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Speaking for herself

Popular deejay Olivia Fox lent her ear and voice to the bay area's black community on the Beat morning show. That bond broken, her next beat will be her own.

By RODNEY THRASH
Published December 24, 2006

TAMPA

Inside the Shark Bar, the drinks flowed, the music thumped, the people mingled. All that was missing was the birthday girl.

"She was supposed to be here," one of the bartenders said. The invitations said 7 p.m. It was 10:30 on a cold Friday in November.

Some had come to see a woman they knew only by voice. For more than two years, that loud, raspy voice had helped thousands of bay area radio listeners, many of them African-American, wake up, get through morning traffic and walk into work laughing.

Two months had passed and no one had heard from her, let alone seen her.

The question on the sign outside the bar seemed apropos: Where is Olivia Fox?

For years, you could turn on morning radio in any city with a significant African-American population and hear black deejays talking about things black audiences cared about. Atlanta had Mike Roberts; Dallas, Tom Joyner; and Detroit, John Mason.

"Reach-out-and-touch radio," veteran broadcaster Dee Lee calls it. "Radio listeners can respond to it. It's their station, their show."

The Tampa Bay area was decidedly late to the party. WBTP-FM 95.7 - listeners know it as the Beat - launched a black-oriented morning show nearly three years ago, and was still the first corporate-owned station in the market to try it.

Olivia Fox was the star. Listeners had never heard anything like her.

Fox could be fast-paced and spontaneous, slapstick and serious. The self-proclaimed "queen of telling it like it is" could speak with authority about anything: not being able to find the right hair weave, living through two miscarriages, battling kidney disease and the racial implications of the Jennifer Porter hit-and-run case. Lisa Wilkins, the mother of the victims in that hit-and-run, called in to Fox's show one morning at the height of the case.

On "Talent Tuesdays," American Idol wanna-bes sang over the phone lines. On "Hook 'Em Up Wednesdays," the lines lit up with calls from singles looking for a love connection.

For African-American listeners, Fox filled a void. She spoke their language. She talked about their issues. She lived life as they did. And she bridged a seemingly fragmented community. That endeared her to fans and quickly catapulted her show ahead of most of the competition. Her show was No. 2 among listeners 18-34 and 25-54.

Which made Sept. 25 all the more confusing.

More than a premonition

At six minutes past 9 a.m. on the last Monday in September, inside Clear Channel's Gandy Boulevard studios, Fox began a segment: "Things That Will Get You Fired."

"If you want to get fired," she began, ". . . forget teamwork. Look out for No. 1."

"That's true," co-host Mike Johnson said.

"That kind of goes along with burning your bridges," Fox interrupted. "Never burn your bridge. Regardless of how rickety and raggedy the bridge is. Never burn it."

As she was speaking, Clear Channel executives pulled into the parking lot.

One of the execs was Dave "Doc" Wynter. Midday jock Reggie Davis liked to call him the "quiet storm." As vice president of urban programming and the highest ranking African-American at Clear Channel, Wynter signed off on every important decision at the station.

Fox sensed something was about to happen, but to whom?

"Tomorrow on the program," she said, "we'll be talking about Miss Cleo. She's a lesbian. She's coming out."

"I thought we were going to ignore that story," said Johnson, the co-host. "I prayed we were going to ignore that story."

"Y'all be good," Fox said. "We'll holla at you in the morning."

After the show, Fox turned to her colleagues.

"Somebody's about to be fired."

No time for goodbye

The meeting, Fox said, couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes.

"I wasn't sad, I didn't cry, I wasn't angry," she said. "I had none of the normal emotions that people go through when they go through a transition."

All she wanted to know was if the co-hosts would still have jobs.

She said Clear Channel executives gave her the standard line about "a different direction." She thanked them for the opportunity to work there and left.

Within hours, promos were running for the nationally syndicated Steve Harvey Morning Show. Fox's face and name disappeared from the station's Web site. She didn't get to tell listeners goodbye.

Clear Channel would not say how many calls it received after Fox's show was taken off the air. But Fox received so many e-mails, she had to create a new folder to store them. Someone started an online petition, "Bring Back Olivia Fox."

People are still signing it, three months later.

Crossing barriers

Just after 10:30 p.m., the guest of honor entered the Shark Bar in downtown Tampa. It was her 41st birthday and her first public appearance since her show was taken off the air. The nightclub's owner organized the party. Fox wore an auburn wig and a black and gold Baby Phat outfit. She ordered a Sprite at the bar and stared at the Pistons-Wizards matchup on the plasma wide-screen overhead.

Before long, a woman behind the bar screamed:

"I miss you soooo much on the radio. The morning after your show was taken off the air, I was like 'F---. I hate that Steve Harvey s---.' I boycotted it."

The woman, Jeslyn McDowell, was white and from South Tampa, not necessarily the audience Fox's show targeted. Fox grabbed her digital camera and took a picture with her.

Later, Fox leaned over. "You expect that from us," she said. "But from non African-Americans? It's a big compliment."

All night, it was like this. Some people rushed to hug her, to see if she was okay. One woman spent a half-hour making a business pitch.

The curious sought an answer to the question on everyone's mind: What happened?

A changing horizon

Legally, Fox can't say much about her termination. A contractual agreement bars her from talking specifics.

Dan DiLoreto, a regional vice president and market manager for Clear Channel in Tampa, declined an interview but said, "This was ratings-driven." Fox did well, but Clear Channel figured Harvey could do better.

In eight markets - including New York, the largest radio market - Harvey is No. 1 among women 25-54. And in nine markets, he is No. 1 among African-Americans.

"When we have an opportunity to put something on the air that is going to be more popular and more successful," DiLoreto said, "we have a fiduciary obligation to our audience to do that."

But anybody who has been following the news about Clear Channel can see there may be more to it than that.

Across the country this year, Clear Channel has slashed popular local programming in favor of cheaper, nationally syndicated shows hosted by celebrities with name recognition. Harvey, for example, was the star of The Original Kings of Comedy and a self-titled comedy on the now-defunct WB network. Clear Channel owns the company that syndicates the Harvey show, all the more reason to promote it.

The cuts have come as Clear Channel sold off nearly 450 of its 1,150 radio stations and all 42 of its television stations to erase nearly $8-billion in debt. With competition from iPods and satellite radio, traditional radio is not as profitable as it used to be. The proof is in Clear Channel's stock price, which has plunged from a high of $91 a share to somewhere in the $30s. In November the company announced that it is selling itself to a private investment group for $26.7-billion.

Fox's firing was all about the corporate bottom line, said Davis, the Beat's midday jock until he was canned just a few weeks after Fox. "It wasn't a result of Olivia not being talented enough or Olivia not doing her job."

As radio retrenches, local black broadcasters and their audiences are taking some of the hardest hits, said radio consultant Harry Lyles, president of the Lyles Media Group in suburban Atlanta. Dee Lee, who had a popular morning show in St. Louis, lost his job a month ago. Closer to home, stations in Orlando and Miami replaced their morning shows with Harvey's.

Though Harvey is African-American, it is impossible for him to broadcast a syndicated show that speaks to the issues in each local market. He can't address, for example, why single black professionals find dating to be a challenge in the bay area. Or why African-Americans were angry when St. Petersburg police officers handcuffed a black kindergartener.

"I need for somebody to talk to me in the morning about what is going on in my community," said Joan Bruce, a 47-year-old mother of two teenage daughters from Temple Terrace. "She can feel it. She can understand it. She's a part of it."

A new market

It was a Tuesday in late November, 9:30 a.m., the time Fox used to wrap up her morning show. She sat at the dining room table in her Valrico home in a yellow head wrap, a spaghetti-strap top and no makeup.

The table was covered with colorful bar graphs and spreadsheets. An assistant offered marketing tips. Another stroked the keys of a laptop, updating Fox's Web site, OliviaFox.com.

This has become her new gig. The Internet, her platform. It is the forum through which she hopes to resurrect her career.

In the month after her dismissal from the Beat, her Web site received 300,000 hits from around the world. Japan. The Netherlands. Christmas Island.

"That's the beautiful thing about the Internet," Fox said. "It doesn't matter where you are, people can still get to you."

One of her assistants interrupted.

"This is for today," she said, pointing to the computer screen.

"Is that eight?" Fox asked.

"Eight thousand," the assistant said.

"We have 8,000 hits as of right now," Fox said. "That means people are at work, not working." Fox and her colleagues laughed.

"Wow," Fox said. "That is crazy."

The week she got fired, Fox was on her way to the airport, thinking about her career. Over the last 18 years, she and her family - husband, Chad, and daughter, Nina, age 3 - have moved so many times that she has lost count. She can't imagine doing it again, especially with a young daughter. Then it hit her: She has a name, a brand and a following that reaches beyond Tampa.

To this day, fans in Charleston, S.C., Boston, Washington - places she hasn't worked for years - send e-mails and leave comments on her MySpace page.

They are hungry for the perspective of an African-American woman. The community needs her, even if corporate radio doesn't.

She has decided to revamp her Web site and create a reality series, "Where is Olivia Fox?" The show makes jokes about being unemployed and trying to find a job. She shoots the episodes at area businesses. Those businesses advertise on her Web site, where the show airs.

"I'm going to make some money for myself rather than lining pockets of other people," Fox said. "What I'm looking for more than anything is to be able to control what I do and not have someone else making decisions for my financial existence, and that's the way it's been really up until this point."

Keeping it real

A week later, Fox stood outside a Temple Terrace hair salon, ready to shoot the third installment of her reality series. This time, her makeup had been applied and her reddish ponytail extension flowed down the front of her baby blue blouse.

One of her assistants hid a microphone under her clothes. The cameraman hoisted the camera atop his shoulder. Whispering, he counted backward to zero.

Three.

Two.

One.

"Hey, you guys," Fox said in that loud, raspy, recognizable voice. "What's going on? It's your girl, Olivia Fox."

Rodney Thrash can be reached at (727) 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 24, 2006, 07:50:06]