New WTMJ PD Aims To Make The Pieces Fit

Last week, 42-year-old Joe Scialfa  was named program director of 620 AM WTMJ Milwaukee, replacing Tom Land, who died in May and whom Scialfa called "a great radio person and a great person," according to a story by Duane Dudek at jsonline.com.

Scialfa prevously has served as assistant program director and also coordinated "imaging," or promos, for the station and its sports network, and spent Sundays during football season at the Capitol Drive studios helping produce the station's Green Bay Packers broadcasts.

Scialfa recently helped negotiate the difficult transition from two franchise players - veteran host Jonathan Green and sports talk host Bill Michaels - to "the next generation of people listeners know and trust": an afternoon news-oriented show anchored by John Mercure, and "Sports Central" with Trenni Kusnierek and Greg Matzek.

As program director, Scialfa is in charge of the care and feeding of the top radio station in the market and most influential in the state. It's so big, said Scialfa, it's not one station, it's three: a news station, a sports station and a talk station.

"And part of my job is to make sure all those pieces fit together."

He said listeners come to WTMJ-AM for different reasons, "and have the ability to compartmentalize all the different things we do."

But it's also clear from reader comments whenever I write about the station that some listeners find conservative talk show hosts Sykes and Jeff Wagner polarizing and the station politically biased.

Scialfa said listeners "are smart enough" to separate the station's different elements, and he compared their co-existence to "sitting at a bar watching a Brewers game with someone you might vehemently disagree with politically but who you slap hands with when Prince Fielder hits a home run."

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