KPCW turns 25
Art: Don Weller
In 1980, Park City was on the cusp. In February, The Park Record celebrated its 100th anniversary as Utah’s oldest weekly newspaper in continuous publication. In March, the Park City High School boys’ basketball team—featuring descendants of the town’s proud mining-era population—won the school’s first state championship in any sport. That spring, a spike in silver prices brought a glimmer to the prospects of the town’s sole surviving underground mine.
On the other hand, a young upstart coyly named The Newspaper was giving The Park Record a stiff challenge. In April, the locally owned Mount Air Market closed its doors, unable to compete with the glitzy new Alpha Beta supermarket. At the Park City Resort, developer Jack Davis unveiled a grandiose plan to turn the parking lot into shops and condominiums.
It was into this shifting firmament that a new star was born—no, exploded onto the scene—on a July evening in 1980. In a sign-on ceremony at the Car 19 Restaurant, Blair Feulner, left hand cupped over his ear in the classic pose, stood at the microphone and announced, “This is KPCW, 91.9 FM, the station that Park City built.”
“The sign-on ceremony came only a week ago, yet KPCW is already a Park City institution,” The Newspaper observed in its July 10 edition that year. “The strains of the city’s own radio station have been coming from every available FM receiver since the magic moment shortly after 8 p.m. July 2. And the station has received such a flood of volunteers in the past few days that the hours will be expanded from 18 to 24 hours later this week.”
Of course, there was a reason every available FM receiver was playing KPCW. There was no other local FM signal. But residents were clearly taken with the station’s unique mix of local news—lots of local news—together with lost-dog reports and an eclectic music play list chosen and introduced by people you knew from The Club, the rugby team ... or even the police department.
The station went on the air with one paid employee, and it wasn’t Blair. The guy who had spent two years putting the station on the air was now working pro bono five days a week.
“Why?” he said, repeating an interviewer’s question. “We didn’t have any money, that’s why.”
To pay the bills, Blair would point his battered Chevy pickup down Parleys Canyon to the studios of KLUB in North Salt Lake. There he would spend most of his waking hours on Saturdays and Sundays, holed up doing newscasts, public-service announcements and miscellaneous production work.
Park City demographics have changed dramatically since 1980. The town is no longer the tight, self-contained community of a quarter of a century ago. There’s a growing population of commuters and wealthy second-home owners. Salt Lake City radio stations now jostle for space on the Quarry Mountain translator site north of town. Among them are two other successful public stations—KUER and KRCL, based out of Salt Lake City.
But here’s the thing: If you were to eavesdrop on the listening habits of your Park City neighbors, chances are you’d still hear Blair’s smooth baritone challenging the lower limits of their speakers. When a Denver research firm did a listenership survey recently, it discovered that 73 percent of the potential listening audience tuned in to KPCW at least once a week.
Seventy-three percent? The number was so far out of the expected range that the research firm called back, offering to do another survey.
Blair credits the station’s phenomenal numbers to its unwavering commitment to local news along with its continuing reliance on volunteers and folksy touches such as lost-dog reports. This style has prompted comparisons to the radio station on the early-1990s TV show, “Northern Exposure.”
One survey summarized listener reaction this way: “It makes me feel like I still live in a small town.”
Of course, Blair no longer moonlights in North Salt Lake to pay the bills. The station is on a sound financial footing, thanks to its unparalleled success in raising money. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting did a study in the mid-1990s, it showed that KPCW was raising more money per capita—several times more—than any other public radio station in the country. “We weren’t even on the same chart,” he said.
The person widely credited for the station’s financial stability is Blair’s wife, Susan, who joined the staff in 1982. Susan said that, in retrospect, her ignorance of conventional fundraising tactics worked in the station’s favor.
“I think we were so isolated that we just made up what we were supposed to do,” she said.
For a start, she set out to forge close ties with local businesses—an approach shunned by many public stations because of the concern that the businesses might try to influence programming. “It never even crossed my mind that anyone would want to do that,” she said.
Park City businesses have been willing, even eager, to donate items that the station could use as “high-value” premiums during its fund drives. Deer Valley Resort, which opened five months after KPCW went on the air, was one of the first. “People loved getting a day pass instead of a coffee mug,” Susan said.
Many of the more exotic donated items—say, a week at a getaway in England’s Lake District—are featured in on-air auctions. The station promotes its list of auction items—along with the times that they will be offered—by sending mailers to local residents.
Another KPCW innovation was inviting programming underwriters to record their own announcements. “I didn’t know that was a strange thing to do,” Susan said. The lilting voice of local skiing legend Stein Eriksen was the first to go out over the airwaves. Many others have followed. Spots often compete with one another to claim the longest underwriting relationship with the station.
On June 30, 2005, Susan is retiring from her job at the station, turning the fundraising responsibilities over to a staff led by E.J. Poppe. Blair said he plans to stick around for at least three more years.
“It’s going to be difficult not having Susan there,” he said.
“It’s going to be fine,” Susan said. “E.J. and her staff are doing a great job. I couldn’t be more proud of these women.”
About 10 years ago, Salt Lake City residents got a taste of KPCW’s folksy formula when sister station KCPW went on the air. Today, that station broadcasts from frequencies at both ends of the FM dial and at 1010 on the AM dial.
According to Blair, another public-radio axiom says that NPR listeners won’t look for programming on the AM dial. “I’m betting that’s not true,” he said.
Given his track record over the past 25 years, he may well be right.
David Hampshire covered KPCW’s signing-on ceremony for The Newspaper in 1980. He figures that, after 25 years, it’s OK to quote from his own story.
In 125 years, The Park Record hasn’t skipped a beat.
You’d think that, in 125 years, somebody would have said at least once, “Aw, hell, let’s just skip this issue. Nobody will notice.”
Weekly newspapers aren’t like dailies. The entire editorial content is often supplied by one or two paid staffers, maybe with help from a couple of gossip columnists and a high school kid covering sports. Sometimes the editor is also the publisher and sells ads on the side.
That’s why a record of 125 years without a hiccup is so remarkable. This year, The Park Record celebrates an achievement unmatched by any other weekly newspaper in Utah. Since it was founded as The Park Mining Record in February 1880, the paper hasn’t missed an issue.
It hasn’t been easy. In 1898, it survived the destruction of the entire business district, including its own offices, in a devastating pre-dawn fire. Feisty editor Sam Raddon conducted business from a tent on the site of the burned building and contracted with a Salt Lake City daily to handle the production and printing.
In the 1950s, with the mining economy in a tailspin, The Park Record shrank to as few as four pages. When the paper changed hands in April 1956, local residents watched as the typesetting equipment was loaded onto a truck and taken to the nearby town of Morgan. For a time, The Park Record was combined with Coalville’s Summit County Bee.
In 1983, its century-old name almost disappeared in a merger with a competing newspaper.
But it survived. The Park Record of today is a far cry from The Park Record of 50 years ago. It publishes twice a week, not once, and its staff box lists the names of a publisher, an editor, seven staff writers, a nine-person advertising sales staff and 25 other people. The editor, Nan Chalat-Noaker, whose affiliation with the paper goes back to the 1970s, knows from her own experience that weekly journalism can be tenuous but can also provide a community with a century-long thread of continuity.
On July 2, 2005, the paper will include a special supplement celebrating the newspaper’s 125 years of continuous service. In a curious coincidence, another local media outlet, radio station KCPW, is also celebrating a birthday on that day.
But, as Chalat-Noaker might remind you, The Park Record has a 100-year head start.
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