There is something about this hire that feels particularly good for radio right now. MacDonald Broadcasting is handing Dylan Salisbury the programming keys to its Mid-Michigan cluster and putting him behind the morning microphone on 98.1 WKCQ, giving a young programmer who has already worked his way through Top 40 and Country in markets across the country a chance to lead three very different music brands for one of Michigan’s longest-running family-owned broadcasters.
Salisbury becomes Program Director for Country WKCQ, Variety Hits 97.3 Joe-FM WMJO and Soft AC The Bay, heard on 104.1 WSAG along with 1400 WSAM and 92.3 FM in Saginaw. He will also wake up Mid-Michigan on WKCQ, which may be the most important piece of the whole thing because this is not a station where mornings are simply another box on the schedule.
WKCQ has been Country since 1968. That means Dylan Salisbury is walking into a brand that was playing Country music before most of the artists on today’s chart were born, and he is doing it from the same Saginaw broadcasting operation whose roots go back to Ken MacDonald Sr.’s purchase of WSAM in 1962. The Saginaw Community Foundation still documents how deeply MacDonald embedded the company in the region, from United Way and Red Cross involvement to Junior Achievement broadcasts that actually put local students on WSAM decades ago.
That history matters here because MacDonald Broadcasting is still a family-owned local company in an industry where that phrase becomes a little more unusual every year. The company’s stations are still operating from Whittier Street in Saginaw, and its EEO filings show the same four-station employment unit serving WKCQ, WMJO, WSAG and WSAM while the MacDonald family continues funding a broadcasting scholarship named for the company founder.
Salisbury is arriving from a completely different radio path, and I think that makes this even more interesting. He has programmed Top 40, programmed Country, worked nights, afternoons, music departments and social media, and learned the business in places including Minneapolis, Lincoln, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Colorado Springs and Portland. Alpha Media’s own announcement when it hired him to program Live 95.5 in Portland documented that winding route through KDWB, KFRX, KKDM, WZPL, KKMG, KUDL, WXSS and KATC.
That is a lot of formats, call letters and moving boxes.
It is also exactly the kind of background that can be useful when one programmer is asked to understand WKCQ, Joe-FM and The Bay without making any of them sound like the other two. A Country heritage station, a Variety Hits station and a Soft AC operation should not share much more than the address, the coffee maker and somebody occasionally yelling down the hall that the printer is broken again.
Salisbury has already been asked to do the multi-format balancing act before. In Portland, Connoisseur Media placed him over both Top 40 Live 95.5 and Country 98.7 The Bull in 2025, giving him responsibility for two stations with completely different audience expectations. The company’s own announcement emphasized his interest in programming both CHR and Country, which is useful context now that his next assignment stretches even farther across the format map.
Country is not foreign territory for him either. Salisbury has talked publicly about growing up around the music of George Strait, Conway Twitty, Garth Brooks, Patsy Cline and George Jones, and Westwood One previously used him as a national Mainstream Country night host. That means WKCQ is not getting somebody who spent the weekend learning the difference between Alan Jackson and Luke Bryan before showing up Monday with a music log.
Still, programming WKCQ is different from simply programming Country.
This station has generations attached to it. Barb Sheltraw spent 45 years with the company before retiring in 2023, including decades in mornings, while Jim Kramer retired that same year after 35 years at WKCQ. Those are not just long tenures; those are entire pieces of Mid-Michigan life spent behind the same microphones.
That is the room Salisbury is entering.
WKCQ’s local legacy also stretches far beyond the studio. For years, the station’s Country Music Fest on Ojibway Island became one of those events that people in the region simply knew, drawing enormous crowds and turning a radio promotion into a Saginaw summer tradition. You do not build that kind of connection by treating a market like a collection of ZIP codes.
You build it by showing up.
That is probably the most important advice I could give Dylan as he starts this job, although I suspect he already understands it. Learn Saginaw, Bay City and Midland separately, because people who live there certainly know the difference, and then learn the smaller communities around them that make up the rest of the WKCQ footprint.
Listen to what matters locally. The current WKCQ site is already doing the work with Mid-Michigan news, weather, local job listings, Saginaw County stories, Bay City developments, Great Lakes Loons scores, Saginaw Spirit hockey and community events from Midland to Flint. That is the material that makes a Country station harder to replace with a playlist.
There is also something very radio about Salisbury getting mornings as part of this assignment. Program directors should occasionally have to live inside the product they are making, because nothing teaches you what your radio station actually sounds like faster than opening the microphone at 6 a.m. and discovering whether there is anything worth talking about besides the next song.
Mornings will also force the local relationship to happen quickly. WKCQ’s audience does not need somebody broadcasting at Mid-Michigan; it needs somebody who starts figuring out why the Saginaw Spirit matters, why the Dow Event Center matters, what happens when Bay City has a major event, why road construction in Midland ruins somebody’s morning and which local story everybody will be talking about before lunch.
That is where Salisbury can make this appointment bigger than another programming title.
Joe-FM presents a completely different challenge. WMJO serves the same broad Saginaw-Bay City-Midland region with a Variety Hits approach, and the station’s current schedule reflects a much different personality from WKCQ.
The Bay is different again. Its Soft AC programming reaches Mid-Michigan through 104.1 WSAG, 1400 WSAM and the Saginaw FM translator, carrying a brand that connects today’s cluster to the very AM station around which the MacDonald company was originally built.
That gives Salisbury an interesting responsibility.
He is not simply programming three formats. He is helping determine how one local broadcasting company speaks to different portions of the same community without making every station feel as if somebody discovered a cluster-wide content template and hit copy and paste.
Please do not do that.
Radio has enough sameness already.
WKCQ should feel like WKCQ. Joe should be allowed to be Joe, and The Bay should occupy its own lane without being forced into somebody else’s personality.
What makes this appointment especially worth watching is that Salisbury has never seemed particularly frightened of experimenting. During his Portland years, he was directly involved in testing AI-assisted radio tools, including the highly publicized synthetic version of Live 95.5 personality Ashley Elzinga. Radio World’s reporting at the time made something important clear, though: Salisbury was not simply turning the station over to a machine, and the implementation still involved extensive human writing, editing and production.
That experience could be useful at a company like MacDonald, where local radio tradition and modern technology are eventually going to have to coexist. The trick will be remembering that technology should make WKCQ more capable of serving Saginaw, Bay City and Midland, not give it an excuse to sound less connected to them.
I also like what this hire says about the programming chair itself.
Radio has spent too much of the last several years eliminating programmers, combining responsibilities and then wondering why stations start sounding as if nobody is actually responsible for them. MacDonald Broadcasting is putting somebody in the position whose job is specifically to think about the product, and then it is putting that same person on the air every morning where listeners can decide whether those decisions are working.
There is accountability in that.
There is also opportunity.
Salisbury is young enough to understand how audiences discover radio content outside the radio, experienced enough to know that digital engagement does not magically make a bad aircheck good, and travelled enough to have seen multiple ways of doing this business. What he has not done yet is program these stations in Mid-Michigan, and that is the part that matters now.
The MacDonald family has been doing radio in Saginaw for more than sixty years. Ken MacDonald Sr. became so closely tied to Michigan broadcasting that the Michigan Association of Broadcasters elected him president in 1975, and Ken MacDonald Jr. entered the organization’s Hall of Fame in 2011.
That is the inheritance sitting on the other side of Salisbury’s new office door.
The best thing he can do is not be intimidated by it.
Respect it, learn it and then add something to it.
Radio heritage becomes useless when everybody becomes so afraid of changing anything that the station turns into a museum. At the same time, heritage becomes meaningless when a new programmer walks in and starts ripping things apart without understanding why listeners cared in the first place.
The good ones find the middle.
Dylan Salisbury now gets that chance in Saginaw.
He gets the keys to three distinctly different music brands, the responsibility of programming a family-owned operation with more than six decades invested in the community, and a morning microphone on a Country station that has been speaking to Mid-Michigan since 1968.
That is a real radio job.
And after everything this industry has done lately to convince talented programmers that maybe there is no chair left for them, there is something encouraging about watching one of those chairs get filled by somebody who still clearly wants to do the work.
Now comes the fun part.
Dylan gets to learn Mid-Michigan, and Mid-Michigan gets to learn Dylan. If both sides give each other a chance, MacDonald Broadcasting may have found the right person at exactly the right point in his career to help write the next chapter of a very old local radio story.
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