Stephen A. Smith Q-and-A Part 5: "(Quite Frankly) content was good"

==On creating a dialogue on radio versus having to talk in sound bites on TV, where you can sound more like a character than a person and give off the wrong impression:

"That’s true, but my response is also, I’m not familiar with it because I never went on TV and acted. When you see me on 'NBA Shootaround,' you’re getting me. That’s how I feel. What I will say is, you're ampted up and fired up. The camera’s rolling and the red eye’s on and you know millions are looking at you and -- all right, I’ve got 45 seconds to make this point. It’s almost like that marathon runner. If you’re jogging or beathing heavy and trying to pace yourself, and all of the sudden you look at the finish line, there it is, whatever you got left in you, you do it. That’s television. In radio, you sit back and (are) cruising, you got all the time in the world, time to make a point. Television, they’re in my ear.

"When you’re bombastic, and I don’t do it on purpose -- I take that back, when I’m talking about Kwame Brown I might do that on purpose, when I’m talking about Slava Medvedenko, I might do it on purpose -– but outside of that, it’s really not on purpose. With television there’s an urgency of the moment. In radio, you feel like you've got time to explain. Let me have a converstion. Let me rap to y’all. But on television, no conversation. I make my point and make sure I deliver it in a fashion where it will resonate and stick to you like glue. And I have 30 seconds to do it.:

==On what happened with his long-form TV show, "Quite Frankly," which started in Aug, 2005 and ended in January 2007:

"It was a tremendous experience. But I’ll never do it again under the same conditions. The pros I learned (was how) to be a host. Everyone says I’m a pretty damn good interviewer, and I learned that I am. It was what people didn’t see. For a long time, I was the warmup act, talking to the audicne. You never saw the Q and A I did after the show once we went off the air, staying up to an hour every day taking questions from a live studio audience. They didn’t want to see my humor.

"I knew that I was pretty good because ... when people criticized my show, they said, 'I can’t stand him.' They never said anything about my show. You read up. That let me know that my content was what it was all about. I told ‘em from day 1, you can tell me right now you can get Jerry Springer’s ratings if I be Jerry Springer, and I’m going to pass it up. I knew from the forcity of African Americans in my position, that I had to quote-unquote represent. What I meant by that was make sure the content was something respectable and people in the profession – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, it didn’t matter – they’d look at my show and say, 'That’s a decent show. That’s a good show. We can respect that.'

"(Former ESPN executive producer) Mark Shapiro is the one who gave me the opportunity and he paged me on my Blackberry when I was in Greece for the Olympics, he said 'It’s time for you to have your own show.' That’s how it all started. Never asked for it. Never pursued it. Been covering the NBA, was looking to venture out into the NFL and boxing and all that stuff, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would host my own show. Mark Shapiro made it happen. He put big-time advertising and marketing behind it. I was promoted everywhere in a consistent time slot and I knew the show would be successful even though it was on ESPN2 instead of the main channel. I knew it had a legitamite shot at success.

"When (Shapiro) left I knew that task was going to be daunting. Anytime you have somebody that’s new, and wants their own vision ... John Skipper is a great man and incredibly generious to me. But the mistake I made it that he wanted to move it to late night and he asked me what I thought and I completely supported that, thinking I’d be on in prime time in the West, not realizing everyone has live events in that time. So I got pushed out. And people would say to me every single day: 'I love your show, I just can’t find it. … when are you coming back on?' I had people thinking I was only on once a week. It got to the point where I could only watch myself on Tivo, and even then it would cut it off. It was crazy.

"What I learned was I bit more off than I could chew because I was hosting my own radio show at the time, writing a column, and I did a discredit to myself by spreading myself so thin because it almost killed me physically."

== Links back to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.