Dave Carwile will never forget August 15, 1986 - Bloody Friday. That was the day he lost the job he loved, the day when Columbus, Ohio, lost its first and only news/talk radio station, WCOL-AM.
"We went into the newsroom, the general manager said, 'I'm sorry, you're all out,'" the veteran statehouse reporter recalled. "The business manager handed out the checks and said, 'If you want to do news the rest of the day, you can. But if you don't want to, you can go home.' It was just put your heads on the block all at once and I'll drop the ax and get it over with. Then he went down to the talk people and the producers and did the same thing and that was it. It was very tight-lipped. People kind of looked at each other and walked out."
Back in the 1960s and 1970s WCOL, with a format of high energy Top 40 rock 'n' roll, was Columbus' top radio station - the ratings leader in Ohio's capital. But over the years, as listeners began switching from the static-filled AM band to the sea of high fidelity sound offered by FM, WCOL's programming floundered and the ratings deteriorated until the station hit the rocks.
In March 1985, WCOL quit playing music altogether and switched to "news/talk," a mixture of listener call-in talk shows and extensive news coverage of the Columbus area. The station's spunky news staff quickly scored some scoops, exposing a Columbus company selling embargoed high technology to the Soviets and telephoning an aide in Muammar Qaddafi's tent for comment after the United States bombed Libya.
Carwile says management originally promised to give the format several years to catch on and build an audience. But the new ratings were abysmal and the station's sales staff was having a tough time selling commercials to advertisers. In August 1986, the radio station changed ownership in a leveraged buyout by its management. Rumors immediately bubbled to the surface about a switch in programming and staff layoffs - rumors that became fact on the morning of August 15.
Seventeen newsmen and talk show hosts were dismissed in a matter of minutes, a wholesale purge of staff and programming talent. By noon, the first and only news/talk station in America's 55th-largest broadcast market was history.
"Unfortunately the market, for some reason or another, didn't respond to it," said general manager Randy Rehe. "Our company was going through some changes, and I felt that we just did not have the amount of time or deep enough pockets that it was going to take to ride the thing out until it finally came around and became profitable. We lost quite a bit of money."
The station now programs a satellite-delivered "middle of the road" musical format. News is restricted to brief reports, primarily during the morning hours. The station, no longer maintaining a force of reporters to prowl the streets of Columbus, now relies on its news staff - one full-time announcer and one part-time - to read the news supplied by a wire service.
"The news business is becoming just that, a business," says Rehe. "And I think news departments once were viewed as untouchable in radio and TV stations. They now find themselves having to manage better. You know, once it
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