NorthEast Radio Watch 7/29/2024: Slick Tom, Traffic Guru Tauriello Both Out

In this week’s issue… Slick Tom out in Buffalo – Tauriello ousted in Total Traffic cuts – Route airstaff detoured – New leaders for WAMC, WSHU – Morning team cut in Maine – Remembering Philly’s Mason, WGMC’s Corcoran

By SCOTT FYBUSH

Jump to: ME – NH – VT – MA – RI – CT – NY – NJ – PA – Canada

*Ask anyone to name a NEW YORK City traffic reporter, and it’s a good bet “Pete Tauriello” will be the first name that comes to mind.

For 42 years, Tauriello has guided listeners on both sides of the Hudson through traffic tangles over a long career that was spent mostly with Shadow Traffic (starting in 1982) and, for more than 30 years, on the top-rated all-news station, WINS.

Most recently, Tauriello has been doing traffic on NEW JERSEY‘s WKXW (New Jersey 101.5) through his work at Metro Traffic, but as the market for traffic reporting has been thinned out thanks to the phones we all carry these days, Metro was hit with layoffs this month, and among the jobs that was claimed was Tauriello’s.

“I’m retired,” Tauriello announced on Facebook after his last on-air shift July 15, and while there was no official announcement of the Metro layoffs (which apparently claimed at least two more on-air jobs as well as Tauriello’s), WKXW morning hosts Dennis Malloy and Judi Franco paid tribute to him a few days later.

“I don’t like when people disappear,” Malloy told listeners. “And if somebody’s going to make me disappear, because I’m saying this, so be it.”

“He wasn’t just a traffic guy, you know,” Franco said. “He was a program director. He was in the industry for a thousand years. Good man.”

And it’s true – there’s nobody in the business with a bad word to say about Tauriello, one of the many New York broadcasters who came into the business by way of WSOU (89.5) at Seton Hall in the 1970s. Tauriello went on to work at WADB (95.9) in Point Pleasant and to program WBRW (1170 Bridgewater) and WERA (1590 Plainfield) before breaking into the big city with on-air stints at WPAT, WNSR and WEVD, as well as WFAS in White Plains.

But it was traffic that made him a star, and his voice made Shadow Traffic as successful as it was in the days when everyone needed radio traffic reports.

What next for the veteran personality? Pete and his wife Maureen still host the “Sonic Boomers” podcast, and as he told friends and fans on Facebook, “Not to worry, it’s all good.”

*At the other end of the state, “Slick” Tom Tiberi has been an institution at 97 Rock (WGRF), where he’s worked on and off since 1982 as part of a Buffalo radio career that started in 1979 at the old WYSL (1400). For most of that time, he’s been the rock station’s night voice, a precarious position these days at just about any radio station in these times of slimmed-back staffing.

But it wasn’t budget cutting that suddenly cost Tiberi his job in mid-July. Instead, it was an unfortunate Facebook post he made on his personal page, showing a meme of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in matching coffins. If the post looked harmless on the Thursday when Tiberi put it up, it looked like something else a few days later when a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump during a rally outside Pittsburgh.

“Was it in poor taste? Yes, it was,” Tiberi posted last week.

“However,” he continued, “the point I need to stress is that this meme was put up BEFORE the assassination attempt on Saturday, I then took it down immediately! However, by then a small but well-organized group of far-right extremist on FB had taken a screen shot of my meme and posted it all over public FB and to their private far right FB groups. This included posting phone numbers and e-mail addresses of Cumulus local and corporate Cumulus management. The screen shot they shared made it look like I had posted the meme AFTER the assassination attempt rather than on Thursday. This small group of individuals have succeeded in getting me fired from 97 Rock, as Cumulus local management crumbled under the pressure from this small group of lunatics. Make no mistake, this was a well-organized hit job!”

“I was a dying breed,” Tiberi told the Buffalo News, speculating that Cumulus was quick to let him go in order to save costs as well as to placate protesters. Cumulus hasn’t responded to requests for comment.