WBGO (88.3
FM, "Jazz 88") is a
public
In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
radio station
Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...
licensed to
Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area.[4 Times Square
4 Times Square (also known as 151 West 42nd Street or One Five One; formerly the Condé Nast Building) is a 52-story skyscraper at Times Square in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Located at 1472 Broadway, between 42nd and ...]
in
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
. The station primarily plays
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
music. In addition the station airs public affairs programming, locally produced newscasts, traffic reports from Total Traffic during morning and afternoon
rush hour
A rush hour (American English, British English) or peak hour (Australian English) is a part of the day during which traffic congestion on roads and crowding on public transport is at its highest. Normally, this happens twice every weekday: on ...
s, and
NPR
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
-produced newscasts and programming.
History
WBGO's first license was granted on January 26, 1947. Originally owned by the
Newark Board of Education with studios in Central High School, it was established as the first public radio station in New Jersey when in 1979 the broadcast license was transferred to Newark Public Radio in cooperation with the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American publicly funded non-profit corporation, created in 1967 to promote and help support public broadcasting. The corporation's mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, ...
. WBGO then became affiliated with
National Public Radio (NPR)
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
and went to a 24-hour broadcast format in 1980.
While WBGO's base of operations remain in Newark, the station's broadcast antenna and transmission system moved to Midtown Manhattan on December 30, 2011.
WBGO was one of two major FM jazz stations in the New York City metropolitan area, along with
smooth jazz
Smooth jazz is a genre of commercially-oriented crossover jazz and easy listening music that became dominant in the mid 1970s to the early 1990s.
History
Smooth jazz is a commercially oriented, crossover jazz which came to prominence in the 19 ...
station
WQCD until 2008, when that station flipped to a rock format, leaving WBGO as the New York area's only jazz station.
See also
*
List of jazz radio stations in the United States
References
External links
*
{{coord, 40.756, N, 73.986, W, type:landmark_region:US_source:FCC, display=title
Newark jazz
Culture of Newark, New Jersey
Jazz radio stations in the United States
NPR member stations
BGO
Radio stations established in 1948
Companies based in Newark, New Jersey
Mass media in Newark, New Jersey