Stepping inside the doors of WPTL AM 920 in Canton marks a throwback to bygone era.

Plaid, high back armchairs wait in pairs for customers. An award for the best Dairy Month promotion — a spot that featured a Jimmy Stewart sound alike proclaiming the virtues of dairy products — hangs on the wood paneled wall alongside an early career Garth Brooks poster.

The station’s only computers whir away in the sound booths, ticking off timing sequences to ensure that local commercial breaks don’t cut in to the satellite music feed beamed in from Golden Springs, Colo. A low click and an in-house machine splices in local station identification — voiced by the station’s President and CEO Bill Reck — before the cross-country DJ jumps back in with another hit. Just across the five-foot wide room eight track tapes line the wall.

WPTL AM 920 represents one of the few stations of its kind left in the industry. Privately owned and operated by the same family since 1978, the station thrives largely due to its focus on local content, from school lunch menus to church news, high school sports to the Flea Market program during which listeners can buy and sell used goods on air.

“We compete with one key factor — local information and involvement,” Reck said.

The business of radio

This type of involvement has gone by the wayside in most radio markets as FCC rules have changed. The FCC now allows public companies to own more stations, thereby resulting in accumulation and assimilation in the name of profit margins, said David Rubin, Syracuse University’s dean of the Newhouse School of Public Communications.

“Publicly held companies are managing more for Wall Street and stockholders than their audience,” he said.

Rather than provide local programming, more emphasis is being placed on automation, advertising dollars and essentially shoehorning stations into a corporate identified market mold, Rubin said.

Using fewer station-based personalities and more news and music services allows for a reduction in the number of people it takes to physically run each station, naturally resulting in less overhead, at least in terms of salary payment.

“Radio’s a business,” said Don Connelly, Western Carolina University’s Director of Electronic Media and faculty advisor to the campus FM station, WWCU.

But while the radio market is driven into conformity across the nation, Western North Carolina remains a stronghold of locally oriented content as stations like WPTL, WRGC in Sylva and WFSC in Franklin keep the focus on their communities.

WRGC AM 680 and WFSC AM 1050 are both under the Georgia-Carolina Radiocasting corporate umbrella, but they have been allowed to maintain their station identities in spite of corporate ownership.

“With the consolidation of the broadcast industry, there’s a lot of cookie cutter type, but we don’t subscribe to that,” said Georgia-Carolina President and CEO Art Sutton. “The station managers are the captains of their ships.”

Local, local, local

Similar to WPTL, WRGC also broadcasts local events such as high school sports games and features listener-based programs like the Trading Post, another on-air used goods sale. But what sets the station apart is its news and analysis, said station manager Karen Vogt.

“What makes us unique is that we don’t just put it on satellite and let it roll,” she said. “We’re very community oriented, that’s why we have the listenership across the board.”

The station’s in-house news director, Loyd VanHorn, spends his time going to local meetings, collecting police reports and writing content for the eight news broadcasts that air each day on WRGC. On-air personality Brandon Stephens hosts 680 Focus, an open forum discussion program on Saturdays.

“If they want to know what’s going on in Jackson County, they can read the Sylva Herald once a week or listen to WRGC every day,” Vogt said, referring to the county’s community newspaper, which is published every Thursday.

Sylva’s newsstand superette, Cope’s, is one of several businesses that tunes in to WRGC on a daily basis, primarily for the local news content.

“I don’t work at a news stand to stay deaf and dumb,” said Jaime Simpson, who has worked at Cope’s for four years. “I need to know what is going on for my customers.”

Simpson said that she both reads the local paper and listens to WRGC, but has grown tired of what she called the station’s redundancy, calling for better and diversified news collecting and programming to include more live reports and features such as storytellers or interviews with children and teachers.

“They can find more to report. They’re lazy I think,” she said. “The whole station’s boring as hell.”

While some may consider the station boring, others view it as the only way to reach potential customers.

“WRGC’s the only game in town if you want any kind of presence on the radio,” said Larry Hinton, General Manager of Andy Shaw Ford and one of the station’s largest advertisers.

Hinton said that coverage from Asheville-based stations is spotty at best and the campus radio station, WWCU, is not commercial. So while the car dealership does do WWCU underwriting, there are no opportunities to actually advertise on the station. When cars come in to the dealership for service, Hinton said he takes the chance to check car radios to see what station they are tuned to. A large percentage of radios are tuned to 680 AM.

“The AM station here does a great job of penetrating the market,” he said.

Hinton also advertises with WRCG’s sister station, WFSC in Franklin. Unlike WRGC, WFSC has a competing station, WPFJ AM 1480, owned by Drake Enterprises. But competition may be what contributes to WFSC’s community news philosophy, as the station also broadcasts high school sports, Tell It and Sell It and the Midday Report, a new commentary program also featuring obituaries, weather, sports scores and more from noon to 1 p.m.

“It’s just a jam packed hour of information,” said WFSC station manager Patrick Moore.

The station actually broadcasts both AM and FM signals, WNCC FM 96.7, both of which feature community news, but the AM signal’s popularity is evidenced by higher listenership.

“Even though it has an FM, (the AM) will often have more listeners,” said station-owner Sutton.

The popularity and community news focus of WNC’s local AM stations is an anomaly in the grand scheme of the radio market, Rubin said.

“It sounds to me that you’re lucky,” he said.

Rubin named several factors that may contribute to this luck: advertisers who chose to spend their money with the stations, an ability to collect and disseminate news cheaply and, of course, having an audience for the programming.

The strength of loyal listeners

Loyal listeners are indeed one of the main reasons these AM stations stay on the air.

“I love speaking to somebody and knowing it’s somebody in our hometown,” said Ruby Rogers, a longtime WPTL listener.

Rogers said she tunes in for the station’s country, gospel and bluegrass music, as well as the church news and occasional sports game.

“I think it’s just wonderful that they still stick to stuff like that,” she said.

But loyalty may have originated more out of necessity than choice. In the region’s mountain communities, AM radio stations became a staple for two reasons — one, the AM signal came first, and two, AM signals travel better over mountainous terrain than FM signals.

A quick look at the history of AM radio shows that one of the first voice transmissions occurred Dec. 24, 1906, in Massachusetts as Canadian-American physicist Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden used continuous wave modulation of a 1 kW Alexanderson alternator to broadcast Christian music.

It wasn’t until 1911 that radio progressed to the point that the first U.S. radio license was issued to George Hill Lewis of Cincinnati and the Radio Division of the Department of Commerce was established. The first broadcast of a dance band and creation of a college radio station wasn’t until 1920. Jack Benny’s first radio show was in 1932. FM broadcasts didn’t begin until the mid- to late-1930s.

But due to the properties of AM and FM signals — AM stands for amplitude modulation and FM stands for frequency modulation — AM signals hug the ground and follow the curvature of the earth while FM signals travel in a straight line, Connelly said.

“The mountains are good for AM because the signals travel well,” Sutton said.

At night, the earth’s atmosphere changes and a phenomenon called skywave propagation occurs allowing AM signals to travel further. Consequently, stations are required to power down and use directional antennas or turn off completely to keep from running over each other’s signals. This phenomenon explains why different stations often can be heard at night than during the day.

The reason why AM radio sounds like AM radio also is due to its signal properties, as AM signals have a more narrow bandwidth than FM, Connelly said. The concept of radio bandwidth is similar to Internet bandwidth in that the more bandwidth the better the transmission.

“The (AM) audio frequency can only do about half of what FM can do,” Connelly said.

However, the technology of radio is changing. Satellite radio, services such as XM and Sirius, are now available to the casual consumer.

“Radio is certainly threatened by satellite radio,” Rubin said. “People are willing to pay for the music and forgo local news.”

The free radio market has its own weapons of competition, as the move is being made to broadcast digital signals. The technology is akin to that in the high-definition television market and will result in FM stations being able to broadcast CD quality sound and AM stations sounding more like the current FM broadcasts, Connelly said.

“Consequently it’s a win-win situation,” he said.

Major radio corporations such as Clear Channel — which owns more than 1,300 stations worldwide — have committed to going to the digital signal, but unlike HDTV there is no set conversion date. With the change in broadcast quality will come a change in consumer end products, as new radios will be needed to receive the digital transmissions, Connelly said. The changeover is not expected to create more stations but more services within the radio market.

The downside to the technological update is that it may leave radio listeners in the dust, as what was one of the last uncomplicated mediums upgrades to the modern world.