A legendary Pittsburgh radio newscaster will be stepping into the booth for the last time next month.
Rose Ryan-Douglas, a KDKA Radio afternoon news anchor with 45 years of experience, announced her retirement earlier this week. Her last day on the air will be Feb. 26, a date she chose because it’s after Inauguration Day and will allow her to hit the 45-year mark from her February 1976 start in the industry.
“When you say 45 years, it sounds like a lifetime, which it is,” Ms. Ryan-Douglas told the Post-Gazette. “It went by really quickly. It was fun.”
Ms. Ryan-Douglas started as a part-timer at KDKA in 2002, doing everything from traffic to writing to anchoring before moving into a full-time role on the afternoon shift in December 2003.
“Rose is the ultimate news professional,” Michael Spacciapolli, senior vice president and market manager for Entercom Pittsburgh (which owns KDKA), said in an emailed statement. “We have been so fortunate to have her in our newsroom for so many years delivering the news that matters to the city. I know she will be greatly missed by our listeners.
“Ultimately, we are grateful for all of her work over the years to help make KDKA the news source [in] Pittsburgh.”
Ms. Ryan-Douglas is a New Kensington native and a graduate of Valley High School in New Kensington and Clarion State College (now Clarion University). She began her radio career in the 1970s as a disc jockey and newscaster at WKPA/WYDD in New Kensington before moving over to WFFM in Braddock.
After a year at WFFM, she spent another year at 96KX before landing a job at 3WS, where she stayed for almost 20 years, mostly as a morning news anchor. Ms. Ryan-Douglas began at KDKA Radio in 2002, becoming an afternoon news anchor a year later.
“Pittsburgh listeners are great,” she said. “With social media and radio.com, listeners aren’t just in Pittsburgh anymore. So I appreciate each and every one.”
Ms. Ryan-Douglas has been a witness to the broadcasting field’s evolution throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium.
“The mechanics have changed tremendously from when I started,” she said. “We had those noisy teletype machines that had a closet of their own. To cut soundbites, we had a reel of tape and would physically splice it. Now, it is so much easier to put the news together.”
Other aspects of radio news have become more difficult. Ms. Ryan-Douglas said social media has made sourcing stories more of a challenge. She would always wait for outlets she trusted, like CBS and the Associated Press, to report a story before she jumped on it.
“I would rather be correct than have something that I’d have to go back and change.”
That ethos of accuracy over speed when reporting the news served her and her colleagues well on Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman killed 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. The entire station banded together to provide wall-to-wall coverage.
“It was a team effort. No one person could’ve sat there and done it,” Ms. Ryan-Douglas said. “The hosts had various guests on during the day. It was a busy newsroom and you have to set your emotions aside because you just want to get the facts and information across as clearly as you can.
“It was one of those days that you couldn’t really feel it until your shift was over. It was a very emotional day.”
On a lighter note, her work also led her to her husband. In 1982, she married sportscaster Tab Douglas and the couple have two children, a son and daughter. Ms. Ryan-Douglas now has four grandchildren, and she wants to “make sure they take a lot of my time” upon her retirement.
She has no immediate plans after Feb. 26, she said. She is an avid gardener and also enjoys sewing. She said she “may start brushing off [my] piano skills” or even take classes at a community college, maybe to learn a new language.
“When you have that routine of going to work every day, I’m sure the first month will be very different,” Ms. Ryan-Douglas said. “Very freeing, but I know I will miss it. Hopefully I get over that quickly.”
Joshua Axelrod: jaxelrod@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jaxel222.
First Published: January 15, 2021, 5:30 p.m.
