When 93X deejay John Arroyo, better known as Twitch, was suddenly fired Oct. 30, he was left without a medium to talk to the city that had listened to him for four years.
Even so, he has plenty left to say.
He was let go along with market manager Terry Wood and FM 100 deejays Steve Conley and Garner Miller when Entercom Communications bought the stations.
He got one-month severance and four weeks vacation pay.
He said he was given no definite reason for the termination, but he believes that money was the main factor.
He was being paid more than most of the staff, and he speculates that the new owner saw an opportunity to save some money by replacing him with a lesser-paid personality.
"It's all about the bottom line," Twitch said. "(Corporate owners) don't look at the intangibles and it's killing radio."
One such intangible might include the relationship between deejay and listener.
"I don't think corporate guys have any idea what's going on," said Pat Haskins, a sophomore business major. "Don't they know that everybody liked Twitch, and that letting him go just to save money would hurt them in the long run?"
Twitch said that big corporations are missing the point, that a deejay is a personality that forms a bond with the market and is involved in the community.
"You develop a relationship and then it gets taken away to save money," he said. "Now I'm out of work. It's not fair to the listener and it's not fair to me."
The state of radio isn't hopeless, but there are changes that need to be made, according to Twitch.
"The little people that make the station work and the listeners need to be more important than the bottom line," he said.
He also said that independent bands don't get enough radio play between the corporate play lists.
Though the rock station 93X boasts about ditching the corporate suits in favor of more open and personal music schedule, that's just how the owners tell them to make their pitch, according to Twitch.
"It's still a corporate way to market it," he said. "93X is a corporate bitch."
He said that CBS Corporation treated the station like an experiment to see if its format would work in bigger markets.
But he doesn't want to come off as bad-mouthing the station, which he said is dedicated to local music and where everyone was like a family.
"Radio is what it is," he said. "Huge companies operate stations in a cookie-cutter manner. You hear the same format everywhere."
Many students turn to other mediums to get their entertainment and avoid commercials and recycled songs.
"I have an iPod, TiVo and get news off the Internet," said Karen Day, a freshman undecided major. "I'm totally new age."
This fragmenting of the market is part of the reason Twitch is now working with outonthebluff.com, a Web site that features culture, sports and music events in and around Memphis, while he is pursuing another radio job.
He doesn't want to leave Memphis and he wanted to thank everyone for caring about the situation, for his or her support and for listening while he was on the radio.
"Don't loose faith in radio," he said. "It has the potential to be as good as the people who run it want to make it."
