The News from Loudoun Goes Silent
A month-old news report from Ashburn was still sitting this week on the Web site of Loudoun County's only radio station -- one of the last local stories on WAGE (1200 AM).
This month, WAGE fired its news director, afternoon host and general manager, and eliminated nearly all of its local programming. The station filled airtime instead with nationally syndicated talk shows featuring business news from the Wall Street Journal, conservative talk with Dennis Miller and relationships advice from Joy Browne.
Like hundreds of other AM stations across the country, WAGE pulled back on local content because it's vastly cheaper to take national talk shows off the satellite than it is to pay a staff to report on the news, sports and community events of interest only to local listeners.
"I ran every announcement I could find about spaghetti dinners and oyster roasts and pancake breakfasts," says Jim Purks, host of "Jim's Country Jukebox" and "Jim's Rock 'n' Roll Jukebox" on WAGE on Saturdays for 12 years, until he was fired this month.
"I did remote broadcasts from the Leesburg Car Show, Leisure World, all kinds of events in Leesburg," he says. "We sort of grew into a radio family. People would bring me cake and sandwiches, just drop 'em off at the station."
Although many longtime Loudoun residents lament the loss of local content -- WAGE was the only broadcast operation that regularly covered the county's government meetings, school board, high school sports and weather emergencies -- the station's decision to scrap the programming that made it a distinctly Loudoun voice reflects national trends and the difficulty of maintaining a local identity at the edge of a sprawling metropolis such as the Washington area.
"Stations like WAGE are losing their advertising base," says Grenville "Gerry" Emmet, who owned WAGE from 1980 to last year. "We used to depend heavily on the mom-and-pop retailers in the county. But they're all being replaced by the Home Depots and Wal-Marts of this world, who couldn't care less about a little community radio station."
Without Loudoun-based advertisers to sustain the locally produced programming that Emmet favored -- when he owned WAGE, it even had live radio theater on weekends -- the station's new owner began to look toward Washington. The new owner, Falls Church-based New World Radio, has applied to the FCC for permission to boost the station's power so its signal can reach much more of the region, allowing it to compete for the same advertisers that pay for time on Washington stations. New World executives did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.
Emmet, a retired banker from New York, was so encouraged by the connection that WAGE made with Loudoun residents that he launched a second career purchasing other small-town radio stations, "also in places where the only other media were local weekly newspapers." But while local weeklies nationwide are growing, bucking the downward trend in newspaper reading, radio stations that cater to small communities have spent recent years eliminating their local content.
"It's a nationwide economic change, with so many new people in new communities, exhausted by their 60-minute commutes," says Tim Jon Steinbrecher, who went by Tim Jon on the air during his decade as WAGE's news director.
"I was like a one-man baseball team, covering seven, eight, nine stories at the same time," he says. "I covered every single minute of every county supervisors' meeting in the last 10 years. But over time, I did feel we were all getting a little more detached from each other in our lives."
As Loudoun became the nation's fastest-growing county in the 1990s, newcomers came to outnumber natives, and interest and involvement in local affairs -- news, politics, the arts -- seemed to dissipate, several WAGE program hosts said.
"There's been a huge migration from places like Alexandria and Fairfax out to Loudoun, and those new residents can still listen to the Washington stations they already know," says former WAGE afternoon host Paul Draisey, who was fired this month after working at the station since 1971. "The big challenge was to let people know there was a local alternative."
Steinbrecher, 47, who is also artistic director of Not Just Shakespeare, a community theater company in Leesburg, sees the same disconnect growing in the arts and media worlds: "People are so worn down by their commutes, they just want to stay in with their DVD players, and it's hard to get them out to see theater -- just like it's hard to get them involved in the news of their community. We don't have much cohesion."
Steinbrecher is optimistic that that will change: "People will grow up in these brand-spanking-new neighborhoods with no sidewalks and eventually they will settle in and this will become a place they care about."
It's not clear, however, whether that sense of place will be Loudoun-specific or will be subsumed in a larger identity as part of the Washington area. "We were a rural, identifiable community," Emmet says. "Then we had an influx of people who hardly know where Leesburg is. They look east to Washington. They don't want to hear the obituary notices read to them at 7:30 in the morning, as we did. Though when I tried to take that off, the listeners demanded we put it back."
Even if the Internet, rapid development and longer commutes have altered how people define their communities, some aspects of life -- home ownership, school, sports, public safety, taxes -- are still based on geography. With dramatically less local content on the county's only radio station, some Loudoun residents wonder where they'll get timely information about school closings, weather emergencies or land-use debates.
"Wait till it snows," Draisey says. "Or till one of our high school teams gets into the state finals. There are 39 radio signals that come into the county, but we were the only one who'd tell you what happened in Loudoun last night."
"We had a pretty solid niche in that market," Emmet says of his old station. "The need for information and entertainment is still there, and the local papers are still thriving. The people operating radio stations these days are their own worst enemies."
By Marc Fisher |
May 26, 2007; 8:47 AM ET
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Posted by: Mark | May 26, 2007 09:14 AM
More or less the same thing happened earlier in Prince William County. Yet, small AM radio stations in Manassas and Dumfries are still serving their local communities -- the Spanish-speaking communities, that is, after the "gringos" lost interest. Sad for us English-speakers.
Posted by: Vincent | May 26, 2007 09:17 AM
I've lived in Loudoun County for 2 years and didn't know WAGE existed. I never listen to AM radio. I do, however, get local information from a plethora of Loudoun County weekly newspapers (Loudoun Independent, Leesburg Today, Loudoun Easterner) and its one daily (Loudoun Times-Mirror). These are also on the Internet.
Posted by: BTMPost | May 26, 2007 12:28 PM
Nice spin by New World Radio, which has historically done the same thing with each and every station they've bought. WBIS in Annapolis (the old WANN), run into the ground with brokered business programming after a long heritage of serving the community. WUST in Falls Church is brokered ethnic programming. And now WAGE in Leesburg is ruined by the absentee lawyer who owns New World Radio. How is it that stations such as WFMD-AM in Frederick and WTRI in Brunswick, which is only a daytimer, can sustain ad revenue in this kind of environment and WAGE, which has a much stronger signal and plenty of ties to the community, has to fire the entire staff and go satellite.
Having a local owner like WTRI's, with a conscious and committment to the fastest growing area in the US, means my advertising dollars are going there. I canceled my WAGE spots as soon as there was even a hint of flipping the format and firing the staff.
Posted by: RMS Leesburg | May 26, 2007 09:32 PM
I have not listened to the station since the mass firings. Way to drive off your listeners - do we really need the same syndicated shows on this station that are available on other DC area radio stations?
Posted by: RIP WAGE | May 26, 2007 10:19 PM
I did work at wage before. it was a broke dick station then, and I'm not surprised to see the changes happen
Posted by: JimShorts | May 27, 2007 02:53 AM
Dennis Miller is talking on WAGE Now,
I guess now all the Yukon driving Bushies that live in Cascades have a drone tho drive home with.
Posted by: Keith Berry | May 27, 2007 08:49 AM
Loudoun County is in a very difficult situation. With WAGE's demise there is no daily source of local news (the Loudoun Times Mirror is not a daily as posted above). The DC stations only cover the big one's and now Loudouners have one less outlet to get daily news. One thing not noted in this blog was the station also cut back its Metro traffic reports. Metro traffic only used to mention Loudoun road conditions on WAGE and sometimes on WINC. So if your in a traffic jam in Loudoun you better not look to the radio to find out what is going on.
Posted by: Lansdowne | May 27, 2007 09:32 AM
Loudoun County is in a very difficult situation. With WAGE's demise there is no daily source of local news (the Loudoun Times Mirror is not a daily as posted above). The DC stations only cover the big one's and now Loudouners have one less outlet to get daily news. One thing not noted in this blog was the station also cut back its Metro traffic reports. Metro traffic only used to mention Loudoun road conditions on WAGE and sometimes on WINC. So if your in a traffic jam in Loudoun you better not look to the radio to find out what is going on.
Posted by: Lansdowne | May 27, 2007 09:32 AM
Never heard of WAGE? Never listen to AM radio? Now that is a real genius. What kind of generation is coming up that can't find the AM dial?
Posted by: Leesburg 2 | May 27, 2007 07:57 PM
I am saddened by the demise of WAGE. It is yet another indicator of the changes Loudoun County has undergone. My family has lived here for nearly 60 years - long enough to appreciate what is being lost. I will miss the local coverage, particularly the morning high school sports reports and live coverage of high school games. We are losing another piece of our unique rural cultural identity and becoming more like Anyplace, USA.
Posted by: Purcellville | May 27, 2007 10:36 PM
I recall saying back in the 1980s when they did away with the 7/7/7 ownership rule that mom and pop radio stations would become an endangered species, and corporate sameness would prevail. Small town radio exists now only in terms of "city of license;" and with the relaxation of the COL rules, I suspect that titular localism will even disappear. So we reaped an AM band full of national-level rant and rave and an FM band of voice-tracked, shallow-playlist rock and rap. Satellite radio at least has some channels of niche music formats.
Posted by: Spruceman | May 27, 2007 11:40 PM
"So we reaped an AM band full of national-level rant and rave and an FM band of voice-tracked, shallow-playlist rock and rap. "
You're 100 per cent correct. AM is dominated by the hate speech from the "conservative talk show hosts" and the loons who call in and claim to agree with them; FM is dominated by subscribers to the bland and shallow "formats" - hip-hop, so-called "urban contemporary", the mechanical "smooth jazz", and a couple other boring formats with catchy names.
Thank goodness for public radio and XM.
Posted by: CEEAF | May 28, 2007 11:37 AM
As the first person ever to be heard on its airwaves when WAGE went on the air in 1958, I shed a heartfelt tear.
Posted by: Ed Meyer | May 29, 2007 10:57 AM
I'm sorry to hear of this little station's demise, but I've lived in Loudoun since 2002 and I've never heard of it.
I faithfully read a half-dozen local fishwraps -- Loudoun Times-Mirror, Loudoun Easterner, Loudoun Independent, Middleburg Eccentric, Leesburg Today, South Riding Connection -- so it's safe to say I'm interested in local news. Sorry I didn't get to help add to WAGE's listernership. That surely won't happen now.
Posted by: South Loudounian | May 29, 2007 12:21 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
The internet is a modern low cost alternative to traditional broadcast radio. Streaming video of meetings, blogging, podcasts etc can serve as an on-demand and archival source of niche info and enertainment.
Who listens to radio as much as they used to, anyway? Let the formulaic national players waste their money fighting over that decreasing market.