Local, local, and more local: Kelli Corbeil and Brattleboro radio station WTSA

It was June of 2008 and Kelli Corbeil had it all going on. The bubbly, buoyant honey-blonde with the open manner and easy laugh had a successful career in banking, two young children and a loving husband who was living his dream in local radio.

By July of 2008, it was all crashing down.

Backing up just a bit, in 2007 Kelli and her husband, Bill Corbeil, bought WTSA AM-FM in Brattleboro. Owning a local radio station - especially the hometown station where he had interned in junior high school - was the culmination of Bill's longtime passion. After all, he had started his first radio station in his boyhood bedroom - with the call letters WBIL. After college, he had been a successful Burlington radio jockey and producer. For a long time, he produced one of the town's most popular shows, "Corm and the Coach," featuring Steve Cormier and UVM men's basketball coach Tom Brennan.

After his father died, Bill returned to Brattleboro to help run the family car dealership. When that was sold, he managed another one, Auto Mall, on Putney Road.

But Kelli knew her husband's heart was still on the air.

"I personally pushed him to get back into radio," she said. "You just knew this guy had to be in radio. He was just good at it."

So with Kelli as his second-in-command, the couple took out a loan and bought WTSA. They found it a brand new home in an abandoned roller rink that overlooks the Retreat Meadows. They put in an expensive new AM transmission tower. They built a state-of-the-art combination of studios and offices.

After a very rocky and controversial start, WTSA was flying high. It was a rare Vermont radio station with its own award-winning news department. It was broadcasting CNN news on the hour on the FM, and ESPN sports on the AM side. It was doing live play-by-play of high school sports. It was raising money for the Jimmy Fund. Bill had his picture taken with Tom Brady. He had big expansion plans for the future. He was happy. He was at the top of his game.

Then, on July 24, 2008, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Nine months later, he was dead. He was 40 years old.

It's common in tragic situations like these to say, "The community was devastated by the loss." But with Bill, it was many different communities. His wife and children. His large and loving extended family. His many friends. His employees. The town of Brattleboro. The Vermont radio community.

Bill had touched a lot of people in his short life.

"He just had an unbelievable passion for being in radio and having fun," said Cormier, who eulogized Bill at his funeral. "He became this legend in Burlington that people wanted to be with. The Rocker - that's the nickname the coach gave him. He had impeccable timing. His best time of the day was after eight at night. I loved Bill Corbeil and I realized I was part of the dream he wanted to live - to own a radio station. Bill was like a showman. He loved music, but it was about the content and how creative it was on the air, about people having fun, being part of a team, wanting to win, wanting to serve the community, and being willing to get up at the crack of dawn to do it again."

After Bill's death, the WTSA employees tenderly gathered around Kelli in her time of need. But there was one big question hovering over all of them: What would happen next?

It didn't take too long to find out. Kelli moved to the station full-time after Bill died, becoming only the second woman in the state to own and run a radio station.

"With Bill, his passion was always radio," Kelli said. "Honestly, that was all he ever talked about. I was in banking for 15 years and he couldn't tell you anything about banking. But I could tell you so much about radio. He trained me without even knowing he was doing it, because that's all he talked about. And I listened, because radio is a fun thing. There's promotional things, making it sound good on the air, the music - it's pure entertainment all the time."

In the end, Kelli knew her heart was at WTSA.

"We took a lot of time and we built the station," she said. "We have a lot of people, our employees especially, I felt indebted to. They were good people and they were good to us. And it's a good company. In the long run, I think it's better for my kids to have our own company. Bill used to say to me, even though he wasn't well and he didn't know what was going to happen, he'd say, 'I don't think you should sell it. It's a good company, Kelli.' But he did leave it up to me. And I know it’s a good company. And I know it's the right decision."

Running a radio station isn't so different from banking, Kelli said.

"Even though you think banking is about numbers, it's really about sales, knowing your people, servicing your customers, putting them in the right things and making sure they're getting good results from it," Kelli said. "Whether it's a bank and they're getting a good return, or it's a commercial and they're getting good results because customers are coming in, it's very similar. It's still a sales-and-service world, either way. This is just a lot more creative. You've got be constantly thinking of new ideas. It keeps you hopefully young for a long time. I hope so, because I just turned 40."

Media Matters

This may be an unsettled time for the economy, but for media, it's more like an unending nightmare. The business model for most traditional media - radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc - has long been based on advertising. Companies buy space to sell their products, and the content is delivered around them. This leads, in good times, to 800-plus pages of Vogue Magazine, 30-second Super Bowl ads selling for $3 million apiece, and major newspapers supporting 1,300-plus person newsrooms.

But in this latest recession, advertising has shrunken to unprecedentedly low proportions. Whether it's the loss of jobs and a resultant loss of consumer spending, the Internet or a host of “perfect storm” conditions, media appears to be fighting for its life.

It is estimated that from September 2008 to September 2009, 35,885 journalism jobs were lost nationwide. Approximately 140 daily and weekly newspapers closed; some were small local chains, but others were large papers like the Christian Science Monitor, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In 2008, 525 magazines folded; in 2009, we lost over 400 more. These included titles from major magazine companies like Conde Nast, Time Inc, the New York Times, Hearst and Hachette-Filipacchi. Some of them? Gourmet, Vibe and Portfolio. In 2009, however, 275 new magazines were started.

In Vermont, media tightened its belt but remained fairly steady. Several newspapers cut reporters or consolidated operations. The state's national magazines saw fewer ads. Radio stations changed owners. But the media landscape did not change dramatically.

The mantra throughout all these seismic industry changes has been "local, local, local." Local news, local weather reports, local advertisements, local personalities, local everything will help media survive. WTSA fits perfectly into that formula.

Radio In Vermont

Thirty years ago in Vermont, most radio stations were locally owned and locally programmed.

Given the mountainous topography, there was no one dominant radio station. Every little market was self-contained. Vermont is still one of the few states in America that doesn't have a 50,000-watt clear channel radio station in its borders -- a station you can hear all over Vermont and well beyond. The only reason Vermont Public Radio is statewide is that it owns several stations; even so, there are still holes in their coverage.

Slowly, radio changed. Little stations, to save money on personnel, started doing satellite programming. Then came deregulation and the Communications Act of 1996, which lifted previous limits on ownership. Before that date, a company was limited by the FCC to a maximum of seven AM, seven FM and seven television stations. They couldn't own more than one station in any one market. Once the new law was passed, it allowed groups like Saga and Clear Channel to buy as many stations as they wanted. In some cases, they bought up the whole market. Then came subscription satellite radio, like Sirius. Little radio stations couldn't compete.

This era started to collapse in 2006, when Clear Channel decided to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations. The ones it wanted to get rid of were outside the top 100 US media markets. Today there are no Clear Channel stations in Vermont.

Saga is still a presence in the Brattleboro area, where it owns WKVT AM-FM - WTSA's chief competition. It also owns two FM stations in nearby Greenfield, MA - WHAI and WPVQ; four stations in Keene, NH - WKNE-FM, WKBK-AM, WINQ-FM and WSNI-FM; and two stations in Northampton, MA - WRSI-FM and WHMP-AM (which simulcasts with WHMQ-AM in Greenfield). All the FM stations beam strong signals into Brattleboro.

Also competing with WTSA, although in a small way, are two tiny 100-watt noncommercial community radio stations, WOOL in Bellows Falls and WVEW in Brattleboro.

Radio station areas are divided into "markets." The Burlington-Plattsburgh market is the largest one in Vermont. Brattleboro is too small to be a market, so it is monitored by Arbitron, a media and marketing research firm, as part of Windham County and sampled by them as part of an area that includes Lebanon, NH, White River Junction and Rutland.

Arbitron measures average quarter-hour market shares and "cume," or cumulative listening.

"The average quarter-hour share combines the number of people listening with how long they listen," said Arbitron spokesperson Jessica Benbow. "Each station in the market has a share of listening out of a total number of stations. WTSA is in the top five both for share and for cume, just in Windham County. So is WKVT. However, Vermont Public Radio is number one. We have no real in-the-book information for Windham, so take it with understanding this is just a county, not in our syndicated service."

Today there is quite a mix on the Vermont airways. Christian stations, college stations, community stations, commercial AM stations, commercial FM stations, chains, satellites, public radio - you name it and you can find it on your radio dial.

"There are 90 radio stations in Vermont, AM and FM," said Jim Condon, the executive director of the Vermont Association of Broadcasters. "Most stations run one of each. There's one stand-alone AM in Bennington."

The number of locally-owned stations has gone up in recent years.

"When Clear Channel decided to divest itself of many of its stations, many in Vermont were purchased locally and are operated locally," Condon said. "But the only other female-owned station is WVNF-FM in East Poultney, which is owned by Judy Leech. It's a fun little station she's got going down there. We do have some female general managers. The Champlain Broadcasting Group is run by Carolyn Seifert and includes nine different stations. And Vermont Public Radio is run by Robin Turnau. They've got nine stations as well, and they're number one in the state of Vermont."

Economically, 2009 was a very difficult year for broadcasters. This year looks better, Condon said.

"Nationally, revenue in 2009 was down an estimated 20 percent," Condon said. "That was pretty much the same here in Vermont. We're seeing some signs that things are springing back, so we're optimistic as an industry here in Vermont and nationwide. We're seeing ad revenues pick up across the board compared to January of last year, so that's a good sign. Plus, this will be a political year, and all that advertising helps, too."

The stations that have weathered the economic storm, like WTSA, did it because they have a strong connection to their listeners, Condon said.

"The stations with the best prospects are stations like WTSA that are doing everything they can to serve their communities through local news, special events, local sports, helping local charities," Condon said. "These are the things that really separate stations from each other. Some do a fantastic job, and WTSA is definitely one of them. Kelli took over at a very difficult time, and to her credit she has helped the station continue to prosper."

Meeting Kelli

Kelli was born in Stamford, VT, in the southwestern part of the state. Her father, an engineer, was a Vermonter; her mother came from Barre, MA. She has three older brothers.

Kelli's grandfather was a farmer who turned his property into a nine-hole golf course. When he died, Kelli's mother took it over.

"She was an at-home Mom until I was about five," Kelli said. "Then she ran the golf course while my dad continued with his engineering career."

Kelli's first jobs were on the golf course.

"In the sixth grade there were these cool Nike sneakers with these colored stripes," Kelli said. "Me and my best friend both wanted the same pair. My parents would not buy them unless I worked to get the money. So me and my friend spent the whole summer down at the golf course, painting 'out of bounds' on trees and markers to get enough money. And since my friend worked, too, my parents gave us both money to buy the sneakers."

Another job she had was going into the pond to retrieve lost golf balls. She got paid by the ball.

In high school, when she was old enough to get a regular job, Kelli started working at McDonald's. She loved it.

"It was fun, and it was my own money, and a lot of my friends worked there," she said. "It was great to work on my own. Then I worked a line job at a box company. Worst job I ever had. So hot. No air conditioning, no anything. I would spend my time watching the temperature gauge, because if it hit a certain degree we could get out. 'Come on! One more degree!'"

Kelli went to the University of Vermont to study education. She worked as a waitress part-time to pay her expenses, and when she graduated she was certified to teach Kindergarten through the eighth grade with a minor in special education. She taught for a while, but by then she had met Bill, who was also studying at UVM while interning at various radio stations. She was 21.

"I met Bill because one of my roommates in college was from Brattleboro," Kelli said. "She knew Bill. He was a part-timer in radio then. He was a jock on weekends and sometimes overnight. I'd pick up McDonald's and drive down to Vergennes, where he was, and we'd eat dinner and I'd pick out albums - there weren't CDs at the time; we used actual albums - and we would stay there all night while we played music. It was fun. He was a good guy. He was a lot like me. He had a nice family. He was just a good person all around. He was nice and sweet to me. I fell pretty hard for that guy."

Their first rock concert together was a Yes show at the Olympic Village in Lake Placid, NY in 1991. Five years later, Bill proposed to Kelli there on the skating rink's big screen.

Soon Bill's radio career was competing with Kelli's work as a grade school teacher.

"We were always at events, going to concerts, doing remotes late at night," Kelli said. "It just wasn't meshing with me being a teacher - I'd have to be home making lesson plans. There was so much responsibility being a teacher, and I was out late at night. It didn't seem to be fair for me to be going back to school."

She changed her career to banking and never looked back.

"Not that banking isn't a responsibility, but it was with adults," she said. "I loved banking. I always loved math - I think I got it from my dad. I pursued two different banks, and the first one that called me, I went there. It was Vermont National Bank in Burlington, and I worked there for 15 years. I did use my teaching skills there - I became a trainer."

With Bill in radio and Kelli in banking, everything was going fine. Then Bill's father died, and Bill and Kelli returned to Brattleboro so Bill could help run the family auto business. That's where they put down their roots. Kelli became an officer at Chittenden Bank. The couple had their two children. But Bill wasn't all that happy, and the owners of WTSA were interested in selling.

Buying WTSA

WTSA, founded in 1950, was Brattleboro's first radio station. When Bill looked into buying it, it came with several beloved radio personalities. Co-owners John "Clarke" Killduff and John Ashley did tremendously popular morning and afternoon drive shows. Tim Johnson, who was one of this year's inaugural winners of VAB's Distinguished Service Awards (the other was Bob Kinzel of VPR), was a longtime radio news reporter who was widely known and respected throughout Windham County and the state. Ashley did a popular oldies show on Saturday mornings, and the "Coffee and Jazz" show was a Sunday morning institution. The station was warm, old-fashioned, familiar and community-minded.

Bill started kicking at the station's tires in 2006, and he brought Kelli in to do the books.

"Bill started working for them and made an agreement to buy it, and in the meantime I came in and took over their books," Kelli said. "It wasn't a paid job. Bill just asked me to do it. Also I attended every staff meeting even though I was working at the bank. The bank was wonderful to me. I helped write up the job descriptions, and I loved it. Weekends or on my lunch hour I was here at the station. Bill did everything, and I was the second ears for him."

It took over a year to finalize the sale, but the Corbeils purchased the station officially on December 1, 2007. Kelli won't say how much the couple paid, but they went all-in with their savings and a bank loan.

"We invested everything except for our two kids," she said. "Seriously - everything! All our eggs are in one basket, and this is it. We did it all together. We created a business plan together. I was involved doing the loan, building this new station. I've been involved in every step of that. What Bill really wanted was for us both to be here. But in the beginning, with the loan and everything else, there were times when Bill would not take a paycheck because he wanted to buy something for the station or give someone a bonus, and we didn't have to worry about it because I had a job that was paying us pretty well."

The Corbeils' privately-held company, Four Seasons Media, owns only WTSA. Its sales revenues fall between $500,000 and $1 million - Kelli didn't want to be any more specific. It has six full-time employees plus one part-timer.

The Corbeils were taking a huge risk buying a radio station in a somewhat down market, but Bill had lots of ideas. He wanted to shake up WTSA and make it into what he thought a radio station ought to be. He quickly made some changes - out with the Oldies show, out with Ashley, and then Clarke disappeared, too.

"We did not fire John Clarke," Kelli said. "Ashley, when we took over, we had to make some decisions, and he was one person we didn't bring on board. We took a loan, we had things we had to do, it was unfortunate, but we couldn't carry all of it. It wasn't that we didn't like him. It wasn't anything about that. It was a business decision. John Clarke just let himself go. He was in our business plan. That was not a Bill and Kelli decision."

If Kelli sounds defensive, it's because all hell broke loose after Clarke and Ashley left the air. Their fans howled with rage. Angry letters poured into the editorial pages of the local newspaper and flamed on the town's local Web site, and they didn't stop coming for a long time. As Bill tightened up the sound and made it younger - he brought down his old intern from Burlington, Ian Kelley, and made him the morning guy - some of the familiarity of the station disappeared.

"The controversy wrecked Bill," Kelli said. "He felt he was doing a good thing - which he was - for the community, keeping it locally owned. He was going to do great things for the community, and he felt that his community attacked him. He was devastated by that. Bill was sensitive to people. He wanted to make good decisions and have people agree with his decisions. He was very, very, very hurt. I was hurt too, but to be honest, I was a little more mad. He was hurt, and I was mad. They had no right and no idea because they didn't know this person they were attacking. He loved this community."

But things were just starting to go downhill.

"On July 24, 2008, we found out he had cancer," Kelli said. "He wasn't sick, really. There were no symptoms. He wasn't ill. We didn't even know he had cancer until that day they did surgery - they saw a spot on his lung and decided to take it out. They tested it while he was on the table, and it was cancer. It was this nightmare from then on."

Strength Under Fire

A sign sits on a bookcase in Kelli's office: "A woman is like a tea bag," it says. "You never know how strong she is until you put her in hot water."

Much has been written about Bill - both before and after his death. But when I met Kelli, it was for her first interview ever. She was dressed in a dark, well-cut business suit with a bright red silk scarf draped around her neck. She was energetic, frank, vulnerable and enormously likable, although for a banker, she was remarkably reticent about anything that had to do with numbers - the cost of the station, the yearly revenue, the Arbitron ratings. Or maybe she was close with figures because she was a banker.

The first thing Kelli did when she took over the station was form a committee of friends and business people to serve as her sounding board. Rick Fleming, who owns and runs Fleming Oil in Brattleboro, is one of them

"Kelli is a very strong woman to be able to move on from Bill's death and to take on the responsibility of running the station," Fleming said. "She's done a fantastic job of getting her hands around the challenge of running a small business - trying to increase sales in an economy that at best is stagnant. She's done a great job of pulling the group of employees together. She and Bill had a vision of running a local station and being involved in the community - with United Way, Project Feed the Thousands, partnering with Brattleboro Reformer on the Home and Health show. That was their commitment -- they wanted to be the local radio station. Kelli has picked the ball up and run with it and I think she's doing a great job. I'm an advertiser on the station. I have been since before the Corbeils bought it. My advertising involvement has increased since they bought it."

Larry Smith was a WTSA on-air news and talk personality for many years before he left to become spokesman for Entergy Vermont Yankee. In fact, Bill's first real job in radio was interning for him. He is also on Kelli's informal board of advisors.

"I've known Bill since he was in junior high school when his dad dropped him off afternoons and he hung around and watched me do my show," Smith said. "We always stayed in touch. When Bill passed, it wasn't like everything got dropped in Kelli's hands. While Bill certainly had a vision and a mission and a plan, Kelli knew exactly what it was and what they wanted the station to do. She's very business-savvy and sales oriented. It might have been a little overwhelming, but after she got over the initial impact of losing her husband and having to raise two kids, she delved into the business. Every month she gets more confidence. She inherently knows what to do. She's got Bill's connections, she's got sales ability, she's got a lot of support and people think highly of her. She's already got ideas. She's going to do extremely well."

Smith believes that being locally-owned and community-minded is the key to profitability.

"What sets WTSA apart is that it's still family-owned and operated," Smith said. "It's heavily involved in news and sports and the community. You can't just say you're going to be a community radio station. You have to live it. You've got to have a local connection that appeals to as many people as possible and gives them a reason to advertise and be part of it and listen. It's an energy. If people are connected, they'll spend money with that station and get involved. 'Hey, I want to advertise and spend my money. It reflects my values.' It's got to be for the right reasons, not just to generate revenue."

Going Forward

Kelli is still marveling over her remarkable new life. When I asked her what a typical day was like, she just laughed.

"I wake up, take a shower, and everything is nice and peaceful," she said. "And the minute I'm out, it's going 100 miles an hour. I have a two-year-old and a nine-year-old. Get them up, go brush your teeth, get them dressed, make their breakfast, make their lunches. Trying to get out the door by 8 o'clock. Being a single parent, I don't have many options. The earliest I can get to the office is 8:30 in the morning. Then it's staff meetings or meetings with customers. I don't try to do a lot over the phone and Internet. I try to get in front of my customers face-to-face. So I'm gone from the office most of the time. Then I'm trying to line up new business, too, so I'm making appointments to see somebody, coming up with new ideas. Even when I'm driving in my car, I'm always thinking about what's a good idea for that customer. Then I'm meeting with the on-air staff. Ian is trying to do more fun morning shows - David Letterman types of things. My days fly by. This week, two of my days were devoted to Brewfest. There's going to be a Brewer's Festival in May. We at the radio station are helping them do all their advertising. Two days this week, I'm going out with the Brewer's Fest committee, trying to get sponsors, line up different bars to do a pub crawl. Then we go back to our regular jobs the rest of the week."

The station is thriving. In the past year, it won the 2009 Corporate Citizen of the Year award from the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce and was voted Brattleboro's "Favorite Radio Station" in a study by Market Surveys of America.

Kelli showed me around the new facilities. Everything is bright, new, clean and top of the line. In the kitchen, photos of the cast of "WKRP in Cincinnati" and another of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" hang over the lunch table. Bill's shiny black-and-chrome drum set sits on a rug at the center of the back wall - it's almost like a monument; Kelli's nine-year-old comes in and practices drumming on Sundays. The middle of the space is occupied by cubicles for sales people and on-air personalities. Dan Taylor, who has been with the station since 1969, does production, traffic and goes on the air. He also serves as the receptionist and has the front desk. Around the edges are the studios - two in front, with large windows looking onto the Retreat Meadows, and two on the side - one featuring a huge Fathead poster of Tom Brady. On the walls hang gold records, signed photographs of recording and sports personalities, and two flat-screened TVs, one tuned to CNN and one to ESPN.

WTSA has access to CNN and ESPN through a barter system - the networks get advertising space for their national commercials in exchange for content.

"With CNN, we take a commercial within the newscast and there's a second commercial we play sometime within the hour," Taylor said. "With Dial Global, our FM satellite programming service for nights and overnights, we get three minutes of commercials each hour. When we're on the satellite live, that covers it. When we're not, we need to play the three commercials during the hour. Another program provider, Westwood One, gives us CNN and also provide us with the NFL package that we run on the AM station. We also get March Madness and Olympic coverage. Each game they broadcast, some of the commercial positions are network and some are local. We also barter with ESPN. We don't pay them per month to run their service. We play their commercials instead. Yankees games, though, you have to pay cash. "

A radio station can't barter for music, however. Licensing fees are an immutable expense for radio.

"You have to pay to play the songs," Kelli said. "It used to be that people would send you their CDs and hope people would hear it on the radio. Not any more. Licenses are pretty much dictated to us. I can't negotiate them."

Kelli's large office is filled with more sports and music memorabilia, Jimmy Fund awards and pictures of her, Bill, Brady and the kids. A big studio poster covers one wall. It has the station's slogan: "We've got you covered," and its logo, a covered bridge - in this case, Brattleboro's Creamery Bridge. There's a pair of musical notes inside the bridge.

"I put the musical note there after Bill passed away," Kelli said. "I wanted him embedded in our logo forever. I was taking a shower one day and wondering where I would put him and I thought of the musical notes B and C. Bill Corbeil. So he's embedded in all our materials, and he'll always be in our logo. Most people think it's just a musical note, but nope, it's actually Bill in there."

Kelli has never been on the air and never wants to be. Instead, she's taken to sales and management like a pro.

"I'm sticking to the business plan," she said. "Stay locally owned. Be involved in the town of Brattleboro. Be a help and a voice for Windham County. Get the word out. Create excitement about things. Bring people in."

She's proud of some of her innovations, like her "Community Reminders," where local businesses "adopt" public service advertisements.

"Say you're having a bake sale to raise funds," Kelli said. "Sometimes these announcements get bumped from the air, because we have too many. So we might have Auto Mall sponsoring a public service announcement so it gets on the air."

Another recent innovation is sending Ian on the road. Every other Friday, he broadcasts as he works a job - like a town garbage collector or a counter guy at Dunkin' Donuts.

"It's called 'Out and About with Ian,'" Kelli said. "One day he'll be a Wal-Mart greeter, or ride on a plow truck. He'll have people honk and wave. Isn't that David Letterman-like? Sometimes it's about being purely entertaining. Everything we do is to try and help this community. We're not trying to make a boatload of money. We're trying to be a good employer, to help everybody and to help businesses, too, by having them advertise with us. We want to help those businesses grow - that's more important than anything else. If they're not growing, then we're not doing our job."

The competition does not faze Kelli.

“We know what we're good at and we focus on it," she said. "We don't worry about what other people are doing. We have listeners from young to old. A lot of that is because we have news. Our music is pretty much middle-of-the road for age, but we have an older group that tunes in for the news and younger ones who tune in for the music. I wouldn't say we have a specific group. We have a range - we have everybody."

The Future

When he designed and laid out the new station, Bill's ideas for future growth were clear and far-reaching. One studio is wired for television - at one time he considered purchasing a small television station in the ski areas. He also planned for the possibility that the local community access television station, BCTV, would get involved with WTSA in televising high school sports - it would provide pictures to go with the radio's play-by-play. Kelli's large office is wired to become two new studios, if and when they become necessary. The businesses next door, which rent space from WTSA, are also wired that way.

"We built this building to expand," Kelli said. "It was just an empty shell. We've talked about buying other radio stations, and a TV station, but now with the economy and my life and two kids, at the moment I'm just sitting tight."

Last year sales stayed steady, but it was a very tough year.

"This year it can only go up," Kelli said. "It can't go down. Last year there was a lot of turmoil, a lot going on. Bill was just barely here. Then he passed away, I was here but I wasn't. Everyone was devastated and sad. So to make it through all that fairly flat was a really big accomplishment. I'm a lot more focused now."

Because the staff is so small, everyone wears lots of hats.

"Part of it is the economy," Kelli said. "And part of it is that we do have a loan. And part of it is getting the right people. As of right now we'll muddle through with what we've got. I have a small staff because I'm trying to be proactive and stay above water. There's no breathing room.

“Soon, hopefully, we'll get another person on the air. My hope for the future is that is I can be a good employer. That everyone makes good pay and has good benefits and I can do great fun things for them. If we had trips we could all go on, or great bonuses and great Christmas parties - you'd never want to leave us because we'd be the best employer ever. I hope the station also does a lot of good for the community at the same time. That's part of our mission."

Kelli has come to believe in the power of radio - she's caught the radio bug.

"It's a great way to get your message out," she said. "It's not a one-time shot. It's over and over, constantly hearing your message. People are coming back to radio. People who might have gone to other medias. I've seen people dropping other media and just sticking to radio because they're seeing results. Us, being locally owned, we have a niche here. We have a local news department. People tune into us. We've been here a long time. We have a killer audience, a great product, great music and great promotions. I think we're in a good spot."

Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, "A Thousand Words or Less," is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.