WWJ (AM)

WWJ

City of license	Detroit, Michigan
Broadcast area	Metro Detroit [1] (Daytime) [2] (Nighttime)
Branding	NewsRadio 950, WWJ
Slogan	"All News All the Time" "Live, Local, and Committed to Detroit"
Frequency	950 kHz (also on HD Radio) 97.1-2 FM WXYT-FM HD2
First air date	August 20, 1920
Format	News
Power	50,000 watts
Class	B
Facility ID	9621
Transmitter coordinates	42°01′9″N 83°14′23″W
Callsign meaning	W "W"illiam "J". Scripps (former owner of The Detroit News)
Former callsigns	WBL (1921-1922) 8MK (1920-1921)
Affiliations	CBS Radio Network Detroit Pistons (co-flagship) Michigan Wolverines football (flagship)
Owner	CBS Radio
Sister stations	WDZH, WOMC, WXYT, WXYT-FM, WYCD part of CBS Corp. cluster w/ TV stations WWJ-TV & WKBD-TV
Webcast	Listen Live
Website	Detroit.CBSLocal.com

WWJ (950 AM, "Newsradio 950") is Detroit, Michigan's only 24-hour all-news radio station. Broadcasting at 950 kHz, the station is owned and operated by CBS Corporation subsidiary CBS Radio. The station first went on the air on August 20, 1920 with the call sign 8MK. It is believed to be the first station to broadcast news reports regularly as well as the first regularly scheduled religious broadcast and play-by-play sports broadcast.

WWJ provides "Traffic and Weather on the 8s" which features 24/7 coverage by Detroit Traffic Reporters and AccuWeather forecasts. Although WWJ is the only commercial all news radio station in Michigan, co-owned WWJ-TV is the only CBS Owned-and-operated station without an evening or late night local news presence.

WWJ can be heard in every part of the state of Michigan during the nighttime hours, and much of southern Lower Michigan during the day. WWJ's signal can even be heard in the Upper Peninsula and Mackinac area at night, while often unlistenable just 40 minutes west of Detroit in the Ann Arbor area due to interference from co-channel WNTD in Chicago. WWJ's nighttime signal to the east is also impeded by WPEN in Philadelphia.

In recent years, WWJ has started to shy away from their moniker "All news, all the time", due to occasional broadcasts of sporting events. However, they remain a news radio network as a whole, using the new moniker of "Live, Local, and committed to Detroit". Along with sister station WXYT-FM, WWJ is the flagship station of the Detroit Pistons. WWJ is also the flagship station of Michigan Wolverines football.

Station timeline

On August 20, 1920, The Detroit News started the station with the call sign 8MK, assigned to it by the United States Department of Commerce Bureau of Navigation, the government bureau responsible for radio regulation at the time.

8MK was initially licensed to Michael DeLisle Lyons, a teenager, and radio pioneer. He assembled the station in the Detroit News Building but the Scripps family asked him to register the station in his name, because they were worried this new technology might only be a fad, so they wanted to keep some distance.

Later that year, Michael and his brother Frank, also assembled the first radio in a police car in Toledo, Ohio (with Ed Clark who started WJR 760 AM in Detroit). They captured a prowler using the radio, and the story captured headlines across the country. RCA got the contract to install radios in police cars across the country.

The Scripps family were also worried radio might replace newspapers if radio caught on, so they financially supported Michael. In fact, most early radio stations were built, for the same reason, by families who owned newspapers . . . out of fear that radio would put them out of business (After all, why buy a paper if you could turn a knob and hear the news?) Michael DeLisle Lyons descended from Francois Bienvenu DeLisle, who served as Cadillac's lieutenant on the founding voyage of Detroit. Francois was also Detroit's first tavernkeeper.

The 8 in the call sign means the station is located in the 8th Radio Inspection District, while the M in the call sign means the station operated under an amateur license. It is not clear why the Detroit News applied for an amateur license instead of an experimental license. As an amateur station, it broadcast at 200 meters (the equivalent of 1500 kHz).

On October 13, 1921 the station was granted a limited commercial license and was assigned the call letters WBL. With the new license, the station began broadcasting at 360 meters (833 kHz), with weather reports and other government reports broadcast at 485 meters (619 kHz).

On March 3, 1922, for reasons that are not known, the call letters, WWJ, were assigned to the station. Some believe the new call letters are an abbreviation for stockholders William and John Scripps, but on page 82 of a book published by the Detroit News in 1922, WWJ-The Detroit News, the station writers write "WWJ is not the initials of any name. It is a symbol. It was issued to the Detroit News by the government in connection with the licensing of this broadcasting plant."

In 1923, the Commerce Department realized that as more and more stations were applying for commercial licenses, it was not practical to have every station broadcast on the same two wavelengths. It was decided to set aside 81 frequencies, in 10 kHz steps, from 550 kHz to 1350 kHz, and each station would be assigned one frequency, no longer having to broadcast weather and government reports on a different frequency than entertainment. As a result, WWJ was moved to 517 meters (580 kHz). It was later re-assigned, during a re-alignment of stations by the new Federal Radio Commission in 1927-28, to fulltime operation on 920 kHz, and allowed to increase its power in stages, reaching 5,000 watts by the late 1930s.

On March 29, 1941 as part of the NARBA frequency reassignment, WWJ moved to 950 AM where it remains to this day. The programming throughout this time was focused on variety. That same year (1941), WWJ initiated Michigan's first FM broadcasts via W8XWJ; this station later became known as W45D, WENA, WWJ-FM, WJOI, WYST, and WKRK, and is now WXYT-FM. During the 1940s it transmitted most of the NBC "Red" network schedule, as well as locally produced news, entertainment and music programming. After World War II, especially as television grew in household reach and popularity, music and regularly scheduled local news would make up a larger portion of its format as television eroded support for variety programming on radio and the Golden Age of Radio gradually ended.

With the advent of FM radio and stereo broadcasting, WWJ phased out its daytime Middle of the Road music programming in May 1971 and became a strictly news and talk station during daytime hours (although for the first several years of the all-news format, the station simulcast the beautiful music format of WWJ-FM 97.1 overnights). The all-news format has served WWJ well over the past three and a half decades, enabling it to rank consistently among the Detroit area's most popular stations with adult listeners, occasionally finishing in first place in recent surveys of overall listenership.

In 1987, Federal Broadcasting Corporation, run by David Herriman, purchased WWJ and WJOI (now WXYT-FM) from the new owner of The Detroit News, Gannett, now the owner of The Detroit Free Press, which was required to sell the stations immediately by the Federal Communications Commission because of crossownership rules in effect at that time. On March 9, 1989, CBS bought the station, with its ownership being transferred to Infinity Broadcasting after CBS's 1996 acquisition of that group...although further corporate reorganization has put the station directly under the CBS corporate brand name once again in recent years.

When CBS acquired WWJ-TV in 1995 and needed a site for a new transmission tower for improving the UHF television station's coverage, the WWJ radio transmitter site in Oak Park was partially dismantled (the taller north tower was razed) to make room for the television tower. The AM transmitter facility was replaced in late 1998 by a new six-tower array in Monroe County, near Newport. The new site allowed WWJ to upgrade to 50,000 watts, greatly improving their nighttime signal in the Downriver communities, where WWJ had a weak signal, as they had been using a directional antenna to protect established stations in Denver, Houston and Philadelphia. The move was not without its disadvantages, as the sheer distance of the new site from commercially important Oakland County meant the new signal, though adequate for home and outdoor listening, had trouble inside office buildings. The northeastern reaches of the Metropolitan area only receive a fair signal, for the protection of a station in Barrie, despite the fact that the station there shut down its AM transmitter years earlier.

In March, 2005, WWJ began offering a 24-hour live webcast. In August 2005, the station began offering podcasts of newsmakers, interviews, and some of the station's feature programming. The station also recently began broadcasting an HD, or high-definition, signal, which gives an AM broadcast FM-like quality.

Staff

Anchors

• Joe Donovan
• Roberta Jasina
• Greg Bowman
• Jayne Bower
• Bill Stevens
• Paul Snider
• Pat Vitale
• Marie Osborne
• Mike Campbell
• Rob Mason
• Rob Sanford
• Michael Collins
• Jeff DeFran

Studio Traffic Reporters

• John Bailey
• Alisa Zee
• Lance Howard
• Mike Lindeman
• Jo-Jo Shutty-MacGregor
• Marty Bufalini
• Terry T. Brown
• Liz Decker
• Jim Daniels
• Chuck Roberts

Chopper 950 Reporters

• Bill Szumanski
• Lance Howard

Weather

• Dr. Joe Sobel
• Bob Larson
• Jim Kosek
• Heather Zehr
• Carl Babinski
• Eric Wilhelm
• Dave Bowers
• Bernie Rayno
• Dean DeVore
• Kerry Schwindenhemmer

Sports

• Tony Ortiz
• Rob Pascoe
• Jeff Lesson
• Pete Spivak
• Ryan Wooley
• Jeff Riger

Specialty Reporter

• Ed Coury
• Matt Roush
• Murray Feldman
• John McElroy
• Tim Skubick
• Vickie Thomas
• Ron Dewey
• Florence Walton
• Jeff Gilbert
• Beth Fisher
• Pat Sweeting
• Jon Hewett

Notable alumni

• Mark Champion
• Hugh Downs
• Marvin "Sonny" Eliot
• Bill Kennedy (actor)
• Byron MacGregor
• Paul Keels

Frequency & power changes

The following details the changes in frequency and power experienced by WWJ over the years. The data is from the Radio Service Bulletins that were issued periodically by the Commerce Department (the dates are the dates the particular bulletin was issued, not the date of the change):

• February 1, 1924, 517 meters (580 kHz) at 500 Watts.
• February 2, 1925, 352.7 meters (850 kHz) at 500 Watts.
• January 30, 1926, 352.7 meters (850 kHz) at 1,000 Watts.
• May 31, 1927, 374.8 meters (800 kHz) at 1,000 Watts.
• January 31, 1928, 352.7 meters (850 kHz) at 1,000 Watts.
• February 28, 1929 326 meters (920 kHz) at 1,000 Watts.

The station's power increased to 5,000 watts in 1937, and its frequency was permanently set at 950 kHz on March 29, 1941.

It reached its current 50,000 watts in 2000.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Media in Detroit

Sources

• Michiguide.com - WWJ History

External links

• WWJ Newsradio 950 on CBSDetroit.com
• Query the FCC's AM station database for WWJ
• Radio-Locator Information on WWJ
• Query Arbitron's AM station database for WWJ