Radio stations and
networks in Texas, Montana and Appalachia serve rural areas in
ways new and old
August 2005
An ambitious station in Texas, a Montana-based news
network and a three-station cooperative in Central Appalachia
offer hope for the future of radio news, especially in rural areas,
said those who heard their stories at the nation’s largest
journalism convention, in August 2005.
A session at the Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communications confab in San Antonio spotlighted
KWED of nearby Seguin, an AM station that says
it makes money with a daily, printed publication; the Northern
Broadcasting System, which started as an agricultural
network and now has a 32-station news network; and non-commercial
Allegheny Mountain Radio, three stations in southeast
West Virginia and southwest Virginia.
The session was the last of several about community journalism
-- which some educators, many of them former journalists, said
was a hot topic at the 88th annual convention, which attracted
about 2,000 people.
Chris Martin of West Virginia University said
that in five days at the convention, the community-journalism
sessions were the only times she heard about increased circulation
and audiences, and that she heard no other journalists say what
KWED News and Operations Director Darren Dunn said -- that they
had covered a community in every way possible and got it right.
Dunn, an African American, grew up in the suburbs of Houston
and aimed for a broadcast career. “I never thought I could
live in a small town” like Seguin, population 23,000, he
told the educators. Now he not only lives there but is president
of the local Rotary Club and puts out what amounts to a newspaper
– the Seguin Daily News, a 32-page mini-tabloid,
with a free circulation of 3,500, five days a week.
“I feel like some days I’m more of a print person
than I am a broadcaster,” he said. Martin said KWED’s
story is a great example of media convergence, one done with much
less hoopla and money than better-publicized convergence efforts.
A newsy station gets newsier -- in print
KWED had the horses to operate in another medium because it already
had a news department with three full-time employees, plus interns
from Texas Lutheran University in Seguin (pronounced
seh-GEEN, with a hard “g”) and other schools. “We
believe in community-oriented radio. We believe in strong service
to the community,” including editorials on local issues,
station owner Hal Widstein said. The print operation has two employees
of its own and recently started turning a profit, he said.
The paper started several years ago as a front-and-back, 8½-by-11-inch
flyer with classified ads, then became a four-pager. It expanded
to a colorful mini-tab through a deal with a local printing company.
Widstein, who has owned KWED since 1983, said that as far as he
knows, his venture into print is unique. “We can’t
find another one of these anywhere,” he said. The paper
is also online, at
this site.
Widstein said he saw a need for another print news outlet in
Guadalupe County because the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise,
which publishes daily except Saturday and Monday, left too many
things uncovered and seemed to have too many political agendas
and too much biased reporting. After the mini-tab started, the
Gazette-Enterprise, owned by Southern Newspapers,
“added color, shortened stories, and started printing a
section with only good news,” Dunn said.
The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues sought
a reply from the Gazette-Enterprise.
Managing Editor Chris Lykins, quoting Publisher Tommy Crow, said
in a telephone message that the newspaper has a policy of not
commenting on other local media outlets, and will continue that
policy.
Dunn said the Gazette-Enterprise, formed by a merger in the 1980s,
was not accustomed to competition, while the radio station has
always competed with all the stations in San Antonio and half
those in Austin. “I think the town has been the big winner
in all of this,” he said. “If they get better, we
get better.”
The paper’s most popular feature is “Seguin Citizen,”
a daily profile of a local person. Dunn said readers often skip
the news up front to see who has bene selected and read about
their neighbor. The choice for Thursday, Aug. 11 was the manager
of a local futness center, which had a quarter-page ad in the
edition.
The station has another print product, a 120-page program for
local high-school football games. It sells the ads for the outer
40 pages, which change from game to game, and the local booster
club sells the ads for the center 80 pages, which don’t.
“Our idea is that we’ve got this community covered
in every possible way,” Dunn said. “I say if it happens
in Seguin, we’ll cover it.”
For a radio site that calls itself an "e-newspaper,"
see Wisconsin's www.DoorCountyDailyNews.com.
As for the radio business, Widstein said it has “a lot
of challenges these days,” including “big-box retailers”
that put local stores out of business. He said large radio groups,
such as San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications,
filled a need because nearly half of U.S. radio stations were
losing money when the groups began forming.
“I have no problem with consolidation,” Widstein
said. “I just have a problem with the people who are doing
it.” He said “there are a lot of better broadcasters”
than Clear Channel, by far the largest owner of radio stations,
“but these were the guys who were able to put together a
whole lot of money really quick . . . because Lowry Mays [chairman
of Clear Channel] is an investment banker.”
A network grows in Montana, and other
states
The Northern Broadcasting System was started
in 1975 by Conrad Burns, now a U.S. senator, as a way to deliver
farm news to Montana, a large, sparsely populated state with 2.3
cattle per person. Burns, who sold the network when he entered
politics, gave the network a regional name so it could more easily
expand beyond Montana. Today, stations in the Dakotas, Wyoming
and Idaho, and one in non-adjacent Oregon, are among the 70-plus
affiliates that receive 109 farm- and rural-oriented radio programs
each week. It also produces two TV programs, aired on eight Montana
stations.
Five years ago, NBS began the Northern News Network,
now with 32 affiliates, most of whom are also members of the Northern
Ag Network, said Kathy McCleary, NBS's director of sales
and marketing.
The news network offers seven newscasts a day, as well as a daily
commentary, a daily talk show and a daily sports report. McCleary
said the sports program includes a continuing story about a golf
course being built hole by hole for a disabled child, now the
subject of a movie being produced for HBO. Students of Denise
Dowling of the University of Montana have done
stories on the Montana legislature for the network and 20 unaffiliated
stations.
The network functions by barter: Affiliates get content and give
up commercial time inside the network's programs. Because airtime
for some programs can be hard to get, McCleary said, the network
sells some sponsorships for one-minute blocks. It established
that revenue source by indirectly helping Montana’s rural
electric cooperatives overcome their problems with the legislature.
The network paid for a survey of the co-ops’ members, McCleary
said. “They found out their own members didn’t know
they were co-op members or who owned them.” Two years later,
after the advertising had raised the co-ops’ profile and
influence, “They said they’d never had such an easy
time in the legislature.”
For more about NBS, click
here. For descriptions of its programs, click
here. For a look at its staff, including four broadcast personalities
in cowboy hats, click
here.
Appalachian stations offer lifelines in
isolated area
Allegheny Mountain Radio is a network of three
noncommercial stations in adjoining counties across a state line
– WVMR-AM in Frost (Pocahontas County), W.Va., WVLS-FM in
Monterey (Highland County), Va., and WCHG-FM in Hot Springs (Bath
County), Va. Two are classified as sole-service providers, meaning
that no other station serves the community.
The stations are owned by Pocahontas Communications Cooperative
Corp., which has an elected board of directors and an
advisory board, and gets most of its funding from the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting. It has seven employees, 20 regular
volunteers and other occasional volunteers.
“I hope it represents a wave of the future in terms of
return to localism in radio . . . perhaps a movement of citizens
taking back the airwaves,” said Maryanne Reed of West
Virginia University, who has a vacation home in the area.
The West Virginia station was founded in 1982 by Gibbs Kinderman,
an Oregonian who came to the area as one of the Appalachian Volunteers,
the mid-1960s forerunners of Volunteers In Service to
America (VISTA) workers – who are now among the
station’s staff. The Virginia stations went on the air in
1995, and the cooperative is planning a station in Monroe County,
W.Va., a non-adjacent county to the west. For more on WVMR, click
here. For a map of the region with WCHG's coverage area, click
here.
The
West Virginia station can’t use the FM band or broadcast
after 6 p.m. because it is eight miles from the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va. But
the station was allowed to remain on the air for 72 consecutive
hours during a flood in the area a few years ago. “Where
community radio really gets important is when you have a disaster
in the community,” Reed’s WVU colleague, Ralph Hanson,
said during an earlier session at the conference. Appeals for
victims of misfortune are heard at other times; Hansen cited one
for a family whose house burned down. Allegheny Mountain Radio
is “hyper-local media . . . local media that’s actually
local,” Hanson said.
One of the cooperative’s slogans is “unique by nature,
traditional by choice.” Reed said it has “old-fashioned
public-affairs programs,” bluegrass, old-time country, gospel
and “roots” music. Burl Ives’ “I Found
My Best Friend at the Dog Pound” introduces the animal-shelter
report that seeks adoptions.
While the stations' background might suggest a liberal bent,
Reed said the area is socially conservative and the stations “try
to be politically neutral” and do not air any political
talk shows or commentary. She said it dropped James Dobson’s
“Focus on the Family” program when it became more
political and anti-gay. To balance that decision, she said, the
co-op made its gospel music program a daily feature.
Widstein said he sees a place for non-commercial stations –
including low-power, community-operated FM stations to serve underserved
constituencies and provide an outlet for lesser-heard voices –
but is concerned that community boards lack the continuity needed
to ensure adherence to technical rules and standards, and thus
may create problems for other broadcasters. “We have the
potential of creating Citizens Band on the AM and FM bands,”
he said. CB is notorious for interference caused by engineering
violations and other problems. Also, he said, such stations need
to be kept truly non-commercial -- not allowing underwriting and
sponsorship recognitions to expand into commercials, and prohibitions
against exchanging the stations for money.
Clear Channel defends remote news, acknowledges
pitfalls
Facing a journalism researcher yesterday, Clear Channel
Communications officials said one of their program directors
should have seen that stories by the station’s reporters
-- including one about forest fire outbreaks -- went on air through
a central production hub. But the radio giant defended its hub-and-spoke
news production system, which sends material to hubs where stories
are produced for individual stations.
The encounter occurred at the Association
for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s
annual convention in Clear Channel's home base of San Antonio.
The executives were Mark Mays, the company’s president and
CEO; and John Hogan, president and CEO of Clear Channel
Radio, the country's largest radio operator. The researcher
was Lee Hood of the University of Colorado, a
former broadcast producer who spent a week last summer in one
of Clear Channel's Western markets. Hood welcomed the executives,
because the Clear Channel station with the central hub declined
cooperation.
Hood said big stories in the unnamed city of 50,000 on July 13
and 14, 2004, included: severe thunderstorms and resulting forest
fires; a county fair parade that drew a huge, holiday-sized crowd;
and a utility’s request for a rate increase. She said none
of those events were reported on the day they occurred, except
a National Weather Service warning about the
storms – which was followed 50 minutes later by the station’s
recorded weather forecast of "partly cloudy with a chance
of a few scattered thunderstorms."
Hood said the station’s two reporters filed stories, with
asterisks to alert the central hub, and were shocked to hear that
they didn't air that day. "It’s difficult to say that
a local market is being served if things like forest fires don’t
get on the air," Hood said.
"Sounds like a bad program director," Mays replied.
Hogan said any one of the company’s 900-plus local program
directors can decide what stories go on the air. "Nobody
in a remote location makes the decision to control local programming,"
he said. "It doesn’t sound like the person did a very
good job."
Hogan said the hub-and-spoke concept allows Clear Channel to
use "better resources, like better voices or better technologies,"
including digital files sent over the Internet. If a station can
only afford two reporters, he asked, why not transfer the production
function elsewhere? In this case, he said, "The execution
. . . clearly was wrong."
Left unanswered in the session was how often such episodes occur
at stations operated by Clear Channel and other groups. Researchers
said they hoped the companies would be more cooperative with their
efforts than Clear Channel had been with Hood. "We have serious
questions about media concentration that cannot be dismissed with
canned answers," said Mark Harmon of the University
of Tennessee.
Other panelists said they appreciated the Clear Channel executives'
willingness to face questions at the convention. "I think
they're honest about communicating their corporate message,"
Laura Smith of the University of South Carolina
told Ashlee Erwin of the University of Missouri,
a writer for AEJMC Reporter, the convention newspaper.
"Where they see it in corporate headquarters is very different
from where people in our backyards see it."
