On Monday, morning host Joe Volk was missing from Cumulus Rock “Z93” WKQZ Midland/Saginaw MI after over two decades as host of the “Joe And The Poorboy” morning show.

Co-host Adam Shilling announced on the air yesterday that Volk was no longer employed at the station, but when pressed online things turned a little ugly. When a listener, who also claimed to be an occasional advertiser asked why Volk was gone the station responded “Yes, you do deserve an explanation and if you were listening this morning you would have heard one. Oh but wait, you weren’t listening.”

Is that really how you want to treat a listener? Even if he wasn’t a one-time and potentially future advertiser why throw away the chance to make one? With the technology available to us now wouldn’t it have been much easier to say something along the lines of “Unfortunately Z93 and Volk needed to go our separate ways. Here’s a link to the audio from this morning where we discussed the situation”?

This way you turn it into a way to promote the station and get on top of the situation as opposed to creating negative publicity in multiple forms. In particular this comes just months after a sister station in the same cluster has been hit with negative publicity for the firing of its longtime morning show and then taking them to court over the launch of an internet show.

But sure, let’s keep giving listeners a reason to turn away not just from a station, but from radio in general.