As we reported Monday, Bonneville has now confirmed it will dissolve the year and a half partnership with The Washington Post, which has operated "Washington Post Radio WTWP." The trio of stations will be rechristened 3WT, WWWT, on Sept. 20. Ratings culled from the Washington Post Radio signals of 1500 AM, Warrenton, VA’s 107.7 FM, and Frederick, MD’s 820 AM never made expectations. The new slogan will be "Left, Right, and Whatever We Want." David Burd and Jessica Doyle will continue to do their local morning show. Tony Kornheiser is expected to return to do late mornings. Local car expert Pat Goss will be joined by nationally syndicated personalities like Neal Boortz, Bill O’Reilly, Phil Hendrie, Glenn Beck and Stephanie Miller. Play-by-play sports will also be part of the station’s programming.
Washington Post Radio, O&O’d by Bonneville International, was a collaborative effort which launched in March 2006 and featured station hosts interviewing editors, reporters and columnists at The Post. Said Bonneville D.C. SVP Joel Oxley: "While many advertisers were satisfied with the results the station generated, we just did not garner the Arbitron ratings we had hoped for. When we launched the ‘Tony Kornheiser Show,’ 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. Since this did not meet the original vision of Washington Post Radio, The Post and Bonneville mutually agreed to end the broadcast alliance. We’ll continue to work together as media professionals as we always have. The Washington Post has a huge array of talented people that we’ve featured for years on our radio stations in many capacities, and we will continue to do so."
RBR observation: There are a tremendous number of News/Talk and information outlets in the DC market. Just referring to the English-speaking stations, DC has three NPR outlets, C-SPAN Radio, WTOP-FM, WJFK-FM and Washington Post Radio on FM. On AM, the market has WTNT, WMAL, WDMV, WMET, the two Washington Post AMs and WFED. It’s very competitive and it will be interesting to see if 3WT fares any better than WaPo Radio.
