You're about to
find out.
Jeff Catlin – aka
"Cat," aka "Catman of the Americas" – is the Program Director of The Ticket and Operations Manager of Cumulus Media Dallas.
Cat has reached out to My Ticket Confession and offered to participate
in an exclusive session on this site on
Tuesday, May 12 in which he will answer Confessors' questions about The
Ticket. I'll get to the details in a
moment.
Let me start out
with a little ass-kissing. First, Cat
contacted me to suggest this. That was
nice. Second, he had in mind a kind of
classic "ask me anything" (AMA) of the sort to which notable persons
like T.C. Fleming subject themselves from time to time. Unfortunately, this platform (Blogger) does
not support any plug-in that I could find that would allow real-time
Q&A. When I advised him of this and
suggested that, much as I would hate to lose the scoop, he might want to
contact other web-savvy P1s to host a traditional AMA. No, he said, I started down the road with you
so let's figure out a way to do it on MTC.
That was really nice.
This should be
interesting. It's a fair bet Cat has a
few things he wants to get off his mind.
In his initial communication to me, he wrote: "Making
a swim through there [MTC] this morning and GOOD GOOD are our sweet clean
lovable P1s misguided! And the anonymous random predictions of an earth-shaking
change coming…..including me leaving? Well
I think maybe it would be helpful to add something of real substance to the
narrative on the record."
And earlier
today, after we agreed on how we would receive questions and how he would
respond, he wrote: "I am looking forward to doing this so I hope
they bring the heat."
Anyone may ask a
question (using the procedure below).
Who knows, perhaps some curious Ticket employees will submit some
interrogatories. Maybe Barry Horn or
Richie Whitt or Brett Blankenship or Latarian Milton will sneak one through. But I'm hoping that the best questions will
come from you, the faithful Confessor.
There will be no
limitation on subject matter, except as qualified below (that is, I'm picking and editing the questions). In fact, Cat specifically advised me that he
was prepared to answer questions about T.C., among the hottest of hot-button
topics, so you can bet that very little will be off limits.
OK, look: I know this site is not exactly advanced. It reflects exactly my capital investment in
it, zero dollars. So when you see how
this is going to go – after Cat and I kicked around the pros and cons of a
number of alternatives – don't gimme a bunch of crap. It's going to be a little clumsy, with the
possibility of error and screwups. It
won't be real-time. But here's how it is
going to – supposed to – work:
(1) Sometime on Sunday afternoon, May 10, I will
put up a post that will announce the start of the submission of questions. Questions may be submitted as comments to that post or emails to theplainsman1310@gmail.com. As are comments now, they will
come to me for review.
(2) Questions will be accepted through 5 p.m. on
Monday, May 11.
(3) I will review all of the questions. (We'll get to question format in a
moment.) I will select the questions,
attempting to ensure coverage of all topics of interest, and I am quite likely
to add some of my own.
(4) Questions will be posted in a new post on
Monday night – probably fairly late.
(5) On Tuesday morning – or, frankly, at any time
Tuesday of his choosing – Cat will begin answering the questions in the comment
section of that post. He will have a lot
of latitude on how to handle the questions.
He may write several long comments, or address specific questions in
separate comments. (The questions will
be identified by number, and, I hope, the name of the Confessor asking the
question.) No other comments to the Tuesday post will be published at any time. Only Cat and, as
you will see below, maybe me.
(6) Cat may choose which questions to
answer. He is not required to answer all
of the questions. I will see his answers
before they are published to ensure that no imposters attempt to impersonate
him.
(7) If I feel that a particular answer could use
some clarification or begs for a followup, I will toss that in as a comment and
he can respond if he wishes.
(8) We do not
wish to wear the poor man out. I will be
monitoring this on Tuesday and we'll go as long as Cat is comfortable
doing so. He and I will be in touch on
that.
There may be
refinements or even material changes in this, but as of now, this is the plan.
OK, how about
your questions?
You all know
me. I want to make sure our guest is
treated with respect. On the other hand,
he has asked you to "bring it," so a certain degree of Tickety passion will be tolerated.
It is my preference to publish questions without any changes, but if
things get too angry or vulgar, the questions will either get bounced or
edited. There will be many duplicate
questions, so I will pick and choose among them, and may combine some, so that
we have room for coverage of all topics of interest to the Confessor. And I'm certain I'll be tossing in a few of
my own.
You may preface
your question with context and commentary. Please keep your entire submission as brief as possible.
Confessors, this is the chance you've been asking for. Cat has been brave (foolhardy?) enough to subject himself to what I expect will be some very pointed examination on this site and offer answers that the public -- including his colleagues and supervisors -- can see.
Make it count, and keep it classy.
I promised I'd
get this up by 9 PM. I'll have more to
say about this over the next few days before the question window opens sometime
on Sunday.
Be thinking of
good questions, and good ways to ask them. You know I'm not going to post 20 T.C. questions, so don't neglect BaD, Norm, JV, Cumulus, Weekends, Tickermen, The Future, and all the rest.
Until we open the
window for questions, let's get some good Campound comments, what say?
