There have to be at least 10 people more fascinating than Jeff Dubay here in the Twin Cities, right?
Although when it comes to City Pages, once a relevant weekly news source, Dubay is hanging in there right around No. 10.
City Pages produces plenty of Facebook and internet traffic by regurgitating news stories from other sources or poaching online postings and adding a dose of color and commentary to its presentation. Train wrecks like Dubay are ripe for the picking, and City Pages loves it whenever Dubay turns the spotlight on himself, as he has a couple of times via Facebook since his broadcasting career ended.
Besides City Pages, it appears the primary source of Dubay news right now is the Pioneer Press. I'm not sure why the stepchild of daily newspapers here in the Twin Cities deems Dubay's online jousts with his former colleagues to be worthy of actual news treatment, but que sera sera. I guess that Bob Sansevere's dissecting of Dubay's career via his Pioneer Press blog made it newsworthy.
A post mortum on Dubay's podcast history by the Pioneer Press and a random collection of tidbits by City Pages provided plenty of insight into Dubay's world. Throw in a few other random sources and I'm still not sure what to believe. Here are tidbits I gleaned in the past 12 hours. None of this is groundbreaking material.
• Everybody is lying. Dubay will claim comments about him are lies. Tom Barnard's nephew will refute any claim Dubay makes. Nobody has said one truthful thing since Dubay's podcast went silent.
• Dubay's co-host, Di Murphy, appears to have been plucked from the online world because she's a woman who is really, really, really into sports. She has blogged on sports in the past, and laments the lack of a female host in the local sports radio market. It's hard to disagree with some of her observations about the local scene. Whether she was cut out for broadcasting in any form is hard to say, as I have never heard her work. She was awfully difficult to work with, according to Dubay.
• Murphy and Barnard's nephew seem to be holding back in revealing something crucial about the sequence of events that brought us to today, and seem to suggest that perhaps it is necessary the Dubay-obsessed public see and/or hear what it is.
• The domain that hosted Dubay's podcast, jeffdubay.com, now redirects to Barnard's podcast site. Although Dubay stripped himself of a Twitter and Facebook presence in the aftermath of his tirade against Team Barnard, he has since restored his Facebook presence.
• Dubay ain't wealthy. This doesn't come as a surprise. It's hard to know how much anyone in broadcasting makes, but there are a few things that we know. It doesn't pay all that well for most folks, despite the public profile it provides. More on this another day, a lot more. For now, we have claims by Barnard's nephew that Dubay has no cash of his own and the startup costs for the podcast were fronted by the Barnard machine.
While Dubay once had a Clear Channel salary, allegedly owned a boat on Lake Minnetonka and may have had some sort of "cabin" north of the the metro – as well as a younger wife who fancied herself a cheerleading coach – his years of not working between radio gigs, (as far as we know,) combined with his time in rehab programs and/or jail settings and his legal bills certainly can't leave him with a lot of personal wealth, unless he was independently wealthy to begin with.
Allegedly Dubay took the bus to work at 1500ESPN each day because his driving privileges are suspended. If so, that's saves him hundreds of dollars per month, but not enough that he'd have built a nest egg to live off of since being dismissed by the Hubbards.
Nonetheless, it would seem unlikely that it's in Dubay's best interest to bite any hand that feeds him, no matter how tiny the morsel.
• Dubay would fly off the handle in his business dealings with those he worked with during his podcast career. Whether he did or didn't, we don't know, of course, but given his short temper and seething anger whenever he read something he didn't like on Twitter, the idea that he was difficult to deal with is not far fetched. Armchair psychologists seem to think Dubay has some sort of mental condition that is not being fueled by chemical stimulants.
So there you have it, the world of Dubay in the final days of March 2014. How will it all end? Will it end? Will Dubay finally just fade away, leaving his fans to wonder, "Whatever happened to that guy?"
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