The possibility that the Bennington area’s radio station, WBTN-AM 1370, could become a historical footnote was driven home last week with word that longtime morning host Rich Ryder has been laid off in a recession-driven cost-cutting move.

The decision to drop the popular morning voice of WBTN illustrates the local station’s financial condition. If anyone needed further evidence, Bennington Town Manager Stuart Hurd, who serves as vice president of the non-profit station’s board of directors, described the situation as "tenuous."

Shires Media Partnership, which formed to purchase the station when it was put up for sale more than a year ago by its previous owner, Southern Vermont College, is not about to shut WBTN down, Mr. Hurd said, but he said there must be an increase in revenue if the station is to survive.

It is worth noting that the AM station was being subsidized during the few years it was owned by the college, which used it as part of its communications program. The cost of that annual subsidy had become too great for the trustees to justify, college officials said, in placing the station and its license on the market.

There is no doubt the recession has had a severe impact on all forms of media, so it is difficult to determine whether the non-profit format will succeed where the old commercial radio format apparently had begun to fail in this area. Not many locally owned commercial stations remain today, as is the case

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in nearby Berkshire County, Mass., and across the nation. Most have been bought out by large national corporations, which often offer little if any local programming.

This area still has a chance to avoid that trend and preserve locally produced programming. There are two ways for that to happen, neither of which is an easy road. One is for volunteers to step up and produce the programming at a lower cost, or for donors both large and small to come to the aid of the station annually during fund drives.

Most likely both of those scenarios will have to merge if WBTN is to survive. So, if anyone has ideas and/or time to volunteer, now is the time to step up. And, perhaps more critically, if you can donate to the station, now is definitely the time if this local media voice is to be preserved.

It also would not hurt if WBTN had someone who might even remotely assume the role of Alan Chartock, president of WAMC Northeast Public Radio in New York, whose fund-raising genius is undisputed and by now legendary. Does Bennington have someone who could fill that role? If so, tune us in now.