City Ellenville, New York First air date 1964 (as WELV) | Frequency 1370 kHz Power 5,000 watts day | |
Broadcast area Southeastern Catskill Mountains Format News/Talk (WKIP simulcast) | ||
WJIP (1370 AM) is a radio station broadcasting a news/talk format, simulcasting WKIP 1450 AM. Licensed to Ellenville, New York, USA. The station broadcasts with a power of 5,000 watts, daytime only, from a single tower located off Irish Cape Road in the hamlet of Napanoch. The station is currently owned by iHeartMedia, through licensee CC Licenses, LLC.
History
The station was known as WELV for 40 years. WELV first went on the air in 1964 with a full service format featuring a variety of local programming. The format was a broad based free-flowing Middle Of The Road music format leaning adult contemporary. In the early part of 1985, WELV and its FM station were sold to Straus Communications and flipped to an Adult Standards format mixing in limited amounts of soft rock and baby boomer pop hits. Initially, they used the Unforgettable format. By 1986 they went to an in house standards format. Its sister station 99.3 (now WRWB-FM) shared the WELV call letters from 1970–1981 and 1984-1989. In 1991, WELV flipped to a news/talk format with mostly syndicated programming.
Bob Mangels was the morning host for several decades, through the late 1990s. In the late 1990s, Mangels hosted "The Breakfast Club," with Ken Gonyea, which aired on Straus Media's four AM stations: WELV, WKIP, WCKL, and WHUC. By 1999, Mike Winters hosted this quadcast morning show. The quad cast continued until 2002, when the AM programming was broken up into several different formats.
Studios were originally on Canal Street in Ellenville, above Matthews Pharmacy, and in the early 1980s, moved to 22 N. Main Street, where they remained until moving to Straus Media (now Clear Channel) facilities in the Arlington section of Poughkeepsie in 1997.
The station changed its call letters to WRWD, on 2004-11-17, to simulcast its country sister station, WRWD-FM. On 2006-12-04, the station changed its call sign to the current WELG. By 2006, the station's original call letters were no longer available, as they were in use by Ellenville Central School District's WELV-LP.
In November 2009, the station and FM sister 99.3 swapped formats: 1370 AM reverted to WRWD (AM), simulcasting WRWD's country format, while the news/talk format went to 99.3 FM as WKIP-FM.
On March 8, 2012 WRWD changed their format to news/talk, simulcasting WKIP 1450 AM, and changed their call letters to WJIP the next day (March 9).