Nevertheless, WNEW (99.1 FM) is betting that it can be scrappier, livelier and just plain newsier than its primary competitor.
Its first broadcast from its new studio, a former office-machines sales office just outside the Beltway in Prince George’s County, sounded much like WTOP. There were brief reports about the death of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, an apartment fire in Laurel and Newt Gingrich’s win in the South Carolina Republican primary. As on WTOP, there were also weather and traffic updates at regular intervals. Even the advertisers were similar.
Starting early Monday, one of WNEW’s most prominent voices will be a familiar one to WTOP’s listeners. The station’s morning traffic reporter is Lisa Baden, who called the drive-time grind every weekday for more than a decade on WTOP until early last year, when the station began using its own employees to report traffic (Baden is under contract to a company called Total Traffic).
Having Baden on board suggests the importance of traffic reporting to news radio, as well as WNEW’s determination to go right to the heart of WTOP’s success.
For decades, WTOP has been uncontested in news radio in Washington, although a few stations (notably public station WAMU-FM and WMAL-AM and FM) offer a hybrid of news and talk programs. The absence of direct competition enabled WTOP, which is heard primarily at 103.5 FM, to grow into the richest radio station in the nation. Its annual revenue was $57.2 million in 2010, according to BIA/Kelsey, a Chantilly research firm.
WTOP’s success in some ways became a self-fulfilling prophecy, scaring off would-be challengers, said CBS’s top Washington executive, Steve Swenson. News radio, he notes, is an expensive format. Unlike a music station, which can be programmed by autopilot, a news station requires a relatively large staff of reporters, anchors and editors to keep the news coming round the clock. Competitors, he said, resisted the initial start-up costs, which run into the millions of dollars.
But Swenson, 56, knows the format can also be mega-profitable: Until recently, he ran CBS’s two all-news stations in New York City, WCBS and 1010 WINS, which were the third- and eighth-highest-ranking stations by revenue in the nation.
So, rather than being put off by WTOP, Swenson says he sensed the area was ripe for an alternative. He began plotting WNEW’s launch last summer. “There are usually choices in any radio format in a market” — two or three pop music stations, for example, he said. “In this market, there wasn’t” a second all-news station.
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