Ideastream (marketed as Ideastream Public Media) is the main

public broadcaster Public broadcasting involves radio, television and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service. Public broadcasters receive funding from diverse sources including license fees, individual contributions, public financing ...

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland ( ), officially the City of Cleveland, is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located in the northeastern part of the state, it is situated along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across the U.S. ...

, United States, serving both

Greater Cleveland The Cleveland metropolitan area, or Greater Cleveland as it is more commonly known, is the metropolitan area surrounding the city of Cleveland in Northeast Ohio, United States. According to the 2020 United States Census results, the five-county ...

and much of

Northeast Ohio The region Northeast Ohio, in the US state of Ohio, in its most expansive usage contains six metropolitan areas ( Cleveland–Elyria, Akron, Canton–Massillon, Youngstown–Warren, Mansfield, and Weirton–Steubenville) along with eight m ...

. Its headquarters, newsroom, and radio and television studios are located at the Idea Center in

Playhouse Square Playhouse Square is a theater district in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, United States. It is the largest performing arts center in the US outside of New York City (only Lincoln Center is larger). Constructed in a span of 19 months in the early 1920s, ...

Downtown Cleveland Downtown Cleveland is the central business district of Cleveland, Ohio. The economic and symbolic center of the city and the Cleveland-Akron-Canton, OH Combined Statistical Area, it is Cleveland's oldest district, with its Public Square laid out b ...

. It operates

WKSU WKSU (89.7 FM) is a non-commercial educational radio station licensed to serve Kent, Ohio, featuring a public radio format. Owned by Kent State University and operated by Ideastream Public Media, WKSU's primary signal encompasses the Akro ...

(), the region's main radio news service aligned with

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 owns

classical music Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...

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 ...

outlet

WCLV WCLV (90.3 FM) is a non-commercial educational radio station licensed to Cleveland, Ohio, carrying a combined fine art/classical music and jazz format. Owned by Ideastream Public Media, the station serves both Greater Cleveland and Northeas ...

() and Cleveland PBS member station

WVIZ WVIZ (channel 25) is a PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the mo ...

(channel 25). Ideastream was formed in July 2001 through a

merger of equals Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are business transactions in which the ownership of companies, other business organizations, or their operating units are transferred to or consolidated with another company or business organization. As an aspect ...

between WVIZ and then-NPR member WCPN (since supplanted by WCLV), which up to that point operated separately as Educational Television Association of Metropolitan Cleveland and Cleveland Public Radio, respectively. Talks of a cooperative agreement between the two entities began in 1999, but was first proposed in 1993, when co-founder Jerrold Wareham was named as WVIZ's general manager. WCLV, then operating as a Lorain-licensed station

at AT or at may refer to: Geography Austria * Austria (ISO 2-letter country code) * .at, Internet country code top-level domain United States * Atchison County, Kansas (county code) * The Appalachian Trail (A.T.), a 2,180+ mile long mountaino ...

, was donated to the group in 2011. Since 2021, Ideastream has operated WKSU and its

repeater In telecommunications, a repeater is an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it. Repeaters are used to extend transmissions so that the signal can cover longer distances or be received on the other side of an obstruction. Some ...

network on behalf of owner

Kent State University Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio. The university also includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio and additional facilities in the region and internationally. Regional campuses are located in As ...

, and has been Cleveland and

Akron Akron () is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the western edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, about south of downtown Cleveland. As of the 2020 Census, the city prop ...

's sole NPR station of record since March 28, 2022. Kevin E. Martin has been the organization's president/

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

since January 9, 2017, succeeding Jerrold Wareham. Jenny Northern, a staffer with WCLV since 2001, was elevated to station manager in 2014 and became general manager for all stations in 2020. All stations in the group jointly rebranded as "Ideastream Public Media" on June 15, 2021, to celebrate the entity's 20th anniversary.

Radio

WKSU

WKSU was founded by

in 1950; Ideastream has operated the station since October 1, 2021, via a public service operating agreement with the university. Originally broadcasting solely to the campus population as a

non-commercial educational station A non-commercial educational station (NCE station) is a radio station or television station that does not accept on-air advertisements (TV ads or radio ads), as defined in the United States by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and was or ...

, WKSU has been an NPR news and information affiliate since 1973, and is the originating radio station for the

City Club of Cleveland The City Club of Cleveland is a non-partisan debate forum in Cleveland, Ohio. Founded in 1912, the club's home is the City Club Building, formerly the Citizens Building, on Euclid Avenue in Downtown Cleveland. Known as "America's Citadel of Free ...

's ''Friday Forum''. Licensed to

Kent, Ohio Kent is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the largest city in Portage County. It is located along the Cuyahoga River in Northeast Ohio on the western edge of the county. The population was 28,215 at the 2020 Census. The city is counted as pa ...

, WKSU's signal is rebroadcast full-time over a network of five full-power

s and two low-power

translators Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transla ...

. With a combined 22-county coverage area and potential audience of 3.6 million people, WKSU and its repeater network boast the largest collective footprint for an FM radio station in Ohio. Since 2022, it has also served

Lorain County Lorain County is a County (United States), county in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Ohio. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, the population was 312,964. Its county seat is Elyria, Ohio, Elyria. The county was physicall ...

and the western portion of Greater Cleveland via Lorain-licensed

WCPN WCPN (104.9 FM) is a non-commercial educational radio station licensed to Lorain, Ohio, featuring a public radio format as a repeater of Kent–licensed WKSU. Owned by Ideastream Public Media, the station serves the western portion of ...

(). The station and its full-power repeater network carry a roster of four

HD Radio HD Radio (HDR) is a trademark for an in-band on-channel (IBOC) digital radio broadcast technology. It generally simulcasts an existing analog radio station in digital format with less noise and with additional text information. HD Radio is used ...

subchannel In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compressi ...

s: a simulcast of WKSU's

analog transmission Analog transmission is a transmission method of conveying information using a continuous signal which varies in amplitude, phase, or some other property in proportion to that information. It could be the transfer of an analog signal, using an ana ...

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

via '' FolkAlley.com'', a simulcast of WCLV and an alternate lineup of news and talk programs.

WCLV

The region's only full-time

and

outlet, WCLV was founded on November 1, 1962, as a commercial radio station

. A complex asset and intellectual property swap on July 3, 2001, re-established WCLV on as part of a long-term plan initiated by founding owners Robert Conrad and Rich Marschner to preserve the format from being subsumed by ownership consolidation in the radio industry. With station operations moved to the Idea Center in 2010, WCLV was donated to Ideastream in 2011 and converted to non-commercial status in 2013. WCLV has been the originating station for

Cleveland Orchestra The Cleveland Orchestra, based in Cleveland, is one of the five American orchestras informally referred to as the " Big Five". Founded in 1918 by the pianist and impresario Adella Prentiss Hughes, the orchestra plays most of its concerts at Sev ...

radio broadcasts since 1965 and for '' Weekend Radio'' since 1982. WCLV's current frequency was previously home to WCPN, one of Ideastream's two founding partners and, from 1984 to 2022, competed with WKSU as the region's other NPR member. It is also the successor station to WBOE, which the

Cleveland Board of Education Cleveland Metropolitan School District, formerly the Cleveland Municipal School District, is a public school district in the U.S. state of Ohio that serves almost all of the city of Cleveland. The district covers 79 square miles. The Clevelan ...

operated from 1938 to 1978, one of the first formally licensed non-commercial educational radio stations on the FM dial and one of the first FM stations in Ohio.

Television

Ideastream's television service, WVIZ, was founded on February 7, 1965, as the 100th public television station in the United States. WVIZ at launch boasted the first female

general manager A general manager (GM) is an executive who has overall responsibility for managing both the revenue and cost elements of a company's income statement, known as profit & loss (P&L) responsibility. A general manager usually oversees most or all of ...

of a major-market television station in Betty Cope, who played an active role in the station's formation and original focus towards

educational television Educational television or learning television is the use of television programs in the field of distance education. It may be in the form of individual television programs or dedicated specialty channels that is often associated with cable telev ...

programming for school districts and telecourses for area colleges; WVIZ gradually adopted the conventional

PBS Kids PBS Kids is the brand for most of the children's programming aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Some public television children's programs are not produced by PBS member stations or transmitted by PBS. Instead, ...

and PBS lineups starting in the early 1990s. Through WVIZ, Ideastream jointly operates and manages

The Ohio Channel The Ohio Channel is a service of Ohio's public broadcasting stations that operates out of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. The Ohio Channel, on behalf of its parent company Ohio Government Telecommunications, produces gavel-to-gavel, unedit ...

(which is carried on a WVIZ subchannel) and the Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau.

References

External links