President of the Jerry Lee Foundation and President of Philadelphia Radio Station B-101 FM
Jerry Lee
Born
1936 (age87–88)
Sharon, Pennsylvania
Education
Youngstown State University
Knownfor
WBEB FM Radio, Criminology
Jerry Lee (born April 20, 1936, in Sharon, Pennsylvania) is a noted crime prevention philanthropist, proponent of evidence-based policy-making, and the former owner of the Philadelphia radio station WBEB-FM 101.1. Currently he is working on promoting the effectiveness of radio commercials, owns SpotQ Services, Inc.,[1] is the President of the Jerry Lee Foundation,[2] and is involved in continuing to encourage the adoption of evidence-based criminology.
In 1960, Jerry Lee graduated from Youngstown State University, Ohio with a bachelor's degree in economics. After a brief stint with a management consulting firm, he became the general manager of WAQE FM in Baltimore. This was his first job in Radio before moving to Philadelphia in 1963 where he joined a new radio station being launched.
Radio Station - WBEB-FM
Jerry Lee was hired by David Kurtz, the owner of WDVR 101 FM radio station, three weeks before the station went on the air in 1963. David Kurtz was trained as an Engineer and gave Jerry Lee the opportunity to work for the fledgling station.[5] Jerry originally offered to work for very low pay but with a very high sales commission and set a goal for himself that the station would be the Number 1 rated FM radio station in Philadelphia in 12 months. He offered to quit if he did not achieve this goal. Originally, Jerry Lee had the title of Sales Manager but soon was running the station.[6]
Originally the station was licensed to broadcast at 5,000 watts of power while the competition broadcast at 20,000 watts. Lower wattage makes it harder to find the station on the dial, which often means a station will have lower ratings and sales. By 1966 despite its low power, WDVR 101 FM had the largest audience of any FM Radio station in the country according to the Arbitron ratings. In order to create such a large audience, Jerry Lee employed a novel strategy for the time. While other stations played familiar songs 70% of the time, he insisted that WDVR play 100% familiar songs.
The station was originally assigned a low wattage because they would have interfered with the signals from two other radio stations. Jerry Lee saw this as one of the primary operational restrictions holding the station back. In 1968 Jerry Lee negotiated a mutual interference agreement with WCBS FM in New York City and in 1970 an agreement was reached with WGAL FM in Lancaster, Pennsylvania that allowed the station to achieve full power.
In February 1967, WDVR was able to move from the Germantown Neighborhood of Philadelphia to the more centrally located Bala Cynwyd. After this move Jerry Lee called a staff meeting, “I will do anything to double our sales in 1968, no matter how far out it is”. The station increased revenue from $339,000 in 1967 to $1,006,000 in 1968.
Some of the sales strategies that came out of that initial meeting included installing new technology like the new automatic IBM typewriter to use as a conversation piece and a continental height bar that was accessed by a sliding door adjacent to his office. The continental height bar proved such a successful sales tool that a penthouse was rented a block away from the studios and an authentic Spanish wine cellar was installed, the penthouse also had moving floors. The penthouse proved to be an even more effective sales tool than the bar adjacent to Jerry's office and automatic typewriter but not as effective as the yacht that was purchased for sales meetings in 1972.
AM dominated FM stations in ratings and in advertising. To change the perception of FM, Jerry decided to lease Cadillacs for every one of the sales reps. In late 1967 a deal with one of the top AM “Rep Firms” in the country (Petry Media Corp) was brokered and business with national advertising brands rose dramatically.
In February 1968 the biggest money giveaway in the history of radio, to that point, was launched. The $101,000 giveaway contest (101 prizes worth $1000) that was promoted by the spokesperson for Avis on TV. It was the first time a professionally created TV commercial was ever made for a radio station. “Some time in the next few days, you will get the most important mailing of your life.” The audience for the station went up 35%”.
Out of the box thinking that was both audacious and carefully researched became the hallmark of the station’s continued ratings growth. This led to Lee becoming owner of 49.99% of the station in 1969.[7]
In 1969 the James Bond car featured in Goldfinger and Thunderball that had an ejection seat was purchased and for the next 42 years was central to the James Bond room of Jerry Lee’s house. Taking a picture inside this car was a major attraction for advertisers, political fundraisers and visiting dignitaries.[8]
One of Lee’s promotions in the mid-1980s focused on giving away 50,000 deluxe rosewood cabinet radios with 6-inch speakers to retailers in the region.[9] The radios were manufactured so that they could only receive 101.1 FM. At the time it was relatively common to walk into a salon, barbershop, grocery store or other place of business and hear one of these radios playing 101.1 FM. As of 2024, it was anecdotally remarked that some of the original 50,000 radios are still in operation.
When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was signed into law Lee saw a broader industry move toward consolidation coming. He was noted to say, “I knew that everyone would scramble to bulk up and buy a lot of stations that would require a lot of financing—and the first thing they would cut is their marketing budget, which they did. So, I increased my advertising over a three-year period from $1 million to $3.5 million a year.” This positioning helped WBEB maintain a large ratings lead.
Lee purchased the rest of the station's shares from Dave Kurtz's estate in 2005 and left the organization in 2018 with the sale to Entercom (now called Audacy).[7]
Productivity Initiatives
While a National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Board Member in the early 1980s, Jerry Lee became concerned that the United States was experiencing reduced levels of productivity. After initiating productivity initiatives like BICIAP (Broadcast Industry Council to Improve American Productivity) and working with people like Howard K. Smith and Don Ephlin (the UAW person at Ford), real change occurred.
Criminology
In 1996, Jerry Lee and his late partner David L. Kurtz founded the Lee Foundation.[2] According to its website, the Jerry Lee Foundation is committed to solving social problems associated with poverty, especially in American inner cities which suffer from concentrated poverty. The Foundation's special concerns are elementary education and crime. Its major strategy is to support research to find out what works, what doesn't work, and what may be promising to prevent crime and improve education. Its major projects have been established at the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Cambridge (England).
In 1997, the University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice invited Jerry Lee to serve as Chair of the Advisory Board of its multi-million dollar “Preventing Crime” program, which extended the work of its landmark 1997 Report to the US Congress on Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising. The program made several Congressional Presentations, and in 2000 launched the annual Jerry Lee Symposium on Crime and Justice Research, originally at the US Capitol and for over 14 years held on Capitol Hill for an audience of policy-makers and practitioners.
The Jerry Lee Foundation enlisted other donors to support the Maryland Criminology Department in making term appointments of two research assistant professors (David Wilson and Spencer Lee), and of David Farrington as a research professor. Their work helped to lead to the founding in 2001 of the international Campbell Collaboration, of which Jerry Lee was one of three original incorporators and David Farrington was the first chair of the Coordinating Committee on Crime and Justice. The mission of the Campbell Collaboration is to provide decision makers around the world with sound evidence in implementing and evaluating policies in the areas of education, crime prevention and social services, derived from systematic reviews of research on specific policies, treatments and programs.
In 1999, the Jerry Lee Foundation, with the assistance of the Broadcast Industry Council and National Broadcast Association for Community Affairs, established an award of $2,500 to annually recognize outstanding community service programs, or programs, news series or public service campaigns promoting or examining the demonstrated effectiveness of local crime prevention programs. Also in 1999, he was elected to the Board of the Philadelphia Police Foundation and was elected chairman of the advisory board of the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2000, Jerry Lee founded the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania with a multimillion-dollar gift. Dean Samuel H. Preston appointed Lawrence W. Sherman, the Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, as the first director of the Lee Center, and later as the founding chair of University of Pennsylvania Department of Criminology, the first and still only department of criminology in the Ivy League. The Jerry Lee Center's goal is to foster collaboration among outstanding criminologists from around the world to further the discipline as a multi-disciplinary science in research, education and public service. The Jerry Lee Foundation supported this center with an initial gift of $5 million. The Jerry Lee Foundation also endowed two Jerry Lee assistant professorships in Criminology at Penn, to which such distinguished criminologists as John MacDonald and Charles Loeffler were appointed. The two assistant professorships were later consolidated as the Jerry Lee Chair in Criminology. Dr. Anthony Braga, an award-winning experimental criminologist, was appointed the first Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology at Pennsylvania University.
In 2001, Jerry Lee and Lawrence Sherman, in conjunction with Stockholm University Professor Jerzy Sarnecki, created an annual prize in criminology that recognized the contributions the field makes to the reduction of human suffering. As president of both the American and International Societies of Criminology in 2001–2, Sherman was able to muster global civil society support for the idea. Jerzy Sarnecki organized a meeting to discuss the idea with the State Secretary for the Swedish Ministry of Justice, Dan Eliasson, and the Minister of Justice, Thomas Bodstrom. The Ministry then agreed to support the creation of an annual Criminology Symposium, organized by the Swedish National Council on Crime Prevention, if a civil society association could raise funds to provide 1,000,000 Swedish Kronor in Prize money for a ten-year period, including support from a Swedish source. The Söderberg Foundations agreed to join in the plan, as well as the Hitachi Mirai Foundation and the Japanese Correctional Association.
At the 14th World Congress of Criminology in Philadelphia in 2005, funded by the Jerry Lee Foundation, Justice Minister Bodstrom announced the creation of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology and the awarding of the first Prizes scheduled for 2006. The Prize has been awarded annually since then in the same hall as the Nobel Prize Banquet, the main room of the Stockholm City Hall. In 2010, the Söderberg Foundations offered a generous challenge grant to create a permanent endowment for the Stockholm Prize, which was matched by the Swedish Ministry of Justice under the leadership of Justice Minister Beatrice Ask. In June 2012, Queen Silvia of Sweden witnessed the signing of the documents creating the permanent Stockholm Prize Foundation by the founders and co-founders, attesting to Jerry Lee's role as the original donor to the Prize. In most years the Prize has been presented to the winners by Queen Silvia of Sweden or another member of the Swedish Royal Family. The Prize winner selection by an international, independent Jury is sponsored by the University of Stockholm.
In 2007, the Jerry Lee Foundation pledged £1,000,000 to create the Jerry Lee Centre of Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge. The mission of the centre, the first of its kind at any university, is to promote the use and development of experimental criminology with operational partners who wish to test new interventions. Experimental criminology consists principally of randomized controlled field trials to develop and test theoretically coherent ideas about reducing harm from crime. Its long-term objective is to accumulate an integrated body of evidence about both the prevention and causation of crime. The centre has also supported Jerry Lee Scholars (all Cambridge PhD students in criminology), such as Dr. Renee Mitchell, the founding President of the American Society of Evidence-Based Policing, and post-doctoral Jerry Lee Fellows, including Professor Barak Ariel . The Director of Research at the Cambridge Jerry Lee Centre, Professor Lawrence W. Sherman, is known for his success in mobilizing serving police officers to design and carry out their own experiments across the UK and in other countries.[10] The Director of the Cambridge Lee Centre, Dr. Heather Strang, is highly cited for the 12 randomized experiments in restorative justice [11] that she led in Australia and the UK.
Awards and honors
1987 President Ronald Reagan – President's Private Sector Initiative Award (on behalf of The Broadcast Productivity Council)[12][13]
MacDonald, John M., Robert Kaminski, and Mike Smith. 2009. The Effect of Less-lethal Weapons on Injuries in Police Use of Force Events. American Journal of Public Health 99: 2268–2274.
Ridgeway, Greg, and John M. MacDonald. 2009. Doubly Robust Internal Bench- marking and False Discovery Rates for Detecting Racial Bias in Police Stops. Journal of the American Statistical Association 104: 661–668.
MacDonald, John M., Andrew Morral, Barbara Raymond, and Christine Eibner. 2007. The Efficacy of the Rio Hondo DUI Court: A 2-Year Field Experiment. Evaluation Review 31: 4-23.
Charles Loeffler, former Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology:
Loeffler, Charles. 2013. Does Imprisonment Alter the Life Course? Evidence on Crime and Employment from a Natural Experiment. Criminology 51: 137–166.
Aurélie Ouss was named Jerry Lee Assistant Professor of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, in 2018. Dr. Ouss completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago Crime Lab and received her PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2013. Her research, which has received support from J-PAL North America, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, examines how good design of criminal justice institutions and policies can make law enforcement fairer and more efficient.
Phillipe, Arnaud, and Aurélie Ouss. 2018. "No Hatred or Malice, Fear or Affection": Media and Sentencing. Journal of Political Economy 126: 2134–2178.
Related Research Articles
WFIL is a radio station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, with a Christian radio format consisting of teaching and talk programs. Owned by Salem Media Group, studios and transmitter facilities are shared with co-owned WNTP in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.
WXPN is a non-commercial, public radio station licensed to the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that broadcasts an adult album alternative (AAA) radio format, along with many other format shows. WXPN produces World Cafe, a music program distributed by NPR to many non-commercial stations in the United States. The station's call sign, which is often abbreviated to XPN, stands for "Experimental Pennsylvania Network". The broadcast tower used by WXPN is located at, in the antenna farm complex in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia.
WXTU is a commercial radio station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Owned by Beasley Broadcast Group, the station broadcasts a country music format. Its studios and offices are located at 1 Bala Plaza on East City Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, while its transmitter is located in the Roxborough section of the city.
WBEB is a commercial radio station licensed to serve Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Owned by Audacy, Inc., the station broadcasts an adult contemporary format, switching to Christmas music for part of November and December. The broadcast tower used by the station is in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia at, The radio studios are co-located within Audacy's corporate headquarters in Center City, Philadelphia.
Beasley Broadcast Group, Inc., based in Naples, Florida, is an owner/operator of radio stations in the United States. As of May 2024, the company owned 59 stations under the Beasley Media Group name.
Robert “Bob” Perkins is an American retired radio personality who worked as a jazz program host and DJ in Philadelphia. His radio career began in 1964 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1969, Perkins began working for Philadelphia's WDAS, where he worked for 19 years before moving to WHYY in 1988. In 1997, he joined Temple University's WRTI Radio, where he worked until his retirement in 2023.
The Institute of Criminology is the criminological research institute within the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. The Institute is one of the oldest criminological research institutes in Europe, and has exerted a strong influence on the development of criminology. Its multidisciplinary teaching and research staff are recruited from the disciplines of law, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. It is located on the Sidgwick Site in the west of Cambridge, England. The Institute of Criminology building was designed by Allies and Morrison. The Institute is also home to the Radzinowicz Library, which houses the most comprehensive criminology collection in the United Kingdom. The Institute has approximately 50 PhD students, 30-40 M.Phil. students, and 200 M.St students. The Institute also offers courses to Cambridge undergraduates, particularly in law, but also in human social and political sciences and in psychology and behavioural sciences.
WQSU is a non-commercial, college FM radio station that is licensed to serve Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The station is owned and operated by Susquehanna University and is staffed by students and faculty of the university as well as community volunteers.
Jerzy Sarnecki is a Swedish and Polish professor in criminology at Stockholm University in Sweden.
WDVR is a community radio station serving parts of western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, including New Hope and Trenton. The station, which broadcasts a variety radio format, is licensed to Delaware Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Its transmitter tower is on Pittsfield Road near Frenchtown-Flemington Road in Frenchtown, New Jersey.
Lawrence W. Sherman is an experimental criminologist and police educator who defined evidence-based policing. Since October 2024 he has served as Chief Executive Officer of Benchmark Cambridge, a global police reform organisation. From 2022-24 he was Chief Scientific Officer of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard, and since 2017 he has served as the Wolfson Professor of Criminology Emeritus at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology.
The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is an international prize in the field of criminology, established under the aegis of the Swedish Ministry of Justice. It has a permanent endowment in the trust of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation. The Stockholm Prize in Criminology is a distinguished part of the Stockholm Criminology Symposium, an annual event taking place during three days in June.
David L. Weisburd, is an Israeli/American criminologist who is well known for his research on crime and place, policing and white collar crime. Weisburd was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and was awarded the Israel Prize in Social Work and Criminological Research in 2015, considered the state's highest honor. Weisburd is Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. and Walter E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Law and Criminal Justice in the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. At George Mason University, Weisburd was founder of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy and is now its Executive Director. Weisburd also serves as Chief Science Advisor at the National Policing Institute in Washington, D.C. Weisburd was the founding editor of the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and is editor of the Cambridge Elements in Criminology Series.
Gerard Anthony "Jerry" Del Colliano'" is an American journalist, author, former media executive, broadcaster and professor of music industry at the University of Southern California. He is currently a professor at New York University Steinhardt School and is publisher and editor of Inside Music Media and founder and former owner of Inside Radio.
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology. He researches the history of interpersonal violence, and has conducted a study on levels of homicide throughout Europe over a period of 800 years. His research has highlighted the ways in which cultural models of conduct of life, embedded in social institutions, have shaped patterns of daily behaviour among adolescent and young adult men, which in turn have influenced the likelihood of frictions leading to aggressive behaviour. He is also recognised for his studies on the developmental causes of crime and delinquency and advocates the effectiveness of early prevention during childhood. Recent projects include the London Medieval Murder Map and the Evidence for Better Lives, a global birth-cohort study in eight cities across the world.
The Campbell Collaboration is a non-profit organisation that promotes evidence-based decisions and policy through the production of systematic reviews and other types of evidence synthesis. Campbell is composed of coordinating groups that coordinate the production of systematic reviews and evidence gap maps in the following areas: Ageing, Business & Management, Children & Young Persons Wellbeing, Climate Solutions, Crime & Justice, Disability, Education, International Development, Knowledge Translation & Implementation, Methods and Social Welfare. It is a sister initiative of Cochrane. The CEO is Will Moy, who was formerly Chief Executive of Full Fact. The current president of the board of directors is Jeremy Grimshaw.
David Philip Farrington is a British criminologist, forensic psychologist, and emeritus professor of psychological criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellow. In 2014, Paul Hawkins and Bitna Kim wrote that Farrington "is considered one of the leading psychologists and main contributors to the field of criminology in recent years."
Marlin Raymond Taylor is an American former radio broadcaster, program director, and radio executive who is credited as the "father of beautiful music," an update of the older easy listening radio format popular from the 1960s to the 1980s. He initially developed the format, which primarily featured instrumental versions of popular songs and classical melodies, while working at WDVR in Philadelphia between 1963 and 1966.
Christoffer Carlsson is a Swedish criminologist and writer, best known for the crime novels about Leo Junker (2013–2017) and the ongoing Hallandsviten, which includes Under the Storm, 2024, Blaze Me a Sun, 2023 and Levande och döda, 2023.
Laurie Robinson is an American scholar and public servant who has held multiple positions across government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. Robinson's most notable roles include serving as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and co-chairing Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. She also served on the congressionally created Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections and on an independent commission that explored the potential closure of New York City's Rikers Island jail complex. Most recently, Robinson served as founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan policy and research organization.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
