City Norway, Maine Frequency 92.7 MHz | Branding Maine's Big Z | |
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Broadcast area Oxford County, Androscoggin County, Northern Cumberland County, Maine and the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire Slogan More Music. Better Variety. First air date December 12, 1970 (1970-12-12) | ||
WEZR-FM (92.7 FM; "Maine's Big Z") is a radio station licensed to serve Norway, Maine, United States. Established in 1970 as WNWY-FM, the station is owned by Mountain Valley Broadcasting, Inc. It broadcasts a hot adult contemporary format as a simulcast of Lewiston sister station WEZR.
History
WEZR-FM signed on December 12, 1970 as WNWY-FM under the ownership of Oxford Hills Radio Communications. The station originally operated on 105.5 FM with a middle of the road format. By 1974, WNWY had moved to 92.7 FM, a change made to accommodate the move of Skowhegan station WTOS-FM from 107.1 to 105.1, and was programming contemporary music, country music, pop, and gold.
Richard Gleason, the general manager of WSKW and WTOS in Skowhegan, bought WNWY-FM for $120,000 in 1975; the following year, the call letters were changed to WOXO to reflect the station's service to Oxford County and the Oxford Hills. By 1978, WOXO's top 40 format was 80-percent simulcast with WXIV (1450 AM) in South Paris, which Gleason acquired in 1976. In 1981, WOXO dropped the top 40 format in favor of country music after Gleason conducted a survey that found that a country-formatted station would be highly-rated. WOXO-FM's country format was simulcast on 1450 AM, which had taken on the WOXO call letters, until the early 1980s, when the AM station shifted to religious programming; in 1986, that station changed its call letters to WKTQ. In 1990, Gleason bought WTBM (100.7 FM) in Mexico; that station then became a simulcast of WOXO-FM.
WOXO-FM's country format moved to WKTQ, which took on the WOXO call letters, on August 1, 2016. Concurrently, the station changed its call letters to WEZR-FM and began simulcasting the hot adult contemporary format of Lewiston sister station WEZR, expanding that station's reach to serve the entirety of the Western Maine Mountains tourism region and parts of Carroll County, New Hampshire, and the WOXO-FM call letters were transferred to WTBM, which continues to air WOXO's country music programming. The format change also brings the Hot AC format back to the North Conway, New Hampshire and Fryeburg, Maine areas, which have been without such a station since 2014, when WVMJ tweaked its format to an Adult CHR, and eventually to a Mainstream CHR with a slight adult lean.