With radio’s AI battle raging, Radio Ink enters the trenches to tell the stories of those on both sides of the 2020s’ defining debate. Whether you’re managing a PD, negotiating a contract, or debating a digital sidekick, the August issue is a playbook for staying in control.
From the dealmaker who’s spent four decades protecting talent’s value to the programmers rewriting their own job descriptions to the company that built an AI co-host from scratch, this issue is about the people deciding what gets automated, what stays human, and who profits either way.
Cover Interview: Weiss Agency Founder and CEO Eric Weiss
He was supposed to be fired before he ever got to Westwood One. Instead, in a Los Angeles office where senior attorneys above him were already being shown the door, Eric Weiss talked his way into a new title (and a raise) in the same conversation. That instinct for finding leverage no one else can see would go on to define four decades in radio, from helping to grow Westwood One into a $500 million operation to closing the deal that gave Michael Bloomberg his first foothold in media.
Along the way came Casey Kasem’s Christmas Eve contract signing, the launch of American Top 40‘s second act, and a career pivot from corporate dealmaker to the agent sitting across the table representing radio’s biggest names.
Now, as AI threatens to replicate the very voices he’s spent a career protecting, Weiss is crystal clear in his conversation with Radio Ink Editor-in-Chief Cameron Coats: there’s no radio business without great talent.
The Most Successful Program Directors in America 2026
Radio Ink‘s annual ranked list returns to spotlight the top 25 PDs fighting to keep radio’s human touch, while adapting to an AI-enhanced future. We asked them how the role holds its footing as streaming and social audio scramble the way people find content, what they’re doing to keep their stations rooted in the communities they serve, and exactly where AI earns a seat at the table and where it gets shown the door.
Amigo Inteligente: Has Radio Built Its First AI Superhost?
Meet Coyotec: the first Latino AI radio personality born out of Entravision, built to say what human talent is sometimes afraid to, and now anchoring drive time alongside his human co-host, GeeGee. Radio Ink sits down with Entravision President of Audio Eduardo Maytorena and EVP of AI Strategy LeaAnna Hernandez to trace how a syndication workaround turned into what may be Hispanic radio’s boldest programming bet yet.
Maytorena and Hernandez get candid about building a personality from the ground up, training him to sound authentically local in a syndicated model that owns none of its own IP, and drawing the line between AI-driven content and the “magic of human direction” that still steers it.
PLUS:
- Manager’s Corner returns with exclusive wisdom from Radio Ink President and Publisher Deborah Parenti, Roy H. Williams, Gary Berkowitz, Loyd Ford, Dara Kalvort, and Grace Agostino
- People on the Move
- Blast from the Past
- Signoff
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