Mark Shannon

1. 2026

   Founder

   Station Compliance Nationwide

   Built when the FCC’s program chain security rule landed and it became obvious that the stations it would hurt most were the ones with nobody on staff to read it. A $149 kit, an $895 service, and a free reference library that stays free.

2. 2026

   Founder

   ShowPrepPro Nationwide

   Daily show prep, sourced twice and readable on the air. Built by somebody who had spent years opening the incumbent’s Word document at 5am and wishing it were anything else.

3. 2026 — present

   Voice of the Fair

   Solano County Fair Association Vallejo, CA

   The official title. And roughly how it is supposed to work in a market this size — the fairgrounds, the station and the morning show are all inside the same twenty miles.

4. 2025 — present

   Founder and developer

   Cartwright Nationwide

   Started because Power88’s own traffic software had never once delivered a log the automation could import, and the fix turned out to be eight separate faults across two systems. It runs Power88 every day now, and it is being readied to run somebody else’s station — which is a different and much harder thing.

5. 2023 — present

   Owner and Morning Show Host

   Power88.FM Solano County / I-80 corridor, CA

   Back behind the microphone, and this time it is my building.

   Launched in Fairfield in 2023 to prove that a digital station could still be a local one. Greatest hits of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, streaming-only, with a mobile rig that spends the summer at fairs and car shows.

   Owner, program director, morning host, and the person who fixes the rack when it stops. A station this size does not have departments — it has whoever is standing there.

6. 2013 — 2025

   Global Vendor Manager

   Minted.com San Francisco, CA

   Twelve years working with vendors twelve time zones away, which teaches you one thing better than any other job could: what it feels like to need a single straight answer out of somebody and be unable to get it.

   That is the whole reason there is no support form on any site I run.

7. Seven years

   General Manager, eight locations

   The UPS Store San Francisco Bay Area

   Anybody can type “real customer service” onto a website. Stand behind eight retail counters for seven years and you find out exactly what it costs you when you have not got it — it costs you the customer, and then they tell people.

   The code was written nights and weekends. This was the daytime.

8. 2005

   Left radio · taught himself to write software

   San Francisco, CA

   I stepped out of radio and started teaching myself web development in Adobe Dreamweaver — a program built on the premise that you should not have to see what it was doing, and what it was doing, quietly, on my behalf, was writing an absolute mess. I could not fix any of it, because I could not see any of it.

   So I threw it out and learned to write the code myself. Then how to build software. I have been doing it ever since.

   Which is the transmitter all over again, twenty years later. I do not trust a box that will not tell me what is inside it, and I cannot leave one alone until I know. No bootcamp, no degree — just a long-standing refusal to let something stay a mystery.

9. 1983 — 2005

   Air talent · Music Director · Program Director · Station Manager

   Ten stations Mobile · Pensacola · Biloxi · Gulfport · Pascagoula · Robertsdale · Citronelle

   Ten stations across the Gulf Coast, in four states’ worth of small and mid-sized markets. I moved around the way disc jockeys do, which is to say constantly — on air, music director, program director, assistant station manager. Most of the chairs, at one point or another. Voiceover work the whole time, and still.

   The full run is below.

   I was never the engineer and never had the ticket. But at every station I ever worked at, the first friend I made was the engineer, and I suspect a few of them wished I had not. There were stretches where I spent three and four nights running out at a transmitter site chasing a fault with nobody paying me to be there. Every one of those men explained it, patiently, at two in the morning, to a disc jockey who had no business being out there — and not one of them made me feel stupid for not knowing yet.

   That is the entire reason I will not do it to you.

10. Late 1980s

    Air talent

    WMML 1410 (formerly WUNI) Mobile, AL

    The station I grew up on. WUNI — “you and I”, everybody said it Woonie — was what my mother had on in the house, and it had a mascot called the Wuni Bird you could telephone and talk to. It was some poor guy down the hall doing a voice. I was a kid, and as far as I was concerned there was a bird at the radio station and he would take my call. About once a week, for years.

    Mel Tillis bought the place in 1984 and changed the call letters to WMML, after his own stutter. A few years after that, they hired me.

    Same frequency, same building. I sat behind the microphone I had been ringing up as a small boy and played the same records I grew up hearing come out of it. Nobody gets over that.

    Which is why, when somebody hands me their station, I know exactly what I have got hold of. I have been on the other end of it — once a week, on the phone, talking to a bird.

11. 1983

    Air talent — the first job

    WGUD AM/FM Pascagoula / Moss Point, MS

    Country, AM and FM combo. Midnight to six in the morning, one shift a week, Saturday night into Sunday morning.

    I was twelve. I told them I was eighteen, nobody checked anything back then, and I was not going to be the one to bring it up.

    Understand what that shift is, though. Midnight to six on a Saturday is the worst air shift in any building — it is what you hand the person with no leverage. Nobody sweet-talks their way into it. You take it because you cannot stay away from the place.

    Before that it was a bedroom, my mother’s Radio Shack microphone and a tape recorder, talking over records to an audience of nobody. Some kids want to be firemen.

Where a duration appears above instead of a year, that is because the duration is what I can state honestly. I am not going to invent dates to make the column line up.