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Tonight! 8 PM his broadcasting aspirations. After bouncing around a bit, Agre graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in what might now be called communications, but was then called speech. He even found time for acting, playing Willy Loman in a summer-stock production of of a and Potso in for Tonight, a Saturday, although he covered the Wibaux town fair and parade this morning, Agre lugs around his video camera hoping to catch a few highlights before heading home. A white baseball cap has replaced the cowboy hat to better keep the gnats out of his eyes, he says. many people sign on the radio at 6 a.m.

and throw a video camera on their back at 9 at says Sturlaugson. Agre tapes the in-the-field interviews, his disembodied voice coming from behind the camera. Occasionally, possible to hear the invisible Agre wheezing many he says) while a friendly football coach is on camera, handing out predictions for the upcoming season. This year, Agre celebrates a 50-year career that began at age 16, when he started out cleaning tapes for KFYR-AM in Bismark, N.D. He still largely sees himself as a disc jockey, pulling Glendive AM 1400 morning shift, cementing his place as the face and voice of news in Eastern Montana.

has quite a flare for that dramatic. When he first started, I think he thought he was answer to Walter says resident Pat Moline, 71, sitting in the stands above the game. It might be a more fitting compliment and comparison if Cronkite had done his own editing, voice-overs, weather and sports. Besides, tastes lean to another broadcast legend. favorite is Paul Harvey.

His program is so well-balanced that, to me, just Agre says. a role model of sorts. always admired him, talked to him on the phone a couple times. He walks that fine line between news and own morning broadcast mixes a down-home sense of humor and such community necessities as reading school menus and weather reports. He keeps a list of some 300 birth dates and sings to them personally.

In one segment, Agre reads excerpts of old community newspapers. He ends each show with an Ole and Lena joke followed by a polka. If he he gets complaints. Glendive residents are not quiet with their opinions. walk up and down town, and two old ranchers will stop you.

let you know what you did Agre says. have to worry about TV or radio critics here, we got 50,000 of For some, broadcasts are the soundtracks to their mornings. a good historian. A lot of the younger kids like him because he play says Jo Ryan, 62, an employee of Reynolds Warehouse. throw my routine off if I listen to him.

If my hair dry by the time he reads the old papers, then This is radio the way radio should be done, Agre says. station like this is probably an endangered species. What I do is probably endangered as he says. must be some valid reason why they listen to me. At least here, we can Too many programs, he says, are pulled down off nickname for broadcast satellites.

can it be stopped? I know if you can. I hate to see that radio stations are losing their Agre says. can flip through stations from here to Billings and hear the same song on five different stations, 40 times, pulled down off the same A gre prefers to get his music, and his news, locally. Although KXGN-TV is a CBS affiliate, it carries some NBC programming at night, including and West When Fox carried the National Football League contract, KXGN broadcast Fox. have been writing the obits of these little tiny stations for a long says Al Tompkins, who teaches broadcasting at the Poynter Institute.

is always a hunger for local news, and as long as they can provide a niche, they are always going to have a market. When it gets to the point where they no longer provide a unique service and their content becomes generic, they lose But with operating costs escalating, Tompkins says, much more difficult for smaller stations to run profitable business models. programming goes through the Tompkins says. they just often survive, because they afford the programs, even the bad ones, between the Of 210 television markets nationwide, Glendive ranks dead last: number 210 with 4,980 TV households, according to Nielsen Media Research. Currently, there are 108.4 million TV homes in the nation.

numbers are based on an estimated total number of television households in the U.S., then the percentage per area, or market. The next largest market, in North Platte, with 15,670 TV households, is more than triple size. signal reaches almost the entire eastern third of Montana, the fourth- largest state after California. Station manager Sturlaugson estimates KXGN-TV can reach 63,000 people, including two communities that recently put up translator towers to boost signal. Stephen Marks, a Maryland businessman, owns KXGN, along with a handful of smaller stations, a practice not uncommon in low-population markets, according to the trade magazine Television Week.

The station carries state-centric news from Billings at 10:30 p.m. before program, so he can keep his news focused on the surrounding 15 counties, including one in North Dakota. Wearing a broad, Wilford Brimley-style mustache that hides his upper lip, the barrel- chested Agre delivers the news in a professional, no-nonsense manner. Occasionally a brief editorial comment, an to chimed in after he agrees with a particular quote, but otherwise he remains a smiling, neutral anchor. Reporting the news in an area where everyone knows your face, your car and your habits requires a certain finesse.

report what you can, and I chase people down. I chase fire engines, or car Agre says. someone is laying on the ground dying, I stick a microphone in their face and ask, do you feel? That to me is asinine. I like that. Even on national news, wrong.

just too much of that thing going However, Agre need to chase ambulances: With no competition, the news often comes to him. A few weeks ago, a homicide rocked Sidney, the next largest town to the north, where Agre was reporting on the new barley elevators installed by Anheuser-Busch. Within minutes, three people approached him with details. the time I left town three hours later, I knew more than I could have gotten from the Agre says. course, there again, you use it until released.

The kids, you report on them. Everybody knows it was 12-year-old Johnny who broke out the school windows, but you say So Agre walks the line between the publicly known and the newsworthy, and plenty of walking to be done. In a geographical area where communities are a series of single- block downtowns connected by a string of thin, constantly under-construction roads, Glendive is a refreshingly connected, media-savvy population. of us in Glendive get a good kick out of him. run into him at the Beer says resident Curt Milne, 70.

boy, lose that personal touch, and that means a lot to a small community. And pride kind of proud to have the smallest TV station, upgrade it and keep it GLENDIVE: 1man does it all at tiny KXGN CONTINUEDFROMPAGE1 Tribune photo by Robert K. Elder way I feel about radio broadcasting and TV talking to says Ed Agre, on the set of KXGN. personal. dealing with those people, sitting in their living station like this is probably an endangered species.

What I do is probably endangered as well. There must be some valid reason why they listen to me. At least here, we can Ed Agre.