I wrote this post in 1994 when I still lived in Kansas City. My uncle had just died, and the funeral was in the northern Missouri town where my mother's family came from. The local radio station, KTTN, caught my attention. It was so plugged into the community. Here's the post, reformatted in minor ways, with a follow-up at the end:
From: Mark Roberts
Newsgroups: rec.radio.broadcasting
Subject: Small-Town Radio in Trenton, Missouri
Followup-To: rec.radio.broadcasting
Date: 23 Feb 1994 05:45:45 GMT
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Small-town radio is indeed different from big-city radio.
No doubt some graduate student will one day get a grant to write a thesis or dissertation to point out that obvious fact, just like I once got a grant to write a thesis pointing out some painfully obvious facts about mass storage and document retrieval. The important part was, I got the degree.
But, in the meantime, let's examine KTTN-AM/FM, Trenton, Missouri, at no additional charge.
Trenton is a city of 6,124 people, according to the city limits signs. It's located in northern Missouri about 35 miles south of the Iowa border. The FCC considers Trenton to be outside all TV markets; the cable system imports the St. Joseph TV station and all Kansas City TV stations. Still, Des Moines has some media influence there. A lot of people listen to WHO, and the Des Moines Register is readily available from newspaper vending machines.
A lot of people move away and come back only for funerals. That was the case with my mother's family. Agriculture is the area's main industry; it has not fared well in recent years. There was significant flooding last summer.
I had not been there for nearly 14 years. I was there for a few days to help arrange and attend my uncle's funeral. The best cared-for buildings in town are the funeral homes.
Otherwise, the place looks seedier and trashier than I remembered it. That could be a sign of my own snobbishness. Or it could be reality; some people have moved out and those who have stayed are poorer and don't have the wherewithal to keep up appearances. Probably all the above.
It may be important to understand the context in which KTTN operates when I begin describing what I heard.
KTTN simulcasts 100%. The AM is a 500-watt daytimer at 1600; the FM is a class A at 92.1. The FM station is in stereo (a couple of other FMs in the area are NOT, which is incredible to me). When the station plays music, it plays country-and-western.
But there's lots of other stuff. Farm markets, weather in five-minute wire-service summaries, local weather from KTTN's own weather station, weather forecasts on all newscasts, and local newscasts oriented toward agriculture and obituaries.
This should not be surprising when one realizes that what's considered the best local restaurant is named "The Branding Iron." This is a culture that takes its beef seriously.
As I related in another post, the funeral home submitted my uncle's obituary, KTTN put it on the next local newscast. This turned out to be an extremely efficient form of getting the news of my uncle's death out to our relatives; everyone whom my mother called had already heard about it. (The local daily doesn't publish on Saturdays or holidays; the obit didn't appear there 'til Tuesday.)
KTTN runs local news every other hour at :15 past the hour. I don't know why :15 past the hour; that's just the way it's always been since KTTN(AM) went on the air in 1955. This includes Saturdays and Sundays; unlike most of the big-city stations for whom (1) the news director is the person with the scissors that morning and (2) weekend news can age for a couple of days, like either fine wine or dirty socks. (In Kansas City, this is even the case on all three of our news/talk stations, KCMO, KMBZ, and KNHN. Only WDAF staffs its news department on weekends.)
One newscast had an interview with the spokesman for the Missouri Future Farmers of America Association, Steve Brown. The FFA is an organization high-school students interested in agriculture can join. This week is National FFA week, and Brown was describing how FFA members promote agriculture to elementary school students.
In a tape cut, he said, "And we bring in actual agricultural animals to the elementary schools" to promote FFA membership.
As I drove out of Trenton, I looked at the KTTN building on Main Street. I saw a mailbox with the following sign written above it:
After Hours NEWS DEPOSITSeeing that mailbox and hearing what KTTN does was for me a refreshing antidote to the hyper-researched, pre-digested pablum that passes for radio in Kansas City. No doubt KTTN is an important element in maintaining a strong sense of community in an otherwise distressed, isolated little city.
In Kansas City, if all the radio stations went away, I don't think anybody would really miss them. You can always get music from a tape deck or CD player. In fact, you can get *better* music from tapes or CDs than you can get on the radio here. (I wonder if "research" tells them that!) The service provided by most stations is easily replaceable.
In Trenton, if KTTN went away, I think people would miss it. Real fast. The service KTTN provides is difficult if not impossible to replace.
--(Moderator's Note: Thank you Mark for this wonderful article. I, too, sorely miss local radio. With all it's glitches and 'un-slickness' rural and other local radio can never be replaced by SMN and Unistar. I urge everyone to call their local satellite repeater which passes for a radio station and tell them you miss them since they went off the air. When they tell you that they are 'on the air' tell them 'no, some guy across the continent is on the air, you arn't'. One of my old sigs said "Satellite 106, "We're Not Here, but You are"... Bill) (the late Bill Pfeiffer, moderator of rec.radio.broadcasting)
--Followup: Here it is 13 years later, and KTTN is still there, still as plugged in as ever. A few things have changed. Trenton's been trying hard to work on economic development. In particular, the local college, North Central Missouri College, has upgraded itself in recent years. The town looks better than it did then (I last was there in 2005). KTTN makes more use of automation than it used to. The AM station now carries totally separate programming and is entirely automated. The FM station is automated in the evenings and overnights. Even then, though, if there's something important going on, there's someone around to mind the store. I listen to the KTTN audio stream every so often. During last week's floods in Missouri, I listened around midnight Missouri time. After the top-of-the-hour AP network news, the station's news director broke in with extensive information about local storms and flooding. On a day-to-day basis, the station is live in the mornings and afternoons. It isn't as slick as a country station in Kansas City might be, but it's genuine and honest.
And speaking of Kansas City, WDAF is now an FM station, "The Wolf", and has more or less killed off the newscasts for which it was once renowned in Kansas City. I guess they thought it was a "tuneout". In reality, that means the people running "The Wolf" lack confidence in their own programming to be compelling enough to get listeners to stick around through a newscast. Based on what I've heard of the same chain's version of "The Wolf" in San Francisco, that lack of confidence is well founded. In an age of iPods, other MP3 players, satellite radios, and Internet streaming audio, I think little KTTN is far better positioned to compete and thrive than "The Wolf" or related species that offer nothing but a jukebox. The big chains don't seem to understand that we can make our own jukeboxes now.