City Kent, Ohio Branding 1520 WJMP First air date March 1964 | Broadcast area Akron metro area Frequency 1520 kHz Last air date July 31, 2016 | |
WJMP AM 1520 was a daytime only radio station licensed to Kent, Ohio and serving the Akron, Ohio radio market. WJMP operated with a maximum power output of 1,000 watts, using a six-tower, daytime-only directional antenna pattern.
WJMP was the Akron affiliate of Mancow in the Morning, The Laura Ingraham Show, The Savage Nation, and The Dennis Miller Show. AM 1520 also carried CBS Radio newscasts hourly. It was commonly owned with FM station WNIR and low-power television stations WAOH-CD channel 29 Akron and W16DO-D channel 16 Cleveland, which simulcast together as the Cleveland market's Retro Television Network affiliate.
History
The station was signed in March 1964 as WKNT, owned by the publisher of the Kent Ravenna Record-Courier newspaper. It was purchased by Media-Com, Inc. in July 1971.
WJMP had a variety of formats over the years, having a history of changing formats to react to changes made by other stations in both the Akron and Cleveland markets.
Prior to affiliating with Fox Sports Radio, WJMP was an Air America Radio affiliate. In June 2006, when Akron's WTOU/WARF dropped Fox Sports Radio for talk radio, WJMP took the sports format abandoned by the Akron station. WARF then added two Air America programs once run on WJMP to its existing talk lineup.
Earlier, in 2001, when Cleveland station WRMR AM 850 announced that it was dropping pop standards music for the sports format of WKNR, WJMP changed to a standards format.
WJMP also has been a talk radio sister station to WNIR, carrying various syndicated talk programs in contrast with WNIR's mainly local schedule of hosts.
It once relayed the TV audio of co-owned WAOH-LP/W35AX, and stunted during the Major League Baseball players' strike of 1994 with a continuous loop of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during its daytime broadcast hours. This stunt gained the small station nationwide attention, and an entry in the Guinness Book of Sports Records.
Before March 15, 1989 the station used the callsign WKNT. Until sister WKNT-FM became WNIR, and became a full-time talk radio station in the mid-1980s, WKNT AM 1520 simulcast with the FM station.
On June 8, 2009, WJMP dropped its all-sports format and became a news/talk station featuring such syndicated hosts as Mancow, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, and Lou Dobbs (WJMP replaced Dobbs with Dennis Miller following Dobbs leaving radio in 2012).
WJMP shut down on July 31, 2016; the next day, the station's license was returned to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for cancellation.