City Ann Arbor, Michigan First air date 1948 | Branding Michigan Radio | |
Broadcast area Ann Arbor, Lansing, parts of Detroit, Michigan Slogan Your State, Your Stories... Your NPR News Station Frequency 91.7 MHz
(also on HD Radio) | ||
WUOM (91.7 FM) is a non-commercial radio station in Ann Arbor, Michigan, licensed to the University of Michigan. The station is known as Michigan Radio: Your NPR News Station, and currently airs news and talk programming. Programs are simulcast on WFUM 91.1 FM in Flint and WVGR 104.1 FM in Grand Rapids, and also streamed online via the station's website.
All three Michigan Radio stations broadcast in the HD Radio format, albeit without any side channels.
History
The University of Michigan applied to the FCC on September 11, 1944 for a station at 43.1 FM (part of a band of frequencies used for testing of Frequency Modulation) with a power of 50,000 watts. At the time an assignment on the new FM band was seen as a significant disadvantage.
The FCC granted a license for WUOM (for University Of Michigan) at 91.7 in the brand new FM band; the station went on the air in 1948. Classical music made up a large chunk of the station's broadcast day until the late 1990s, when, faced with declining ratings and listener pledges, Michigan Radio changed its daytime programming to news and talk. Classical music programming continued for a time at night and was eventually phased out altogether. Michigan Radio was also the flagship station for The Todd Mundt Show, distributed nationally by NPR. Until recently, the station kept a few music programs, such as American Routes, on its weekend schedule; these have also since been phased out.
WUOM's signal covers most of Southeastern Michigan, including Metro Detroit (where the station has somewhat high ratings for an out-of-market NPR station, and listeners in the western half of the Detroit area can get a stable lock on their HD signal), Lansing and parts of extreme Southwestern Ontario. It is also reported to be the most listened-to station in Ann Arbor, ahead of all commercial signals. The station provides 24-hour NPR news service to the state capital, since WKAR-AM must sign off at sundown and WKAR-FM airs the Classical 24 network from 7 pm to 5 am weeknights with minimal, if any, interruptions for news.