Post Radio venture signs off

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Washington Post Radio, the short-lived joint venture between the D.C. newspaper and the parent company of all-news WTOP-FM, will be replaced next month with a new talk-radio station, Bonneville International Corp. said yesterday.

"Talk Radio 3WT" will debut Sept. 20 on 1500 AM, 107.7 FM and 820 AM with the slogan, "Left, Right and Whatever We Want." Syndicated hosts Bill O'Reilly, Neal Boortz, Glenn Beck and Stephanie Miller will headline the new station. Talk Radio 3WT, whose call letters will be WWWT, will also retain several personalities currently heard on Washington Post Radio, including Tony Kornheiser, David Burd, Jessica Doyle and Pat Goss.

Rumors that the money-losing Washington Post Radio (WTWP-FM) was headed for the chopping block had circulated for several weeks. The 17-month-old station had lagged in the ratings race, most recently finishing at an all-time high of 18th place in the D.C. market, according to Arbitron's spring ratings.

"Washington Post Radio was a tremendous experiment in broadcasting, and it was wonderful working with The Washington Post, a world-class newspaper," said Joel Oxley, senior vice president for Salt Lake City-based Bonneville. "While many advertisers were satisfied with the results the station generated, we just did not garner the Arbitron ratings we had hoped for."

Bonneville had a three-year deal with The Post, under which it paid for use of the newspaper's brand and its reporters. The station's programming falls somewhere between the longer features of public radio news outlet WAMU-FM (88.5) and the news blurbs of Bonneville's WTOP (103.5 and 103.9 FM) — the third-most popular station in the region, according to Arbitron.

The radio company said ratings for WTWP spiked earlier this year with the debut of "The Tony Kornheiser Show" weekdays from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. The station is also home of the Washington Nationals baseball team.

"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," Mr. Oxley said of Mr. Kornheiser's program. "Since this did not meet the original version of Washington Post Radio, The Washington Post and Bonneville mutually agreed to end the broadcast alliance."

According to a report in The Post, Bonneville's losses related to WTWP have been about $2 million a year.

Mark Fratrik, a vice president at BIA Financial Network, said Bonneville's lack of success with Washington Post Radio "really shows you how competitive the local radio marketplace is."

"News/talk radio is expensive; you have lots of people. It isn't like putting CDs in," Mr. Fratrik said. The market for local content may also have been saturated with WTOP and WAMU on the dial, he added.

"You will always have radio stations that will have relationships with the local newspapers, but I don't know of any other formal, brand-name type of attribution to the radio station," he said, adding that the station's demise doesn't mean that a formal partnership between a radio station and a newspaper is doomed to fail. "Some things work in some markets that don't work in others. I wouldn't dismiss it completely."

Bonneville did not say what will happen to broadcasts of Nationals games. Washington Post Radio was scheduled to broadcast the team's last game on Sept. 30.

Channel Surfing runs Wednesdays. E-mail krowland@washingtontimes.com.