Former Baltimore Ravens Coach Brian Billick to partner with 'Nasty

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Sep 4, 2008 by Robbie Whelan

A local AM sports talk radio station has tapped former Baltimore Ravens Coach Brian Billick to help transform it into "something much larger"--a Web-based media company that examines local sports from a hometown perspective and engages fans through Web-based platforms and more modern technologies, such as text-messaging.

Nestor Aparicio, CEO and owner of WNST-AM 1570, said Wednesday that Billick would be a partner in his latest venture, WNST Sports Media LLC. Billick will also host a monthly radio show, "Billick Live."

"I've found the Web to be an intoxicating place, what with ESPN.com and SI.com," Aparicio said. "Radio is the really the first place where an ordinary guy can have a forum to say what he wants to say, and the Web is that on steroids."

The transformation comes two weeks after Aparicio said he paid $1 million for a 50.2 percent controlling interest in the radio station, buying out the shares of his previous partner, Jimandi LLC, a local ticket brokerage service, and transferring the station's Federal Communications Commission license to the new company.

Billick, in addition to hosting his own radio show, is also a partner in WNST Sports Media, although both he and Aparicio declined to describe the extent of his involvement.

"Brian Billick is the most recognizable sports figure in this city, behind Cal Ripken," Aparicio said Wednesday. "Tonight, he is going to announce that he's our partner. ...We went from being a radio station that had a Web site that was incidental to our product ... [to] now our Web site is our prime business."

Reached by phone Wednesday, Billick said there are parallels between his experience taking the reins as coach of the Ravens in 1999 and building the team up to a Super Bowl winner in 2000, and the development of a small business such as WNST Sports Media.

"Typically you come into a business environment or a sports environment that hasn't been very successful and you change the culture," he said. "It's about setting priorities on a day-to-day basis."

Chief among those priorities, he said, are giving voice to fans' interests and maintaining local flavor.

"It's about attracting the right people," he said. "I want to make sure we have good people who are giving a lot of views. With any media outlet, once you give the down and distance, so and so caught the ball, so and so ran the ball, the next word out of your mouth is an opinion. And we want to tap into the opinions of the fans of Baltimore."

He added that he was particularly excited about working in Web- based media with a local personality as well known as Aparicio.

"In this flattened world, to use a Thomas Friedman term, clearly the Internet has been that flattener," he said. "To me, [Aparicio] has always been about Baltimore. This is going to be a locally- owned entity, and rather than working from the top down, we're going to work from the bottom up."

Aparicio said that wnst.net, the station's Web site, currently gets about 15,000 unique visitors a day, and that a newly redesigned home page will debut in two weeks. In addition, he said the station's text-messaging service, which sends sports news alerts to listeners and directs them to the Web site for more information, has 3,000 subscribers.

WNST's broadcasting operation is comparatively small for the Baltimore market. It broadcasts at 5,000 watts during the day, and 237 watts in the evening, making it difficult to hear in some parts of the city.

By contrast, WBAL-AM 1090, the Ravens' flagship station, broadcasts at 50,000 watts during the day, or 10 times the signal strength of WNST, and can be heard nightly as far away as Nova Scotia and Bermuda.

A spokeswoman for Arbitron, a market research firm that measures local radio ratings, said WNST doesn't even garner the minimum ratings to be measured in the market.

Malcolm Moran, a professor of sports journalism at Penn State University, said Aparicio's venture is somewhat uncharted territory, but ultimately, the success of a Web-based venture depends on the quality of the original information provided by the site.

"To me, the question is, are we just trading in one form of uninformed ranting for another?" said Moran, who was a sports writer for newspapers including USA Today and the New York Times for nearly 30 years. "Do you assign a reporter to go to the press conferences and games, rather than just having hosts pontificating in a vacuum? In the case of digital format, it's can you obtain a credential for a reporter who can then obtain information for informed speculation or commentary?"

Moran added that including Billick was a "shrewd choice," because of his name recognition and expertise.

"Having been there, not just on Sundays, but on each of the days that leads to Sunday and determines how each Sunday turns out -- any performance evaluation he gives, you have to think it's pretty well informed," he said.