WBAL (AM)

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WBAL
WBAL (AM) logo.png
City of license Baltimore, Maryland
Broadcast area Baltimore, Maryland
Branding 1090 AM WBAL/WBAL News Radio 1090
Slogan Maryland's News, Talk, Sports Station
The Only Station that Matters
Frequency 1090 (kHz)
Repeaters WIYY-HD2 (97.9-2 MHz)
First air date 1925
Format News radio/Talk/Sports
Power 50,000 watts
Class A (clear channel)
Facility ID 65679
Transmitter coordinates Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Callsign meaning W BALtimore
Affiliations ABC News Radio
Baltimore Ravens
Yahoo! Sports Radio
Owner Hearst Corporation
Sister stations WBAL-TV, WIYY
Webcast Listen Live
Website wbal.com

WBAL (1090 kHz AM) is a News radio/Talk/Sports radio station located in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Owned by the Hearst Corporation, WBAL broadcasts from a three-tower transmitting facility in Randallstown, Maryland. The station shares its studios and offices with sister stations WBAL-TV (channel 11) and WIYY (97.9 FM, formerly WBAL-FM) on Television Hill in Baltimore's Woodberry neighborhood.

As a 50,000-watt Class A clear-channel station, WBAL is the most powerful station in Maryland. Its directional nighttime signal covers most of the eastern half of North America, and reaches as far as Nova Scotia and Bermuda. Its daytime signal easily covers most of the Washington metropolitan area, most of the Eastern Shore, and large portions of Delaware and Pennsylvania. WBAL employs the largest number of news staff of any radio station in the state. WBAL and WIYY are the only two radio stations still owned by Hearst.

History

The WBAL Building, on Television Hill in Baltimore, has housed WBAL Radio since 1962.

WBAL began broadcasting after being dedicated on November 2, 1925, as a subsidiary of the Consolidated Gas Electric Light and Power Company, a predecessor of Constellation Energy.[1] WBAL's initial broadcasting studio was located at the utility's offices on Lexington Street, and it operated as part of the Blue Network of the National Broadcasting Company.[1] On January 12, 1935, with radio becoming more commercialized, there was little justification for public service company ownership of a radio station, and WBAL was sold to the Hearst-controlled American Radio News Corporation, who operated it alongside the Baltimore News-Post and Baltimore American (later merged as the Baltimore News-American).[1]

In the 1930s, WBAL became the flagship station for the international broadcast of radio evangelist G. E. Lowman, which originated in Baltimore until 1959.[2] During the 1960s, WBAL had a full service free-flowing Middle Of The Road music format heavily emphasising personality. The station played a mix of soft rock and roll and non rock songs/standards.

Former logo of the radio station

By the early 1970s, the station had a full-service adult contemporary music format with the exception of weekday evenings, where the station employed talk programming.[3] Among its personalities during that period were program host Jay Grayson, Harley Brinsfield (who had a long-running Saturday night jazz music program, The Harley Show), and White House-accredited newsman Galen Fromme. In the early 1980s, WBAL began running talk shows overnights as well as evenings and continued to play some music during the day. Music gradually decreased and in the fall of 1985, WBAL had transitioned to its current news-talk format, winning 19 national Edward R. Murrow Awards since then – the most of any local U.S. radio station.[3] Since the mid-1990s, the station has become increasingly conservative, both in its on-air personalities and its editorial disposition. WBAL offers no moderate or liberal talk shows in its programming.

In 2010, WBAL switched its morning (5–9 AM) and afternoon (3–6 PM) drive-time shows to an all-news format, entitled Maryland's Morning News and Afternoon News Journal respectively (the latter show has since been renamed to Maryland's News Now). The all-news blocks include national newscasts from ABC every 30 minutes; previously, the national feed had been provided by CBS at the top of each hour until 2014. Also in 2014, the station was re-branded as WBAL News Radio 1090, to better reflect its status as Maryland's radio news leader.

In addition to its analog 1090 kHz signal, WBAL is repeated on WIYY-HD2§,[4] a digital subchannel of WIYY's HD Radio signal.

Personalities

File:Robert lang.JPG
WBAL reporter Robert Lang at a Governor O'Malley press conference in 2009

Notable personalities

  • Ron Smith – died, at the age of 70, on December 19, 2011, after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer.[5][6]

Sports

WBAL is the co-flagship station (with WIYY) of Baltimore Ravens football and Navy football.

WBAL is also an affiliate of Sporting News Radio which it broadcasts late nights and weekends.

Since the Baltimore Orioles began their inaugural season in 1954, WBAL has been their flagship station for most of their existence, though not continuously; for example, it carried Orioles games every season from 1987 to 2006 (after which the team's games were broadcast on crosstown rival WJZ-FM "105.7 The Fan"), and resumed that status from 2011 to 2014 before returning to WJZ-FM in 2015. Ravens games have been broadcast on WBAL and WIYY since the 2006 season. In the event that the Orioles and Ravens played on the same day, WBAL would broadcast the Orioles game, while WIYY got the Ravens game.

Other teams whose games have been broadcast on WBAL include the Baltimore Colts, the University of Maryland Terrapins and the Towson Tigers.

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. O'Connor, Thomas H. Baltimore Broadcasting from A to Z (1985), p. 23.
  3. 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. http://www.allaccess.com/net-news/archive/story/132908/wiyy-drops-hd-only-music-channels
  5. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links