Unintended Inside Information

Like many stations, we monitor just about everything coming and going from the studio- on air, phone calls, internet, emails, Vox Pro, etc.  I was never really a fan of spying on my on air talent so I never really had much of a means to use any of the spying tools available.  I always thought if they do their job well, there's no need to micromanage them. 

I once had a jock who used to think he was god's gift to radio.  I have to be honest, I did not like him.  I am a professional so I knew as long as he kept his nose clean, his ratings up, and his attitude right that we would be okay.  One day I got several emails that the Vox Pro was working slower than usual and also a notification that the storage on it was getting low.  I decided to take care of the issue personally since everyone else seems to be busy.  I took the Vox Pro into my office and began going through it to see what I could delete to free up some space.  I was going through the calls when I listened to some audio of what seemed like a phone conversation with an unknown man and my night jock.  To sum it up it was basically someone from a competing radio company within the market trying to lure my jock away from my station and onto a new station that would be switching formats as a direct competitor.  I could not understand why this conversation was happening on the listener line let alone why the night jock was recording it, but there it was.

I actually felt this was a lucky break since I had no idea that direct competition was in the works.  We gained much inside information based off the conversation alone.  This brought me to a point of what do I do about it?  This was especially confusing since the night jock had recently asked for a contract extension.  To make a long story short I spoke with some of the management and we decided that we were going to confront the night jock with my findings from the Vox Pro.

I called the jock into the station for a meeting and we confronted him.  Prior to the meeting I did not know for sure what we were going to do to him, I did know that he wasn't going to lose his job.  He got very defensive and said he did not know what we were talking about and that we had no proof of our accusations.  I then played him the recording and he knew he was busted.  He immediately started to verbally attack everyone.  I didn't have to fire him, he quit on his own.  Before he left the office I had explained to him that we weren't going to fire him.  He didn't care and stormed off exiting the building with a barrage of inappropriate expletives.  I knew this wasn't the end of it cause the jock had over-looked one small major detail, his contract had a non-compete clause in it!

A few days later the jock called me apologizing and asking if we could release him from his non-compete.  "Sorry, but no."