Hear All About It: Post Venture Aims To Recast Radio's News/Talk Model

In the 1920s, when many of the first radio stations were owned by newspapers, the news consisted of editors sitting in front of a microphone to read the morning paper to listeners. The goal was to boost newspaper sales.

Next week, The Washington Post and Bonneville International, owner of all-news WTOP, will launch a radio station, Washington Post Radio, on which no one will read stories from the newspaper. Instead, the station, WTWP, will try to appeal to listeners who might find all-news radio too superficial yet think of public radio as too dull. The idea is to make better use of the newspaper's wide-ranging expertise, develop Post personalities and give Washingtonians a new reason to stick with broadcast radio. And boost newspaper sales.

When Washington Post Radio debuts March 30 on 1500 AM and 107.7 FM -- dial positions that until now were home to WTOP's 24-hour headline service -- listeners will hear twice-hourly news bulletins from washingtonpost.com, morning and afternoon drive-time programs featuring Post reporters and columnists discussing the news of the day, and midday talk shows focusing on business, sports, health, family and the arts.

The station will include the voices of Post movie critic Stephen Hunter, Reliable Source reporters Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger, business writer Jerry Knight, baseball columnist Thomas Boswell, media writer Howard Kurtz and hundreds of other writers and editors, from foreign correspondents describing the scene in Baghdad or Bali to suburban reporters delivering the latest from crime scenes or neighborhood disputes.

"This is local, accessible, hometown, conversational radio," says Tina Gulland, The Post's director of TV and radio projects and an architect of the new station. "In eight years here, I've been seduced by how fun and witty and knowledgeable the people in this newsroom are -- and what fabulous storytellers they are."

The station also will feature journalists from Slate and Newsweek, both owned by the Washington Post Co. But because most print journalists lack radio experience, the station's anchors will be professional broadcasters, among them Mike Moss, the erstwhile morning man on WTOP; Bob Kur, a longtime NBC News correspondent; Sam Litzinger, a veteran of CBS and public radio; and Hillary Howard, a local TV weathercaster turned WTOP news anchor.

The anchors will work out of studios at Bonneville's local headquarters in the McLean Gardens section of Northwest Washington, while most of The Post's participants will join programs from a new studio constructed in the newspaper's downtown newsroom.

"People in radio often think of newspaper people as very deliberative and shaped by a luxury of time that is very different from what radio faces," says Holland Cooke, a news-talk radio consultant for McVay Media who was an executive at WTOP in the 1980s. "And we get the impression that . . . newspaper people think we're a lounge act. But the rich trove of information and expertise at The Post is much deeper than what gets into print. The unscripted newspaper reporter really paints a picture of the story, telling what it felt like at the scene.

"If Washington Post Radio can find a place halfway between the staid, contemplative sound of public radio and the 75-mile-an-hour sound of WTOP, people will definitely listen."

Kur, who will anchor the 3-to-7 p.m. shift, believes the new station will show listeners what media insiders have always known, that "most original reporting comes from newspapers. The other media pick up on those stories. The Post's reporters can immediately put the news into context and answer the audience's big questions: What's really going on? What's the back story?"

The headlines, traffic and weather on WTOP -- originally named for its location at the top of the AM dial -- will live on at 103.5 FM, former home of classical WGMS.

"WTOP will continue to do what they do best -- easy access to information and particularly traffic and weather," says Greg Tantum, who was just hired as program director of Washington Post Radio after many years at news-talk stations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. While stories on WTOP rarely last longer than a minute-and-change, the Post station will devote three to 12 minutes to each topic, Tantum says.