WNCN/WQIV/WNCN/WAXQ

[Scott Fybush]

At 12:00 PM 1/3/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>They dropped Classical to become rock WQCD (I think!), which was 
>supposedly all quadraphonic, all the time.  After pressure from the groups 
>mentioned in my previous post, they went back to Classical and changed the 
>calls back to WNCN, which remained in place for a number of years before 
>they were sold and became WAXQ.

"WQIV," actually (WQCD is the 101.9 that used to be WPIX-FM.)

But it was a different era - in 1974, the FCC still took the old "public 
interest" obligations seriously enough to be willing to consider stations' 
formats at license-renewal time, and the WNCN/WQIV case set a precedent for 
a time. Here in Rochester, when commercial classical WBFB 92.5 (sister 
station to top-40 giant WBBF 950) wanted to flip to the new NBC News & 
Information Service at the end of 1974, the WNCN ruling was enough to make 
the station's owners donate the entire music library to the brand-new 
public radio WXXI 91.5 and provide a lot of the assistance needed to get 
the new public station on the air before WBFB flipped away from classical. 
That wouldn't happen now.

By 1993, the FCC had ceased to concern itself with station formats, so it 
was safe for GAF (the company that ended up buying WQIV/WNCN from Starr 
Broadcasting - in which William F. Buckley was a partner - and flipping it 
back to classical) to again think about dropping the classical format from 
104.3, which it did in Dec. 1993 with almost no warning. WNCN became WAXQ - 
still under GAF ownership. It was later sold to Viacom, which eventually 
sold it and duopoly partner WLTW to Chancellor/AMFM/Clear Channel.

(And the PD of WNCN in its final classical incarnation was the same Mario 
Mazza who's now at WCRB, where I'll bet he didn't get a Christmas card from 
Larry Glavin this year :-)

s