Bigger and Better WOWO

For the past couple of weeks, my primary radio station, WOWO, has been teasing our listeners about something coming that would make WOWO Bigger and Better.

Today, in the 7am hour WOWO Afternoon host Pat Miller joined Kayla Blakeslee, our host of Fort Wayne’s Morning News to reveal what the BIG deal was that we’ve been talking about on air and online.

(At least I hope they did, because I’m writing this article and recording the podcast a few days before.)

The BIG reveal is that WOWO is adding another way to listen to us.

Now Listeners in Fort Wayne, Indiana can listen to WOWO at 92.3 FM too.

Here’s the details and backstory:

For all of my lifetime (and before) WOWO has been on 1190 AM.  When the station first debuted 98 years ago it was on another AM frequency and moved around until 1941, so 1190 WOWO has been “The Place To Go When You Need To Know” for 82 years.

WOWO has also been a full time news talk radio station since 1996, but when I was a teenager in the 70’s WOWO was what they called a full-service radio station that played music along with having a full-time news department too.

WOWO had the distinction of being one of a hand full of Clear Channel AM radio stations in 1954 with the maximum power of 50,000 watts, That continued until the mid 1990’s when WOWO was purchased by Inner City Broadcasting whose intent was to buy WOWO and turn it off.  Why?  Because Inner City Broadcasting also owned a radio station in New York that was broadcasting on 1190 AM, but was required to sign off the air every night because of the Clear Channel license that WOWO had enabled WOWO to be the only station broadcasting east of the Mississippi River at 1190 AM at night.

Fortunately Federated Media stepped in and saved WOWO.  Federated Media owned two other stations in Fort Wayne and around the midwest and negotiated a deal.  The result was Inner City Broadcasting got to go full-time with their New York station on 1190 AM and WOWO would reduce their night time signal to 9800 watts, retaining the 50,000 watts during the day.

1190 WOWO is not going anywhere with this BIG announcement.

Now, why was the addition of 92.3 FM a BIG announcement?

It was a play on words.

Ever since 2016, Federated Media has been playing a Classic Hits Music format on 92.3 FM.  It’s Moniker was BIG 92.3.

Now WOWO has been on FM before.  If you review the History of WOWO website like I did, you’ll see that there was a WOWO FM briefly in 1955 and again in 1985 for a number of years.  When I joined WOWO in 2013 WOWO’s FM signal was 92.3.

Let’s go down the rabbit hole of 92.3 FM.  WFWI was originally put on the air at 92.3 FM in the mid 1990’s by Russ Oasis.  I happened to work on the air for Russ Oasis for a year, starting out doing afternoons on Music 92 and then we flipped formats to an all 70’s music station as the first version of 92.3 The Fort where I did mornings.  Eventually Federated Media bought 92.3 The Fort and for years it was the Fort Wayne home of the Bob and Tom Show in the morning and then Classic Rock the rest of the day and night.

According to my sources, 2012 was the year that 92.3 The Fort went away and that FM signal was given to WOWO.  However I recall going to breakfast meeting where it was announced that Federated Media was going to put music back on 92.3 FM in 2016.  That’s when BIG 92.3 FM launched.

When BIG 92.3 took over WOWO’s home on the FM dial, they also launched another FM home for WOWO, 107.5 FM along with 97.3 HD2 FM.  Forgive me for going all technical for a moment.

The Federal Communications Commission, which is the licensing and regulatory body of the Federal government created subchannels for FM radio stations that had High Def capabilities. So WOWO has been available on the HD2 channel of our sister station WMEE at 97.3 FM.   However HD subchannels are only available to you if you have a special HD radio, or if your car has an HD radio.

The F.C.C. also created another class of FM, Low Power.  Federated Media got licenses for our two Fort Wayne AM stations to also broadcast on FM using this technology whose only limitation was signal strength and thus coverage area.  107.5 FM has been WOWO’s FM signal but it’s only 75 watts and that limits the range.

92.3 FM is nearly 2500 watts which is full power and covers our the entire Fort Wayne Metro Area of 6 counties and beyond.

For now WOWO will continue to be heard on 107.5 FM but not very long, it’s not needed with the more powerful, BIGer 92.3 FM Signal.

That’s the BIG news for WOWO and let me wrap this up with a couple of answers to questions I’ve been asked:

1. Why did WOWO leave 92.3 before?  It was a counter-programming move by our company.  Ever since they dropped the Classic Rock format of 92.3 The Fort, the two local stations that played classics had all those listeners.  We wanted to offer Fort Wayne area music listeners another choice and we did by also offering the Two Minute Promise.  During regular programming BIG 92.3 commercial breaks were only two minutes or less.
2. Was BIG 92.3 successful? Yes and no. Yes, it made an impact on the radio landscape as it gained a lot of listeners, over 32,000 according to the last rating period. That weakened the other two classic music stations listener bases.  But No too. Because as a business, BIG 92.3 was never profitable.  It was the one division of our six Fort Wayne radio stations that wasn’t making money.  Every year since I’ve been in management, the question was do we keep BIG 92.3 or replace it. And every year it was keep BIG until now.  Music licensing fees have been increasing and even though there are no live radio personalities on BIG anymore, we still were paying one of our people to program 168 hours of music every week.
3. I heard that some car companies like Ford are going to stop offering AM in their vehicles…  and 4. What happened to WOWO on 1190 AM? We live (80 miles away) and can’t hear WOWO anymore?  The answer to these two questions are circumstantial and coincidental.  With the government mandate to move to Electric Vehicles there are some car companies that decided that they were not going to offer AM in EV’s because it requires extra expense to create shielding to prevent interference, or at least that’s their story. Meanwhile the National Association of Broadcasters is lobbying Congress to create a law mandating the AM radio continues to be included in new vehicles.  And regarding the WOWO 1190 AM signal… a few weeks ago, our engineers had to make repairs and improvements to the WOWO towers and power had to be reduced from the 50,000 watts for what was originally going to be a few hours at night and over a weekend.  Unfortunately, once they were up there, they discovered more had to be done and that included ordering parts way beyond the original plans.   As I was writing this today, I received an email saying that WOWO will be back to our full 50,000 watts on 1190 AM by Monday morning too.

While I’m at it, let me leave you with a few applications:

• First of all, carefully consider all the areas of your business and evaluate their value.  Long term and Short Term.  That’s what Federated Media did with 92.3 FM.
• Do this evaluation more than once.  We did it every few months and made changes along the way.
• Not all decisions should be based solely on money.  However there is a cost to the actions you take or don’t take too.
• Keep looking forward and plan for the potential possibilities.  Even if some of the futurists and forecasters are wrong, it’s better to be prepared for if they are right than try and play catch-up.