WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Hillsdale Interview: Vince Benedetto

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Vince Benedetto is the Founder, President, and CEO of Bold Gold Media Group, which owns and operates fourteen full-power radio stations and twenty-five broadcast frequencies throughout Pennsylvania and New York. He joins Mattie Grace Watson on Radio Free Hillsdale to discuss his experience in the radio industry.   

Welcome back to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. My name is Maddingley Watson, and today I will be interviewing Vince Benedetto. Now, Vince is the founder, president, and CEO of Bold Gold Media Group, which owns and operates 14 full-power radio stations and 25 broadcast frequencies throughout Pennsylvania and New York. Vince is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, a former Air Force captain, and Air Force OSI Special Agent, where he specialized in counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and felony-level investigative efforts for the Department of Defense. With a desire to be a media entrepreneur, he separated from the Air Force and formed Bold Gold,

where his growing portfolio of radio stations have become leaders in social and digital media management. Vince has frequently been named as one of radio's top 20 leaders by Radio Inc. magazine. Outside of work, he enjoys a passion for writing and speaking about American and military history, as well as writing and producing music. He is the president of the Churchill Society of Pennsylvania, and newly appointed to the board of directors for the international Churchill Society. He also serves on the Radio Advertising Bureau's Sales Advisory Committee. Vince is the current chairman of the Joint Board for the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters. And special to us actually helped Radio Free Hillsdale get started.

Vince, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Now, Vince, you left the Air Force to become an entrepreneur. Why did you choose to go towards radio into media entrepreneurship specifically? Well, the truth of the matter is I didn't get out with the sole intention of going into radio broadcasting at all. I actually, you know, my profession was security and counterintelligence in the Air Force. And so, you know, I half got out thinking I would start a business that did security work. The other thing that I was raised to do is I was raised in a very musical household. So I thought I might go into the publishing or music production side of things, which I had some experience in. But the truth was I didn't. have a great plan. I got out and was spending time doing due diligence on what to do. And in the process of that, I found out in my hometown some radio stations were for sale. And, you know,

I had done some work. I've done some customized music while I was trying to find time to roll out a business plan. And so I knew the radio station, knew some of the staff, and I met with the owner, and we struck a deal to buy it. And it was an entire leap of faith. And I kind of committed to purchasing them. I knew the area quite well or was learning about the area quite a bit. And what struck me the most about radio that intrigued me was it reminded me a lot of what I did in the counterintelligence world. And people go, how is that possible? Well, the truth of the matter is a great radio station really gets the pulse of a community. It knows what's going on. It's not just about the music. It's actually what happens in between the music. And so in a sense, you need to

source an area to have a good local radio station. You have great local news. You've got to have great contests, you got to have great DJs that connect with the local community. And that's exactly what counterintelligence is. When I'd go to a foreign country and have to set up a source network, you're not the expert on that area. You have to find the experts, put them together, put a team together, and deliver information ahead of everybody else, basically, right? That's how you keep your base, Air Force Base safe and your airmen safe. So radio, I thought, this is a natural fit. You know, you're basically sourcing a region, getting great confidence. content and broadcasting it to a community. And so it just, I connected with how it would work,

how local radio works. And that's basically how I got in. It was, it was very, very entrepreneur. It was kind of a leap of faith, a huge risk, I guess, to say, because I had no background in it professionally. But it's been an exciting ride, that's for sure. Now, as we see media types growing in all kinds of ways. There's kind of a conversation about how that makes the radio's new role in our ever-growing media society. How do you see that role going in the future? Yeah. So this surprises everybody. Just last month, Nielsen released their media survey of radio listenership and overall media consumption. And radio now officially is the largest mass reach medium in the United States. It surpasses broadcast TV by quite a bit now, and it reaches more people

than even the Internet in the United States on a weekly basis. And so, you know, radio's success, I think it surprises people because it's a hundred-year-old technology. So people think of it as an old technology. But the reality is it's enormously competitive in the digital age, right, because it's live, it's instantaneous. It's even faster than the Internet. You know, the radio waves move at the speed of light. It will get to you quicker than an internet relay can. It's free. Every phone is now a radio. But the magic of radio isn't, is part the technology and that it's still competitive and capable in today's world. But it's really the secret sauce is a sense of companionship that it gives people. People marvel at the fact that close to 90% of the U.S. population

every week, it tunes in to a broadcast radio station. It's staggering numbers, and people have tried to pick apart what this is, and it's hard to pick one thing. But radio is not, a lot of people I think in their head think of radio is you turn it on and you listen to music. But radio, local radio, when I say radio, I'm kind of referring to broadcast local radio, AM and FM radio and communities across the country.

What it is is, you know, people love where they live generally, right? They have a connection to their home. And so who's talking about what's important to them in their community, right? You get into small towns in America. The only place they may be able to go, for example, is their local radio station, right, in today's world. Maybe this hometown paper disappeared a long time ago or isn't being published every day. But for live and local information, local radio is dominant in that realm. So people tune into radio.

If you, you know, if you buy a home in a small community and you have kids going to school, the taxes in the area, the safety of the area, the growth or lack thereof of the area. Who's talking about those issues? It's generally your local DJ, right, or your local news department. The other thing is, as national news has declined in trust, Americans have very little faith in national news outlets and national news figures. It's become very ideologically driven. but the exception in media is your local news broadcasters, you know, people trust their local

DJs, they trust their local news departments, they're in those communities with them. So it's really, like I said, what happens in between the music, which is what makes radio so special. And so as long as there are people that love and care about where they live and cherish their community and want it to be better, there's a place for people that are talking to those people. that's increasingly broadcast radio. It always was, but solely now, because of, I think, the lack of other media that used to cater locally.

Media's gotten very nationalized and centralized in a lot of ways, news, that is. So I think that's the part of the secret sauce of why radio still endures so well. Now, Vince Minidado is responsible for the creation of Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. First, Vince, thank you for everything you did to help. helped create our station. What led you to connect with Hillsdale about this endeavor? So, you know, Hillsdale probably better than any college, almost certainly, has leveraged broadcast radio to make itself a household name. You know, hosts like Hugh Hewitt, who is here right now, you know, regularly talking about the college. The college had an enormously

successful and continues to have an enormously successful outreach program over broadcast radio. So it was quite some time ago. I think it was 2014. I just had suggested to Dr. Arne that you use radio so effectively to reach millions of people, you should teach broadcasting at the college. And he said, well, how best should we do that? I said, well, you need a radio station. He said, well, can you get me one?

And that's where it began. The reason I think it's important, though, is because the things being taught at Hillsdale, which are taught at less and less places are imperative to the future of our country, imperative to the future of free speech, and broadcast radio is also imperative to those things. The great thing about broadcast radio, even though the world has gotten more democratized

in terms of people's access to mass communication, right? Everybody can have a social media page and say what they want, and whether that's ultimately a good thing or a bad thing for civilization, that's another discussion. But the reality is everything through the Internet is increasingly getting consolidated, right? We all hear stories of content that an aggregator or an algorithm at Google or Facebook or on YouTube doesn't like and that content either disappears or people can't find it or can't get to it. So even though there's a veneer of freedom of speech through these platforms, the reality is everything you do online is tracking you. and, you know, the social media is basically like a fly trap where they want you to come and use this platform so they can collect all this data on you so that they can target you with what they want to target you with.

And so, you know, broadcast radio doesn't work that way. Broadcast radio is the ultimate in freedom of speech. You know, when you get on, you flick on that mic, and you're talking to thousands of people over the broadcast airwaves. There's nothing. There's no server. There's no internet. There's no big tech company between you and the listener.

It's pure and it's important. You know, it's why during, you know, World War II and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were so important. This is how we reached behind enemy lines, behind the Ironware. Iron Curtain and were able to speak to people who wanted to hear about freedom, wanted to hear about, have hope about what could happen, you know. It's how Churchill reached so many people and occupied Europe with a message of hope that were, you know, under Nazi tyranny. Picture back then, if it was the Internet, was how that message had to get behind enemy lines. How dangerous would it be to tune in and connect an Internet stream? Who can track you? Who

can follow you. But the radio, you have a radio, they can't stop it and they can't trace it. So there's advantages to broadcast technology that are very, very powerful. And so I think that the mirroring up of the ideas taught, you know, all the good things taught at Hillsdale with a broadcast program where young people like yourself get to learn how to communicate over this medium and can graduate here. And if you choose to go into the broadcast medium, you know, know how to use this medium, know it's important. It's survival. Broadcast radio is absolutely imperative to the survival of this country and the preservation of freedom and the values that this college defends and is important to so many of us.

Because most of the other platforms that people communicate, there's just a few people behind those, you know, a few organizations. And we know who they are. It's the Googles. It's the Facebooks, right? It's, you know, those places are watching what you're doing and they're limiting what you can do and how many people can reach. And that's dangerous. Certain ideas get to percolate, not on their merit, but on the people behind wanting those algorithms to allow that information to reach more people. And other information that they view is not ideologically favorable to them.

It doesn't do as well. And, but, you know, the ideals of freedom and liberty and our foundational principles do very well on. talk radio. It's an interesting thing. Those ideas dominate the broadcast medium. And I think it's because they get a fair take in that world. And so people get to choose. And when they get to choose without an algorithm interfering, you see the success of some of the hosts that Hillsdale outreaches through on national talk radio. And I think it's because the medium is authentic, it's genuine, and everybody can access it. Now, you mentioned a few instances. of radio being used throughout history? Is that something we see a lot in history of, like,

radio being this beacon of hope and freedom like you were mentioning? Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, radio is a 100-year-old technology, and it's still used to reach people that are, you know, in areas that they're oppressed for the very reason that it's free for them to access. They don't need to have an internet connection that they pay for. They just have to radio with some batteries, right? And so the technology, the technology is extraordinarily adaptable. One of the things about broadcast technology is it's a one-to-many technology.

People don't talk about this much. The internet is a one-to-one technology. Every person who's listening to some audio coming over an internet stream has to have a direct connection to a server. So there's a million people listening to something on the internet. There's a million individual connections

back to that provider, right? That service provider. And if that service provider decides to cut that off, that audio stops. broadcast and by the way the more people that tune into a internet stream the generally the quality of the stream goes down right we've all seen you know servers crash because too many people try to access a social site or a website or an internet stream broadcast whether there's one person listening to wrfh or 10,000 right does not affect its ability and its quality to reach

that person so it doesn't it's its redundancy and its capabilities um are great. So broadcast radio is also the most dependable in an emergency. When the power goes out, your TV's down, the internet goes down. Generally, if there's an emergency that's, you know, during like, September 11th terror attacks, people couldn't make phone calls, right? The cellular networks were clogged up. If you were stuck in a tunnel or you were stuck, you couldn't make a call and you necessarily couldn't get on the internet, but you could turn on the radio. And so the redundancy of the broadcast radio system is why it's still the backbone of the U.S.'s emergency alert system, for example, because when everything else is down, there's broadcast towers everywhere,

there's independent studios everywhere, and as long as you have a generator, you can keep that station on the air, even if you lose power at your radio station. So that's why it's so effective in reaching people in areas where there is oppression, where you can't reach them in any other way. If you want to get a message through broadcast radio is generally the number one way to do it, and the safest way to do it. Now, with the ever-growing importance of radio, are we seeing that as something that is still being taught in schools, maybe growing, decreasing. What does that look like? So I think what you're seeing in a lot, I mean, a lot of colleges do have a broadcast program.

I think every broadcast program, if it's preparing somebody for the world we're in now, broadcast radio integrates with everything else, right? So like my own company, you know, we're driven our core, certainly broadcast radio, but we have dynamic digital platforms and we stream all of our stations. I mean, you want to reach the listeners wherever they are, right? And so a good broadcast background

is going to teach you how to do that, right? Because if you're going to do a podcast, you know, the podcast relates to the on-air, right? If you're an on-air personality, more people are going to listen to your podcast, right? You can use the on-air to drive people to the podcast. So on-demand listening is a thing

that's very important. And, you know, the consumer expects to get you wherever they're listening. So if they're listening to your radio station on an app or they're listening to it on their Alexa device or they're listening to it in their car, they expect to get you where they want to listen. So all this stuff integrates.

So I think the natural thing you see is because there's so many options in the audio space, there is probably less young people interested in radio. It's not the cool new thing that it used to be. But I think you're seeing a renaissance in some of this stuff too, right? because people realize that if they want to have a successful podcast or a successful blog, being a broadcaster that's a mass reach medium. See, all these other things are what we call narrow reach or narrowcast, right?

They reach a targeted audience. And digital media is very effective at targeting, right? For all the reasons I mentioned earlier, it's collecting data on you. So that's narrowcasting. So when somebody already knows about you or your product or your service or your whatever content you're providing, Once they know about you, you know, digital media is very effective at being able to give it to them whenever they want and target them. Mass-reach media, broadcast, radio, television, they're very effective storytelling mediums. They're very good at getting somebody interested in it to begin with.

It's why radio, broadcast and digital media from a marketing and advertising standpoint go hand in hand, right? So the best way to tell a story on a high credibility platform is over, say, broadcast. radio. So a smart advertiser, smart communicator is going to use broadcast to tell their story, reach the masses, so to speak, large audience. And then a portion of that audience is going to distill down and get more interested in that product or service. And then when they go to Google, or they go to the social page or the website of that business or that service provider, at that point, the digital media can take over and be very effective in completing like that sales cycle or that information cycle. So they really do work hand in glove. So from a

preparing to go out in the media landscape. There's going to be people that are digital first. There's people that are broadcast first. The reality is you want to know both sides of that to run a successful business or be a successful asset or great asset to whatever media company hires you. Now, Vince Bidetto has had a lot of experience

in the business industry. Now, Vince, what advice do you have for young entrepreneurs, whether they be interested in going into radio or any other field? So my advice generally is, you know, one, don't take advice from the people that care about you the most, right? Mom and dad and your best friends are sometimes not very good at understanding an entrepreneur. Find good mentors, right, that have done something successful. Like people that there's risk in business, right?

It's part of what makes it exciting. It's part of what makes it scary. A lot of people that care about you when you're going into business. if you're going to start your own business, you know, will caution you, right? They don't want to see you fail. And so oftentimes those voices, you know, weigh heavy on people. You know, somebody you love and care about is going to say, I wouldn't do that. You know, why don't you just get a nice job somewhere? Why do you want to go through being a business? Because it's tough to run a business. I mean, we live in an increasingly regulatory world, right? There's a lot of hoops you got to jump through.

But it's also a very liberating thing to build your own business. and you create it and you get to lead the team and make the decisions, right? That's what's exciting. And you'll have good days and bad days in business, and many days they're the same day, right? Great thing happens, bad thing happens. And you're responsible for all of it, right? Even if you can't control sometimes the circumstances. So my advice is find good mentors, find people who've built businesses.

This doesn't have to be in the industry you're going into. But surround yourself. It's the first thing I did is I surrounded myself with people that had built businesses, manage businesses. And I went to them when I had doubts or concerns or questions, right? And they gave me tremendously good advice. And it gives you backbone, right? Because it takes courage to be in business.

So that's the advice that I give people. The other thing, too, is a lot of people are looking for that home run idea, right? I'm going to develop an app that's going to, you know, sell a million, get a million downloads, and I'm going to get rich overnight. That could happen, but that's not likely to have. And generally a smart business is to find a good idea that's proven and go in there and build on it. And that's what I loved about being a radio entrepreneur. Radio is a very established business.

You buy a radio station in a nice little town and you go in there and you do X, Y, and Z very well. You take care of that community. You give them information that they want and crave and you're entertaining, caring, and you amplify the passions of that community. They're going to listen and they're going to trust you. and then they're going to advertise with you. And then you want to build a great app. Now you've got the thing that can promote the app, right? Now you've got a stable business model that is proven and reliable,

been around 100 years. Most tech companies, you know, that start, they may even look very successful, but, you know, six months, two years later, they may not be there. And that's most of them, right? So I always tell people, find something that you can picture doing five, 10, 15 years,

if you really want to build a business. You know, technology is disrupting every industry. It's just part of being a business person is you're dealing with disruption. And so you have to know that going in, right? Like, how do you take out a 15-year loan? You know, where's the world in 15 years? But that's how commercial lending works.

So you have to be, you have to really love what you're getting into. And you've got to not cave the first time it gets tough because it will get tough, you know, and you're dealing with crisis, and people get hurt, people get sick. Things happen in the business. business community. So have good mentors, have good people that have been there and are going to tell

you, you got this. You can do it. Hang in there. Don't quit. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a delight to get to talk to you and hear all about your advice. Thank you so much for having it. My name is Manningly Watson and you've been listening to the Vince Benedetto interview on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7FM.