My Last Radio Home is Back in the News Business


Posted: March 31st, 2007 | By: Steve Mullen | Filed under: Media Relations News | No Comments

If you’ll excuse a self-serving post about Richmond radio…

I used to work in radio and television news. My last job in journalism was as news director of All News 990, WVNZ, an AM 24-hour news station in Richmond, Virginia. Less than a year after I left in mid-1999, they switched the format over to talk radio, and then later to Adult Standards, and then later to Southern Gospel. I saw a bus billboard the other day that said the all news station is back on the air. They switched the call letters long ago to WLEE, which are letters with a long history here in Central Virginia. I actually worked at WLEE in the early 1990s when it was 1320am and a talk station.

The programming on the new All News 990 is .. get this .. the TV signal of CNN’s Headline News. Yup … it’s television without the pretty pictures. They sprinkle in some rip-and-read AP copy to say that they have local news breaks. I listened for a little while the other day and it’s bearable, but obviously local all news radio could be done much, much better.

The good news for the station is that they were finally able to increase the power of the signal. Back when I worked there it was 1,000 watts daytime and about the power of a cell phone at night. Now it’s 4,000 watts daytime and 2,000 watts at night.

I suspect the same people are behind the whole thing, based on a lot of the branding messages I heard in promos. The station group that owned them when I worked there sold out a couple of years back, but I heard the station manager/part owner ended up getting a job with the new owners.

I wish them luck with their new format, but I wish someone would dive in and really do all news here in Richmond. I did the best I could with very limited resources when I was news director. It seems like they’re not even bothering to do it halfway now.

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