[Swprograms] DC Radio Experiment Ended

[jfiglio1@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

>From "Raw Fisher", a blog by Washington Post writer Marc Fisher


Why Washington Post Radio Died
(Jump to bottom for an update on what will replace Washington Post 
Radio.) 

>From its sudden and fascinating inception to its slow and awkward 
demise, Washington Post Radio was a work in progress. It never came 
close to fulfilling its original promise--"NPR on caffeine," in the 
spicy phrase of the newspaper's radio-TV guru, Tina Gulland--but it 
was a radio station bubbling with possibilities.

Not that many listeners cared to explore those possibilities. The 
radio station--which will die next month by mutual consent of its 
clumsily-paired parents, The Washington Post and Bonneville 
broadcasting--never showed much of a pulse in the ratings, even though 
its programming ran on one of the most powerful and storied spots on 
Washington's radio dial, the former home of all-news WTOP.

In an era of rapid change in the news and media businesses, when both 
print newspapers and broadcast radio stations are seeing huge chunks 
of their audience migrate to online news and entertainment sources, 
Washington Post Radio was an experiment in stretching the idea that it 
doesn't really matter through what platform you get your news--what's 
important, rather, is who the storytellers are.

>From the start in March of last year, Post Radio was intended to serve 
several purposes: 1) Promote the Post's print and online journalism by 
reaching a new audience on the radio. 2) Create another outlet for 
Post reporting and thereby add one more justification for keeping a 
big, sprawling newsroom at a paper that, like almost all U.S. papers, 
is otherwise shrinking its staff. 3) Give Bonneville, the owner of all-
news WTOP and several other D.C. radio stations, a way to capture some 
of the Washington region's enormous audience for public radio's more 
in-depth and upscale news and information programming. 4) Build on the 
powerful profits that WTOP draws as the dominant local station in 
morning drive time.

The radio industry by and large found the experiment intriguing but 
foolhardy--a difficult marriage of two very different news cultures. 
The station, owned by Bonneville in a contract with the Post, was 
managed primarily by executives at WTOP's headquarters on Idaho Avenue 
NW in McLean Gardens, while most of the people who appeared on the 
station sat in a studio built in the Post's downtown newsroom. Both 
companies provided producers who worked in their respective newsrooms 
organizing each day's programming.

Not long after Post Radio launched, National Public Radio helped local 
public stations WAMU (88.5 FM) and WETA (90.9 FM) finance a series of 
focus groups with listeners "to help us see what Washington Post Radio 
would mean to us," said Caryn Mathes, general manager of WAMU, the 
third-most listened to public station in the nation, after outlets in 
New York and San Francisco.

The four focus groups were united in their perceptions of Post Radio: 
Listeners said that after they tuned in to the Post station, which 
launched with the slogan "There's always more to the story," "there 
wasn't more to the story," Mathes said. "People felt the station 
didn't deliver on deeper, more insider kind of stuff from the 
reporters who were on the air."

For the Post's hundreds of reporters and editors, going on the radio 
was something new. From the start, some people were good at it, some 
were just awful and a lot perhaps had potential, but didn't have much 
idea of what we were doing. This was learning by doing--in a very 
public way.

At first, the idea was to create a throwback to radio's golden era, 
with a station designed like a magazine, with different departments 
each hour--an hour on travel from the folks in the paper's Travel 
section, an hour with the editors from Book World, an hour of 
politics, and so on. But with the station making not a blip in the 
ratings and with its producers increasingly convinced that too many of 
the Post's writers had perhaps chosen a career in print for a good 
reason, the executives at Bonneville quickly moved to scrap the 
original format and go to something they knew more intimately--a 
tightly-organized hourly clock with different stories and 
personalities appearing every five minutes or so.

Listeners had every reason to wonder what had happened to the 
increased depth they had been promised. Print editors accustomed to a 
more serious news menu clashed with radio producers who argued that 
their medium required a more populist and lowbrow selection of 
stories. In each newsroom, too many people rolled their eyes over the 
cluelessness of their cross-town partners. 

When the radio-side producers one morning invited on the air and 
lightly questioned some nutball hawking a conspiracy theory about how 
the U.S. government had arranged for the 9/11 attacks, editors in the 
Post newsroom went ballistic. Although many attempts would follow to 
find a happy medium between the two news sensibilities, the basic 
reservoir of mutual respect had dropped suddenly and permanently to a 
dangerous low.

At its best, Washington Post Radio was a comfortable, personable and 
conversational way to learn what was in that day's newspaper and 
sometimes even to get the story behind the story. The station's 
anchors were top-shelf professionals, from NBC veteran Bob Kur and 
former local TV weather forecaster Hillary Howard to CBS and NPR 
newsman Sam Litzinger and longtime local radio host David Burd. And 
some of the Post's voices worked splendidly on radio, winning praise 
within the industry and from listeners as well--Lisa deMoraes on 
television, Stephen Hunter on movies, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz on sports, 
and columnist Gene Robinson on just about anything.

Sometimes, the theory behind the station became reality, and a foreign 
correspondent could phone in from the scene of an earth-moving event 
with the kind of firsthand account that radio was invented to deliver. 
More often, however, the reporters who came on the air did little more 
than repeat what they'd said in that morning's paper.

In the end, there were too many oh-my-God, Martha, this person is 
freezing up live on the radio moments. A Book World segment crashed 
and burned when a writer insisted on reading his pearls of wisdom 
verbatim from his newspaper work. And on more occasions than either 
side cared to admit, reporters were told to come on the air to talk 
about one story, only to go live and hear an anchorman ask them about 
something wholly different, about which the reporter knew not a thing.

In the end, though, Post Radio's competitors say it was the basic 
concept that was flawed: "It sounded like a bad college seminar where 
neither the professors nor the students knew how to keep anyone 
listening," said the program director of an FM music station who asked 
not to be named because he might work with people at Bonneville in the 
future.

And from the other end of radio's spectrum, this from the chief of the 
region's most powerful public radio outlet: "This assumption that 
people don't have an attention span is kind of offensive," WAMU's 
Mathes said. "People who want a deep contextual approach to news do 
have an attention span."

For those of us who tried our hand at radio, Washington Post Radio was 
enormous fun, a chance to dive into a form that might seem similar, 
but really requires very different skills. The idea that Post 
executives fell in love with remains an important one: If the American 
newspaper is to survive as the basic foundation of newsgathering in 
this country, the companies that produce daily papers will have to 
find ways to sell their wares in various other media. But what the 
demise of Post Radio teaches is that that expansion into other crafts 
will mean that news organizations must hire and train people with a 
different set of talents and passions, and that inevitably entails a 
different concept of what the news is. It's a new world out there. 
Read all about it.

2:30 PM UPDATE:

This just in from Bonneville, the owner of the stations at 1500 AM and 
107.7 FM, as well as 820 AM in Frederick, that were Washington Post 
Radio--the new station will be called Talk Radio 3WT and will feature 
syndicated right wing talkers Neal Boortz and Glenn Beck, as well as 
liberal talker Stephanie Miller. 

Here's the text of a press release from Bonneville's local boss, Joel 
Oxley:


WASHINGTON, D.C. August 28, 2007 Bonneville International Corporation 
announced today that it will replace Washington Post Radio (WTWP) on 
1500 AM, 107.7 FM and 820 AM with a personality-driven station, Talk 
Radio 3WT (call letters WWWT). 

Talk Radio 3WT will feature a lineup of personalities currently heard 
on the station - David Burd, Jessica Doyle, "The Tony Kornheiser 
Show," and Pat Goss - along with established, 
nationally-recognized personalities Neal Boortz, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn 
Beck, and Stephanie Miller, as well as play-by-play sports. The 
station's slogan will be "Left, Right, and Whatever We Want," 
reflecting 3WT's diverse collection of personalities and opinions.

Earlier this week, Bonneville International Corporation and The 
Washington Post agreed to end their broadcast alliance which had 
resulted in the creation of Washington Post Radio.

Washington Post Radio, owned and operated by Bonneville International 
Corporation, was a collaborative effort which launched in March 2006 
and featured station hosts interviewing editors, reporters and 
columnists at The Washington Post.

"Washington Post Radio was a tremendous experiment in broadcasting, 
and it was wonderful working with The Washington Post, a world-class 
newspaper," says Bonneville D.C. Sr. VP Joel Oxley. "While many 
advertisers were satisfied with the results the station generated, we 
just did not garner the Arbitron ratings we had hoped for. When we 
launched the 'Tony Kornheiser Show,' it was met with such success that 
we realized we needed to take the station in the direction of 
personality-driven talk with more opinion and less hard news. Since 
this did not meet the original vision of Washington Post Radio, The 
Washington Post and Bonneville mutually agreed to end the broadcast 
alliance."

"We'll continue to work together as media professionals as we always 
have," Oxley added. "The Washington Post has a huge array of talented 
people that we've featured for years on our radio stations in many 
capacities, and we will continue to do so. We're fortunate to have a 
great relationship with, and access to, one of the finest 
organizations with some of the best professionals in the world."

3WT will debut on 1500 AM, 107.7 FM, and 820 AM in Frederick on 
September 20.


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