NorthEast Radio Watch 7/8/2024: 100 Years for WNYC

In this week’s issue… WNYC’s centennial party – AM show out at KTU – CHIN moves programming, 820/1150 silent – CFCO heads for FM

By SCOTT FYBUSH

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*It’s not the first public radio station in the US to hit 100 years – that honor goes to world pioneer WHA in Madison, Wisconsin, which traces its heritage back to 1917 and marked its centennial seven years ago – but in NERW-land, there’s nothing that matches the legacy of NEW YORK‘s WNYC, which signed on July 7, 1924 as the city’s municipal broadcaster.

Over the hundred years that have followed, WNYC has been a remarkable voice for the metropolis, whether in its early decades carrying speeches from city officials (and Mayor LaGuardia reading the funny pages during a newspaper strike), later on as a source for fine arts programming and an early booster of FM radio, still later as a key part of the early days of NPR, or, since 1995, as a full-fledged public broadcaster under its own umbrella separate from city ownership.

But WNYC (and its sister station, WQXR, still a dozen years away from its own centennial) have something no other public broadcaster does: its own in-house archivist and historian – and our friend Andy Lanset has been exceptionally busy these last few years helping to make sure that as WNYC hits the century mark, its producers have vast amounts of material to draw from for the celebration.

There’s an interactive timeline full of the images and sounds Andy has collected in the last few decades, part of a larger centennial website the station has assembled. On the daily Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC is marking “100 Years of 100 Things” with daily feature segments about “everything from ice cream to immigration,” starting today with WNYC itself.

Tonight, Lehrer and Lanset will hit the air at 7 for a discussion of the station’s history, followed at 8:45 by a 75-minute recreation in WNYC’s Greene Space of the actual first broadcast from that sweltering night in 1924 – because of course the station archives still include the rundown of that inaugural program.

And that’s just the start of an ongoing celebration, including an art display in the Greene Space windows and a gala scheduled for September.

It comes at a somewhat tentative time for WNYC, which is in the same boat as most public media outlets right now as it copes with a falloff in underwriting and all the questions about how journalism can function in such a divided time – but for the moment, we’ll let those headlines hang in the background and send our congratulations to Lanset and the WNYC team for a spectacular job of celebrating all the broadcasting history the station has created.