Copper Theft Is Making Small Radio Stations Go Silent
“They destroyed a whole outlet for a few hundred dollars.”
One morning in December of 2021, Argie Tidmore, the owner of two radio stations, WPPA and WAVT, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, woke up to alarms on his phone warning that something was wrong with the stations’ transmission. Tidmore raced to check on the towers, which sit atop a hill in an eight-acre clearing surrounded by woods. There, he immediately saw the damage.
Thieves had yanked radio equipment out of the ground around the towers, bashed doors open, and destroyed the guts of the system. Their target: the three hundred and fifty square feet of copper wire that spiderwebs throughout the towers and into the earth. Tidmore said that even the massive cables buried deep in the ground were stolen. “They must have had to hook it to the bumper of their car or their truck,” Tidmore said.
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.