When DC broadcasters move to the suburbs, what’s lost?

The Glass-Enclosed Nerve Center is moving to Maryland.

In Washington, DC, the seventh-largest media market in the country, WTOP is the king of commercial radio. But the FM broadcaster told Bethesda Magazine last month that it plans to say goodbye by January to its McLean Gardens home at 3400 Idaho Ave. NW, a building that holds hallowed significance for many listeners and employees, and move just outside the District to 5425 Wisconsin Ave. in the Maryland section of Friendship Heights.

WTOP’s announcement follows news that Fox 5 is also departing the District. Originally announced in September 2017, the move became official in August when station executives signed a lease to move to a new building in Bethesda. The move from 5151 Wisconsin Ave. NW is scheduled for 2020.

Critics of the moves are concerned that when radio and television broadcasters leave for the suburbs, the District loses important local businesses. ABC7 and public TV station WETA — both outside the city, in Rosslyn and Shirlington, Va., respectively — are currently the anomalies in local broadcasting. But soon television stations NBC4 Washington and WUSA9 and public radio station WAMU will be the only major English-language news broadcasters still based in the District.

Some decried WTOP’s decision to exit the District, claiming the move is a loss for the local economy.

“The problem (from my perspective) is WTOP becomes a Maryland business and, among other losses, its taxes go to Annapolis instead of DC,” Tom Sherwood, WAMU analyst and Washington City Paper contributing writer, tweeted at the time of the news. “It is one of the biggest radio stations in the country. A loss for our city.”

“Local officials swinging for the fences with Amazon are missing the small ball game of keeping more modest employers like WTOP and Discovery in place,” CityLab staff writer Kriston Capps tweeted in agreement.

WTOP general manager Joel Oxley says the decision to leave the District was due in part to the lack of available, affordable space in the area that could fit its needs: 30,000 square feet all on one floor. The current Nerve Center is currently spread out over four floors, much to the frustration of WTOP employees. He also said there needed to be parking, a rare feature in much of DC.

“We scoured the area near us for real estate in our over yearlong search but didn’t find space that worked for us. So we made the decision to move 1.9 miles up Wisconsin to the DC/Maryland border,” Oxley said in an interview. “In terms of covering DC, we are looking forward to our reporters being able to get to many locations in the District quicker than ever before since we are next to a Metro stop instead of taking a car or walking a mile to a Metro stop as they have to do in our current building.”

Yesim Sayin Taylor, founding executive director of the DC Policy Center, is concerned that the District’s tax policies are driving broadcasters and other companies to the suburbs. “I don’t think the government has anything against the broadcasters, but the underlying thing is how unfriendly the tax system is,” Taylor said. “It’s expensive here.”

Oxley said property taxes were not a significant factor in WTOP’s decision, as they were fairly comparable in DC and Chevy Chase.

Fox 5’s general manager did not respond to a request for comment about his station’s motivations, but Bethesda Magazine reported last year that the Montgomery County Economic Development Corp. did offer the broadcaster, which includes sister stations WTTG and WDCA, an incentive package to finalize its move.

Oxley did not indicate any similar arrangement for WTOP. “I’m not sure that we really got approached in a significant way by Montgomery County or the District,” he said. “We just had to do what we felt was best for our business and best for employees.”

While the economic impact is tangible, the question remains as to whether broadcasters’ departures have an effect on local media coverage of DC.

“It’s a blow to a city to not have people whose job it is to pay attention to what’s going on,” said Nikki Usher, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Every second counts for relevancy and the farther you are away from the action, the less relevant your content is.”

“DC is actually a broadcasting haven. We have the fourth-highest number of broadcasters in the country,” Taylor said, citing employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “We are the capital and at some point the studio location mattered, but increasingly it doesn’t matter,” she added, noting that TV and radio reporters can increasingly report remotely.

Usher has studied the symbolic importance of news buildings, including those of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and The Miami Herald, and has asserted that these buildings’ visibility — and movement — matter to the communities they cover.

“I think [buildings] matter a little bit less for broadcasters [than newspapers] because broadcasters have been doing mobile journalism since their inception,” said Usher. “Since you could have a satellite beaming from a news truck or a news van, TV’s greatest advantage was that and is that it can broadcast from anywhere.”

Still, Usher says that there’s an emotional connection citizens have to local news outlets — whether it’s the building or the tagline, like Glass Enclosed Nerve Center — that often goes ignored but emerges when things change.  

“Standing out in a crowded market is more than just having the best content — it’s about having an emotional connection,” Usher said. “What we don’t get from all of these quantitative studies about trust and user attention is … the emotional side. … I think that’s why we keep talking about these stories about what happened when a news building leaves because we know intuitively, even though it’s hard to measure, that people feel a connection that is more than just content and more than just information. It’s identity.”

Oxley is confident in the decision to move. He’s happy with WTOP’s next step and thinks it will give his staff a nice new home, replete with new space and technology, and will bring his reporters closer to the District by connecting them with more reliable public transit.

“It was really about, ‘Are we going to be in a good location to be able to do our work?’” he said. “And people seem very enthused that we [will] have made it easier to cover the area [as compared to] where we are now.”