Davis Media AAA “102.1 The Tide” WXTG-FM Virginia Beach and 1490 WXTG/101.9 WW270DA Hampton VA is currently stunting with the sound of waves crashing as it prepares to flip to News “All News 102” on Monday, January 7.
The station will include content from co-owned news sites wydaily.com and southsidedaily.com along with ABC Radio, NBC Sports Radio, Bloomberg Radio, Accuweather, Reliant Traffic, Associated Press, and Virginia News Network.
The former AAA format will remain on sister “92.3 The Tide” WTYD Deltaville/Williamsburg.
Eric Jon Magnuson
I doubt that they’re attempting to pull off anything like WTOP or Entercom’s News stations, but they do have a good lineup of content providers–and the co-ownership with the news sites may have been the determining factor to even think about doing this. Also, despite its size, Hampton Roads has never been a strong market for Talk-based formats, in general; it likely doesn’t help that neither of the primary operators (Sinclair Telecable, for commercial WNIS, or the Hampton Roads Educ. Telecommunications Assn., for public WHRV) currently subscribes to Nielsen Audio ratings.
TV and Radio Pro notes this new story from the Virginian-Pilot that gives a lot more details about the new format…
https://pilotonline.com/news/local/article_c55cefd2-0ea9-11e9-afbd-5b5a2f846967.html
Surprisingly, some of the networks and content providers that are mentioned in this article are different from those that were mentioned earlier.
Unfortunately, the stream may not be active, but it looks like everything else has gone as scheduled. Indeed, despite a few loose ends, there’s a fully functional website–and the station is apparently active on Facebook. I’m pleasantly surprised that the new site has most of its content housed on the site itself; I was almost expecting a placeholder site for the station that would primarily link to the others.
The stream went live today, and I’ve been able to listen a bit, this afternoon. It looks like middays may feature long-form Bloomberg shows, but the 4:00 hour has been largely local. (The site, though, may still not have a posted schedule.) Beyond that, there’ve definitely been ABC, CNBC, and NBC Sports newscasts, even during the Bloomberg shows–along with apparently recorded weather items from WVEC, and local traffic reports (presumably produced via Reliant). (And, yes, given the numerous bridges and tunnels in the area, traffic issues are important.) Also, there’ve been national/international reports within the local programming from, at least, both ABC and CBS.