No more imploring to “Give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.” No more looking ahead to “traffic and weather on the 8’s.”

KQV at 1410 on your AM dial — with a broadcasting history that dates back nearly 100 years, the last 42 of them with a rare all-news format — is preparing to go off the air at year’s end.

Robert W. Dickey Jr., the station manager whose family has owned or co-owned the station since 1982, delivered that news Friday morning to most of his 20 employees gathered in the KQV office at Centre City Tower Downtown.

The station made no immediate on-air announcement and doesn’t plan any until Dec. 31, Mr. Dickey said. He calls the plan a “suspension” of broadcasting, allowing for the possibility some investor or buyer may come along in the interim, though he’s made no active efforts to sell KQV.

“Candidly, I think it’s a sad day for broadcasting,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s fair to say we’ve been trying to provide a community service. The bottom line is I just can’t sustain the business model. We’re an independent, labor-intensive format, and we were happy to take it on as long as we could financially do it.”

Mr. Dickey, 61, whose sister and business partner, Cheryl Scott, died last month, said KQV would continue all of its existing programming until the end of the year. After that, he’s not sure what, if anything, anyone will hear when tuning in the future to 1410.

“If you tune to us on Jan. 1, you probably won’t hear anything,” he said.

That will be a switch for many Pittsburghers, whether they are news junkies or baby boomers who grew up in the 1960s and early ‘70s using KQV as their first source of Top 40 music.

As FM became the primary radio format to hear rock or other music, KQV in 1975 became one of a number of stations nationally switching to an all-news-all-the-time format. Mr. Dickey’s father, the late Robert W. Dickey Sr., was a station manager who got financial backing from billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife to form Calvary Inc. and purchase the station from Taft Broadcasting in 1982.

The senior Mr. Dickey died in 2011, and before Mr. Scaife’s own death, he sold his shares to the Dickey family in 2013. Mr. Dickey Jr. and his sister ran it, with her as president and business manager, and Mr. Dickey said it became clear after her recent passing that it would be difficult to continue.

The news format, due to the salary costs of the necessary number of reporters, editors and announcers involved, is much more costly than music programming on radio, Mr. Dickey said. At the same time, the media industry in general has been suffering from a drop in advertising by major retailers and others. Mr. Dickey said he did not consider a format change at the station because of his family’s longtime focus on delivering news as a mission.

“We perceived the world of reporting on the news as a sacred one,” he said. “What made this worthwhile is not that we were making money, but that we were doing something important.”

In the corporate-dominated broadcast industry, Mr. Dickey said part of KQV’s strength was its independent, family ownership that was immediately responsive to staff, listeners, advertisers and others. 

“There’s got to be commitment to the product, and that attitude kept the station on air for as many years as it has,” he said. “We didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of the product by cutting costs, letting people go. We curbed costs [by other means] as much as we could.”

While he’s uncertain what will happen to the broadcasting license, Mr. Dickey said there’s also value in potential sale of the North Hills property holding its transmission towers.

Regardless of its future, the station will retain its storied history, with roots traced to 1919. In addition to its many modern broadcast journalists, it will be remembered as the former “Groovy QV” that once captured teens’ attention with not just rock, soul and pop music but colorful disc jockeys, including Chuck Brinkman, Jim Quinn and “Jeff Christie,” the pseudonym used in the early ‘70s by future conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh. 

Gary Rotstein: grotstein@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255.

First Published: December 15, 2017, 7:37 p.m.