At 98 Rock, Lopez had gone public with his cancer diagnosis more than a year before his death, and remained on the air as long as his illness would permit. Between December 1987 and May 1995, WJZ-TV, Channel 13, lost the twin pillars of their top-rated newscasts, anchors Jerry Turner, still the most dominant news anchor the Baltimore market has ever known, and his longtime partner, Al Sanders. Both men died after their illnesses had been made public.
Replacing such local media giants is never an easy task, nor one undertaken hastily. When Turner died, WJZ quietly slid his colleague and another familiar face, Denise Koch, into the chair alongside Sanders. When Sanders passed away 7 1/2 years later, after a three-month battle with lung cancer, WJZ waited almost six months, until January of the next year, to name Virginia native Vic Carter as Koch's co-anchor.
Jason Loviglio, director of media and communication studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, says radio and TV stations are wise to take their time replacing audience favorites. Waiting a while, he says, does more than help ensure the right person is found. It helps the station and its audience grieve together and heal together. It also helps develop an intimacy and familiarity between the station and its audience, something valued in any media marker, but perhaps especially in Baltimore.
"It gives the station a chance to talk about how they feel with their audience," he says. "Dealing with someone dying is something that is going to become a helpful part of the programming, and of the healing process. Being mourned on the air by others is going to be a really helpful way ... to figure one's way into the next era."
In addition, he says, radio, with its continuing presence throughout the community, creates an intimacy that TV cannot match, making K-Swift's death even more devastating to her fans. "There's a sense of immediacy and localness," Loviglio says. "That's the last thing that the old electronic media still has, that nobody else can duplicate. And the only place people can mourn her death together is listening to 92Q. They're not going to talk about it in any satisfying way anywhere else."
In the end, he says, audiences need to be assured that the memory of people like K-Swift - like Bob Lopez, Al Sanders and Jerry Turner - is being revered. Audiences don't want to dwell on their deaths, he says. But they don't want to see their memories neglected, either. In a sense, its audience will help 92Q decide when the time is right to move on.
"You don't replace a K-Swift," Loviglio says, "but if the listeners feel like [replacing K-Swift] is a problem that is being ... dealt with by the radio station, they are going to be much more open to a solution.
"There's going to have to be a period of appreciation for what she did," Loviglio says, "and then, people will start to think, 'Now, it's time for somebody else.'"
chris.kaltenbach@baltsun.com
