All-news WNEW debuts as competitor to WTOP

CBS and Swenson probably know as well as anyone how this is done. The company operates eight of the dozen or so all-news stations in the country, with outlets in New York (where an earlier incarnation of WNEW once aired), Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and Los Angeles. Swenson himself has spent more than 30 years in radio news. “We kind of know what works and what doesn’t work,” he said.

The new station lit its “On the Air” light on Sunday with 39 people in its newsroom, about one-third as many as WTOP. Robert Sanchez, WNEW’s program director, acknowledges that his staff of eight field reporters “is not a lot of boots on the ground” to cover a region of some 5.6 million people. But between weather updates every four minutes, traffic reports every 10 minutes, business and sports twice hourly, plus 17 minutes an hour of commercials, there’s only so much time left over for actual news on an all-news station.

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“The goal is not to be WTOP,” said Sanchez, a veteran of news stations in Miami and New York. “The idea is, you punch the button and you’ll find out what’s happening now. You don’t always get that on WTOP. I hear a lot of process on WTOP — national-security stories, political minutiae. They can sound like a very glossy magazine. That’s great, but when something is happening, you don’t pick up a magazine to find out about it.”

WNEW intends to spend less time reporting on developments at the Pentagon or Capitol Hill and more on a breakdown on the Red Line, adds Michelle Dolge, the station’s news director. “We don’t want our people to be in here,” she said. “We want them in the neighborhoods.”

If WNEW’s managers know a bit about their rival, it’s probably because they used to play for the other team. Swenson ran WTOP between 1996 and 1997, and Dolge spent 17 years there. Among Swenson’s hires at WTOP was Jim Farley, who has headed its news operations and built its powerhouse reputation over the past 15 years.

Farley calls WTOP vs. WNEW “a friendly rivalry” but doesn’t think much of the upstart’s chances. “They have a tough task ahead of them,” he said. “The news appetite is already satisfied” by what’s available. “News is just everywhere. It’s on the radio, TV, print, your cellphone.”

Farley says he “still has scars” from the last attempt to cram more news onto local radio — “Washington Post Radio,” which featured newscasts and discussions with reporters from The Post. The collaboration between the newspaper and WTOP’s then-owner, Bonneville International (WTOP is now owned by Hubbard Broadcasting of Minnesota) died in 2007 after 18 months of low ratings and indifferent advertiser reaction.

In preparation for WNEW, Farley insists WTOP isn’t making any preparations. “We’re not changing a thing,” he said.

WNEW may be at a disadvantage right out of the gate. Its dial position, 99.1 FM, is a familiar one to a generation of local rock fans, having been the home of the “legendary” alternative music station WHFS until 2005 (it was replaced by the Spanish pop music station WLZL, now moved to 107.9 FM). But broadcasts over 99.1, which emanate from transmission facilities in Bowie in Prince George’s, tend to come in stronger in Baltimore County than on the far western and southern fringes of the Washington area.

WTOP, by contrast, simulcasts on three signals (103.5, 107.7 and 103.9 FM) with a massive “footprint” that stretches from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Eastern Shore and north into Pennsylvania. As a result, more people may tune into WTOP than WNEW simply because more people can pull in WTOP.

Swenson isn’t concerned about the station’s signal strength; he says it has come in loud and clear in tests throughout the region.

Even so, he’s keeping his expectations modest. WNEW will be a success, he said, if it can capture about $10 million in advertising during its first year. That’s a pale echo of WTOP’s annual total, of course, but would put the newcomer solidly in the middle of the pack among local radio stations. And in the all-news game, that would be pretty big news, indeed.