City Salt Lake City, Utah Frequency 910 kHz Format Silent | Broadcast area Salt Lake City First air date 1945 | |
 | ||
Power 5,000 watts (day)
1,000 watts (night) | ||
KWDZ (910 AM) is a broadcast radio station licensed to Salt Lake City, Utah, serving the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. The station is owned and operated by iHeartMedia. The KWDZ broadcast license is held by Citicasters Licenses, Inc.
History
The station was founded in 1945 and originally held the callsign KALL. It was originally owned by Mr. and Mrs. George C. Hatch and Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Hinkley. In 1946, John F. Fitzpatrick, publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune (owned by the Kearns Corporation), representing the Tribune, purchased fifty percent interest in the station from the owners. The Tribune's interest (Kearns-Tribune, Corp.) sold its interest in 1954 to permit its owner (Kearns-Tribune, Corp.) to apply for a license to buy a television license and to purchase a fifty percent ownership in KUTV Channel 2.
KALL had long aired a full service format. In the early 1990s, the station began airing a news/talk format, carrying programming such as The Rush Limbaugh Show and The G. Gordon Liddy Show. On March 6, 2000, the station's format was adjusted when its sister station KNRS adopted a talk radio format, and the station adopted the slogan "talk radio with an attitude", carrying hosts such as Jim Bohannon and Phil Hendrie.
In 2003, Disney/ABC purchased the station for $3,700,000, while the intellectual property and callsign was purchased by Clear Channel Communications for $2,000,000. Clear Channel moved the station's talk programming and the KALL callsign to 700 kHz, and on April 30, 2003, the station changed its call sign to the current KWDZ.
In June 2013, Disney put KWDZ and six other Radio Disney stations in medium markets up for sale, in order to refocus the network's broadcast distribution on top-25 markets.
On August 17, 2013, KWDZ dropped the Radio Disney affiliation and went Silent.
After almost 1 year, KWDZ resumed operations on August 14, 2014. Initially broadcasting locally originated automated programming upon its return to the air, Radio Disney programming returned sometime around October 2014. By that time, Disney had announced plans to sell all but one of Radio Disney's remaining 23 owned-and-operated stations. Originally planning to sign-off the stations on September 26, 2014, Disney later decided to keep the stations on the air until they were sold.
On May 29, Radio Disney Group filed an application to sell KWDZ to the Citicasters Licenses, Inc. subsidiary of iHeartMedia. iHeart bought KWDZ (and WRDZ-FM) for $1.95 million. Previously, Citicasters Licenses was owner of KWDZ (as KALL) until 2001 when the station was sold to Mercury Broadcasting Company as a result of iHeartMedia's (then known as Clear Channel Communications) acquisition of KTVX which brought them over ownership limits. The sale was approved by the FCC on July 14, 2015. The sale was completed on July 17, 2015 and the station went silent again.