WBEN (AM)

WBEN

City of license	Buffalo, New York
Branding	"News Radio 930 AM and Now 107.7 FM, WBEN"
Slogan	The Voice of Buffalo
Frequency	930 kHz
First air date	September 8, 1930
Format	News radio
Power	5,000 watts
Class	B
Callsign meaning	We're the Buffalo Evening News (was owned by the Buffalo Evening News, later rebranded as The Buffalo News)
Former callsigns	WMAK (1922-1930)
Owner	Entercom Communications
Sister stations	WGR, WKSE, WWKB, WTSS, WWWS, WLKK
Website	WBEN.com, audio stream

WBEN is an AM radio station serving the Niagara, Buffalo and Western New York area, broadcasting on 930 AM and, as of April 5, 2011, simulcasting on sister station WLKK at 107.7 FM, which in turn is relayed on 107.3 FM in Williamsville. It previously simulcasted between 1946 and 1960 on 102.5 FM as WBEN-FM. Both stations retained the WBEN callsign after the co-owned TV station, WBEN-TV, was sold separately to become WIVB in 1977. Its AM transmitter is located in Grand Island, New York. The present FM transmitter is in Wethersfield, NY in Wyoming County. Its AM radio signal can be picked up quite strongly as far as Toronto, Ontario and the FM covers both the Buffalo and the Rochester markets.

History

WBEN signed on September 8, 1930. It initially used the facility built by the Norton Laboratories organization from Boston, as part of an experiment to send amplitude modulated voice transmissions between Niagara Falls, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as WMAK. When WMAK was launched in 1922 it operated initially out of Lockport, New York at 833 kHz. The station later moved its transmitter to North Tonawanda (broadcasting at 1130 kHz there) and then landing on 900 kHz, with 1000 watts of power, as a result of General Order 40, which realigned American AM radio allocations in 1927–28. In the late 1920s WMAK was acquired by the Buffalo Broadcasting Company, based at Buffalo's Rand Building, which also controlled WGR and WKBW in Buffalo. WMAK was a charter member of the CBS Radio Network, being one of the 16 stations that aired the first CBS network program on September 18, 1927. The comedy duo of Stoopnagle and Budd began their careers at WMAK in 1930.

WMAK was closed in the spring of 1930 as federal regulators began probing concentration of media ownership in the nation's largest radio markets. Buffalo Broadcasting Company chose to retain WGR and WKBW while shutting down WMAK and another daytime-only station, WKEN in suburban Kenmore, New York. At the same time, the Buffalo Evening News was granted a broadcast license of its own, purchased the decommissioned transmitting facility of WMAK on Shawnee Road in Martinsville, and relicensed it as WBEN. A new studio complex was built at the Statler-Hilton Hotel in downtown Buffalo, (chosen primarily for access to the live orchestra there) and served WBEN, its sister fm station and sister television station (which opened in the spring of 1948) for more than 25 years. In 1941, the station moved to its current position on the dial, at 930 kHz, as a result of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement (NARBA). The station had also relocated its transmitter to Grand Island at almost the same time, increasing fulltime power to its current 5,000 watts in the process. The Grand Island transmitter plant is still in use today.

WBEN, like its predecessor WMAK, was among the most active experimenters in Buffalo radio. In 1928, then-WMAK joined with General Electric-powned station WGY in Schenectady to demonstrate television technology. It was, by today's standards, a crude, mechanical scan system, with only 30 line vertical resolution (compared with today's 1080 line high definition digital television). But the result made history because GE's experimental facility was the first American television station with a regular broadcast schedule, as well as the forerunner of current Capital District CBS-TV affiliate WRGB. In 1934, WBEN launched W8XH, the first ultra-shortwave radio station of its kind, considered today by owner Entercom to be a predecessor of current FM station WTSS.

Buffalo in general, and WBEN in particular, was an incubator of national radio and television talent. In the early 1940s, WBEN's morning host was comedian and future national late-night television star Jack Paar (he left the station when drafted into the military in 1943 during World War II, and opted not to return to Buffalo after the war). Paar's place was taken by Clint Buehlman, who was recruited from competing station WGR when Paar went to war and remained for 34 years until retiring in 1977. He was in turn succeeded by Jefferson Kaye, who later became the voice of NFL Films and WPVI-TV. Kaye came to Buffalo via Boston, MA and was a most creative DJ, highlighting belly dancing and wine tasting on air.

WBEN was also the station where longtime national commercial spokesman Ed Reimers launched his career, In 1946, WBEN was one of the first radio stations in the United States to launch an FM radio station, which originally was located at 106.5 MHz on the dial. In May 1948, it launched what would become WIVB, the first television station in Buffalo and only the second in upstate New York, following WRGB.

WBEN-FM would later move to 102.5, increase its signal strength to 110 kilowatts to become the most powerful FM station in New York State, and eventually become WTSS; it is still WBEN's corporate sister to this day. (The 106.5 frequency is now occupied by WYRK which is not under common ownership with WBEN and WTSS.)

WBEN long enjoyed a premier position as a full-service radio station, first under Buffalo Evening News ownership, and then under the ownership and management of Larry Levite's locally-based Algonquin Broadcasting Company. The station won numerous regional and statewide awards for its news and public-service efforts. Levite presided over the gradual transition of WBEN from an adult contemporary format to its current news/talk format. In the early 1990s, he sold the WBEN stations to Kerby Confer's Keymarket Communications organization, and retired from the broadcasting business. Keymarket, in turn, later sold the properties to River City Broadcasting, which then merged with Sinclair Broadcasting. In 1999, Entercom Communications bought WBEN, as well as its competitor WGR, and most of Sinclair's other radio stations, when Sinclair decided to exit radio. Both had been hybrid news and sports talkers, and the two stations swapped personnel, so that WGR became all sports, and WBEN became the market's principal commercial news/talk station.

On April 4, 2011, Entercom announced that its Classic Rock/Triple-A hybrid sister station WLKK will become a simulcast of WBEN, effective at midnight on April 5, 2011. As of 2011, WLKK will not be able to acquire the WBEN-FM call signs, because WBEN-FM is already in use on another station (not owned by Entercom) in the Philadelphia area. The "Lake" format will continue on WLKK, but only on the HD2 digital subchannel.

Nowadays WBEN competes with country-format WYRK for the leadership in total audience in most quarterly ratings surveys. As of the most recent Arbitron book, WBEN was in "fourth or fifth place" among persons 25 to 54 during the morning drive time (as opposed to second overall); that, along with an operating loss on WLKK and the national trend of simulcasting AM stations on FM outlets, prompted Entercom to add the simulcast on WLKK in the hopes of pushing those numbers to "second or third."

Portions of the above come from the Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers Web site.

Programming

• Buffalo's Early News, morning news program, John Zach and Susan Rose
  • Technical Producer: Chris Johnson
  • Show Producer: Randy Bushover
  • Engineers: Tom Matte, Sam Hixon

• Tom Bauerle, midday talk host
  • Technical Producer: Chris Johnson
  • Call Screener: Connor Wolfley

• Rush Limbaugh, syndicated talk host
• Sandy Beach, afternoon drive host
  • Board Operator: Tony Caliguiri

• Buffalo's Evening News, evening news magazine hosted by Tom Puckett
• Sean Hannity, syndicated talk host (broadcast on tape delay, replaced Dr. Joy Browne in June 2008)
• Jim Bohannon, syndicated talk host (added 2009)
• Coast to Coast AM, overnights
• Cigar Dave, syndicated (but originally from the Buffalo area) weekend talk host
• Bob Brinker, syndicated weekend talk host
• Meet the Press
• NFL Football, in Season
• Ron Dobson (fill in host, formerly 7pm - 10pm weeknight host)
• Larry Hunter (fill in host)
• Brad Riter, fill in host

WBEN is an affiliate of the CBS Radio Network.

See also

• Oldest radio station
• List of radio stations in New York State

External links

• WBEN
• The WBEN History Page by Buffalonian Steve Cichon
• WBEN jock history (billdulmage.com)
• Query the FCC's AM station database for WBEN
• Radio-Locator Information on WBEN
• Query Arbitron's AM station database for WBEN