough to experience age discrimination and to have some unique job seeking needs.

I’ve been a fan of my former Lexmark co-worker for a long time. If you go to Jeff’s LinkedIn profile you’ll find this recommendation I wrote for him: “Jeff has too many talents to be neatly defined by and confined to the narrow "individual contributor" specialty roles Fortune 500 companies squeeze multi-talented people into. In a room full of techies, Jeff is the guy thinking business. In a room full of business people, Jeff is the guy who understands the technology. Somebody should give Jeff a job that he can grow into, a job that requires him to use all his skills all the time.” May 20, 2009”

Call Jeff Foster at 859-797-7798 and join his job club.

What Charleston Needs: Former Huntington Mayor Bobby Nelson’s Radio Show

I’ll be Mayor Nelson’s radio guest this Wednesday January 20 at 3:05 PM. Topics: “Governor Manchin’s State of the State Address” and “The Current Legislative Session”. Call the show at 877-420-8255. If you’re in the Huntington radio market listen live on 930 AM. If you’re in Charleston, you can’t hear any live, progressive talk radio at 3PM or at any other time.

From a technological standpoint, there’s no reason Mayor Nelson’s show can’t be aired in Charleston. Reeves Kirtner and the folks at Kindred Communications can easily provide the show to any Charleston station willing to bring liberal talk show listeners back to the radio.

If you’d like to lobby Charleston market radio station owners to air Mayor Nelson’s show live at 3PM here is what you need to know:

Bristol Broadcasting of Bristol, VA and LM Communications of Lexington, KY, own stations in the Charleston market. Lisa Nininger Hale is the CEO of Bristol Broadcasting and she can be reached at (276) 669-8112.

Bristol Broadcasting’s cluster GM is Mike Robinson. Phone Mike at (304) 744-7020 and tell him you are a liberal and you want Mayor Bobby Nelson’s radio show on the air in Charleston.

Former St. Albans radio mogul, Lynn Martin, owns LM Communications. WKLC in St. Albans was Martin’s first radio property and now he owns stations in several states. Call Lynn Martin at (859) 252-4137 and tell him Charleston needs and wants a liberal talk radio option.

LM Communications’ cluster manager here in the Charleston market is Steve Z. Zubrzycki. Some of you know him as “Steve Z”. Call Steve at 304-722-3308. Tell him you want Mayor Nelson’s show on the air in Charleston.

Why It's Conservative And Capitalistic To Air Liberal Radio In Charleston

I just mailed a letter to Lisa Nininger Hale, President of Bristol Broadcasting, suggesting that if she hasn't already made a decision about how to re-program "Z-Rock" which is playing Christmas music until Bristol is ready to unveil their plans for the former rock station, she might want to consider liberal talk radio. No matter what Ms. Hale's politics, being the first to air liberal radio in Charleston, WV, would be a very capitalistic, very conservative, very Republican thing to do for one simple reason: In Charleston, WV, the owner of a liberal talk radio station would have a monopoly on that market.

Program directors whose paychecks are signed by Clear Channel and other politically conservative radio station owners are quick to point to Air America's difficulties as proof that "liberal radio never works" or that "liberals won't support liberal talk radio."

While I'll stipulate that even the most successful liberal hosts like Thom Hartmann, Ron Reagan, Jr., Stephanie Miller, Bill Press, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes don't have listening audiences as big as those of Rush Limbaugh, there are two reasons I think trying to compare liberal talk radio market share to conservative talk radio market share isn't comparing apples to apples.

First, since most radio station owners are conservatives who have built their radio brands for years, liberal talk radio has generally only been tried on stations nobody was listening to when those stations had a different format.

Second, conservative station owners have chased away nearly all the potential liberal radio listeners who, frankly, feel they can't turn on the radio without being aurally assaulted. If Charleston had a liberal talk radio station it would take a while for liberals who have come to associate radio with pain and insult to eject their CDs or turn off their iPods and seek information and entertainment from the radio again. I never did think it was a wise strategy for companies like Clear Channel to actually shrink the radio audience by alienating half their potential listeners without giving those alienated listeners another station to turn to. If I were an enterprising, cynical radio company I might want to own both liberal and conservative stations in the same market so that when Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity chase radio listeners and advertisers from one station, these listeners and advertisers are driven into the arms of a station that airs liberal programming.

And finally, I think one of the reasons liberals have not always supported liberal talk radio is that liberals don't like liberals who try to sound like liberal versions of Glen Beck or Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. In other words, I'm saying that you don't communicate to liberals the same way you communicate to conservatives - and I think I'll stop right there. My fellow liberals know what I mean. Let's just say that if Michael Agnello and Rush Limbaugh experienced born again conversions to liberalism and went on the air tomorrow attacking conservatives with the same simplistic arguments and bombast with which they attack liberals now, even liberals who agree with what they say would object to how they say it and tune out in droves once the novelty of their liberal conversion wore off. You don't communicate with a liberal the same way you communicate with a conservative.

Anyway, I sent my letter to Bristol Broadcasting President, Lisa Nininger Hale, telling her that if she converts Z-Rock to liberal talk, not only will she have a monopoly on that format, I'll even help her identify liberal advertisers who might like to use radio to reach liberals.