Lee... I am impressed! You are right. The first thing our owner did WAS fire
the copywriter.

At that time, the station's commercials were so far ahead of any station
within 100 miles. At first, I couldn't put my finger on the reason. Then I
got to know our copywriter and found out that all those good ideas were
coming out of that one young lady. Give her the facts, and she could whip
out a commercial in a couple of minutes. And it worked! Those spots were
dynamite!

But it appeared to the owner that our copywriter was merely a drain on the
bottom line. She didn't sell anything, didn't produce anything (that he
could see), and only seemed to look busy maybe an hour or so each day. So he
fired her.

That's when it became real obvious just how important that copywriter had
been to our station.

After that, all the spots were at best, mediocre. Our sales people were
stuck writing spots when they could be selling. And the ones they wrote were
often worse than that of a grade school student. I tried writing spots
myself, and I was so slow and terrible at it that I quickly abandoned that
idea.

Hats off to anyone who can write good radio.