WUWM (89.7
FM, "Milwaukee's NPR") is the flagship
National Public Radio
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 ...
station in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at th ...
. It is owned and operated by the
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UW–Milwaukee, UWM, or Milwaukee) is a public urban research university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is the largest university in the Milwaukee metropolitan area and a member of the University of Wiscon ...
and licensed to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. A unit of the UW-Milwaukee
College of Letters and Science, the station transmits from the
WITI TV Tower
The WITI TV Tower is a lattice communications tower located in Shorewood, Wisconsin, which transmits the signal of several television and radio stations in the Milwaukee area, including its namesake, Fox owned-and-operated station WITI (chann ...
in
Shorewood, and is based on the seventh floor of
Chase Tower in downtown Milwaukee, moving there from facilities in the nearby
Shops of Grand Avenue in mid-January 2010.
WUWM airs programming from NPR,
Public Radio International,
American Public Media
American Public Media (APM) is an American company that produces and distributes public radio programs in the United States, the second largest company of its type after NPR. Its non-profit parent, American Public Media Group, also owns and o ...
, and also airs
BBC World Service in the overnight hours, with much of the weekend entertainment programming scheduled purposefully to avoid duplication with
Wisconsin Public Radio
Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) is a network of 34 public radio stations in the state of Wisconsin. WPR's network is divided into two distinct analog services, the ''Ideas Network'' and the '' NPR News & Music Network,'' as well as the ''All Classic ...
's
WHAD (90.7). WUWM also airs considerable amounts of local programming and also fills airtime with
adult album alternative
Adult album alternative (also triple-A, AAA, or adult alternative) is a radio format. See pages 9 and 10Mills, Joshua. "A New Radio Music Format: Rock for Prosperous Adults" New York Times, Feb 28 1994, p. 2. ProQuest. Web. Accessed September 4, 2 ...
music, including a weekly program hosted by longtime Milwaukee radio personality (and early WUWM staff member)
Bob Reitman called ''It's Alright Ma, It's Only Music''.
Until December 2013, the station broadcast in
HD Radio. It operated an
automated
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...
AAA station on its second HD channel known as ''The Deuce''. The HD transmitter broke down in December 2013, and WUWM opted not to replace it due to lack of demand. According to the station's general manager at the time, Dave Edwards (who was also the chairman of the NPR board), the HD2 stream attracted very little listenership over the air, and only 200 listeners per week online. With little outside of a small jump in audio quality on the main signal to justify the technology, station officials concluded it was not worth the effort to bring the HD transmitter back online.
History
WUWM signed on the air in September
1964
Events January
* January 1 – The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved.
* January 5 - In the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches since the fifteenth century, Pope Paul VI and Patriarc ...
. Originally a student laboratory, it took on a more professional look with the formation of 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, ...
. It was a charter member of NPR in 1971, and remained independently operated from what was then known as the Wisconsin Educational Radio Network, even after the same year's merger of the Wisconsin State University system and the University of Wisconsin into the combined
University of Wisconsin System.
However, its signal was largely limited to the area around the UW-Milwaukee campus and Milwaukee's East Side. That changed in 1978, when WITI donated space on its tower, giving it a fairly decent signal to Milwaukee itself and much of the metropolitan area. It was originally limited to 1,500 watts due to a glut of stations on the lower end of the FM dial in the
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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-Milwaukee-
Madison Madison may refer to:
People
* Madison (name), a given name and a surname
* James Madison (1751–1836), fourth president of the United States
Place names
* Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital of Wisconsin and the largest city known by this ...
axis. However, a change in FCC regulations gave priority to fully qualified public radio stations. It gradually increased its power to 15,500 watts, giving it a signal comparable to the other major stations in Milwaukee. It became an all-news station in 1988, predating the trend towards all-news programming on major-market NPR stations.
History of WUWM
WUWM website. Retrieved on June 10, 2007.
References
External links
WUWM official website
*
*
*
{{University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
NPR member stations
UWM
Radio stations established in 1964
WUWM
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
Public broadcasting in Wisconsin
UWM