Pittsburgh Radio: New Owners Hope To Keep KQV All-News

The husband-and-wife team who just bought Pittsburgh's oldest news radio station aims to get KQV 1410 back on the airwaves this fall.

Longtime KQV listeners likely will be pleased with their vision: Robert and Ashley Stevens of Broadcast Communications Inc. say their top priority is to reboot an all-news station modeled after KQV's previous format.

“We would like to be able to do the news,” Robert Stevens told the Tribune-Review on Monday. “I would like to be able to do it as a news station very similar to the way it was.

“We just need to make sure we can do it in a way that would be financially feasible.”

The pending purchase of KQV-AM 1410 and its assets for $55,000 — which hinges on approval by federal regulators — would expand the duo's ownership portfolio to a dozen AM and FM commercial and non-commercial radio stations in Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland.

The Stevens “quite possibly” would be interested in rehiring one or more of the 20 employees who lost their jobs when KQV went dark Jan. 1, Robert Stevens said.

He noted that the new KQV, however, will have to be leaner and rely on less staffing in hopes of getting on a fiscally solvent path so it can survive another 100 years.

KQV — whose roots date to 1919 — was independently owned since 1982, when Dickey's father, Robert W. Dickey Sr., and the late Dick Scaife, former Tribune-Review publisher, formed Calvary Inc. to buy it from Taft Broadcasting.

KQV had been grappling with years of declining advertising revenue amid increased labor costs.

With the acquisition of KQV, Robert Stevens will own four AM and three FM stations within a market of 45 stations, which complies with federal broadcasting ownership rules, the purchase agreement states.