Growing up in Baltimore, Jeff Beauchamp cherished WBAL radio. On chilly mornings, he would huddle around the radio listening intently, not for news, not for music, but solely for two words magical for a boy: snow day.
Beauchamp, who would one day lead the city's top news-talk station, wasn't born a journalism junkie. He never, as he puts it, wanted to change the world, but he realized very early on the power of local radio.
Beauchamp, who worked at WBAL for 34 years, transforming it from a place to hear soft music into the No. 1 station in Baltimore for hard news and talk, was asked to leave his job last week, another victim of the economy and the struggling media industry.
"It's been tough, we've had to try to do more with less, and we've had to make hard business decisions," the 58-year-old Beauchamp said Friday in his TV Hill office, adding dryly, "I can attest to that, now that I'm one of them."
Beauchamp started at the station as a news anchor and reporter when he was 25. He'd graduated just a few years earlier with a business degree from Towson. He might have gone with a communications major, but his dad felt he needed a backup because radio seemed so volatile.
Within four years, Beauchamp was the 50,000-watt station's news director. Then, he became program director. His first charge: Turn the wishy-washy station that flitted from adult contemporary music to farmland features into a news-talk station.
"It had to happen," he says of the change. FM stations were becoming the place people turned to for music. Who wanted to hear songs on a static-filled AM station when FM was so much smoother and clearer?
He had to remake WBAL, hiring reporters, editors and talk-show hosts - and, in many cases, teaching them the nature of the business from scratch.
Beauchamp, many say, had a keen eye for talent - even if a lot of it was raw.
There were people like Ron Smith and Dave Durian, former TV folks who thought their news careers were over. Or people like Clarence M. Mitchell IV, or "C4" as he's known on air, who hadn't hosted a show before.
"He molded and mentored them," says Mark Miller, WBAL's news director and a 30-year veteran of the station.
Though he worked to keep the news shows fair and opinion-free, as a conservative himself, Beauchamp enjoyed cultivating the station's editorial line through the talk programs.
