The year 1988 saw a number of significant events in radio broadcasting.
Events
February - Longtime St. Louis rocker KWK 106.5, tired of playing second-fiddle to KSHE 94.7, flips to CHR/Top-40 as WKBQ "Q-106.5" to try its luck going after consistently top-3 rated KHTR 103.3. Although the station skews younger ("Out with the old, in with the Q!"), it shaves off enough of KHTR's younger audience to drop it to the middle-of-the-pack and forces a format change later in the year.
August 13 – Los Angeles radio personality
Shadoe Stevens takes over as host of "
American Top 40." He replaces
Casey Kasem, who had hosted since the show's debut in 1970. Stevens will remain with the program until the end of its original run in January 1995.
September – KMGK in
Minneapolis, Minnesota becomes
KQQL, adopting an
oldies format after stunting various versions of "Louie Louie".
September 22 –
WYNY 97.1, a country music station and
WQHT 103.5 (Hot 103), a CHR station swapped frequencies in New York City.
October 7 –
WNBC radio in New York signs off for the final time at 5:30 pm after 66 years on the air, being replaced with an all-sports station,
WFAN. The switch was the culmination of a complicated station owner/format swap initiated by Emmis Communications, owner of WFAN and FM sister
WQHT; the latter switched dial positions with WNBC's FM sister,
WYNY, which was sold off to
Westwood One.
The original frequency for WFAN was spun off to
The Jewish Daily Forward and became
WEVD.
^
abCox, Jim (2008). This Day in Network Radio: A Daily Calendar of Births, Debuts, Cancellations and Other Events in Broadcasting History. McFarland & Company, Inc.
ISBN978-0-7864-3848-8.
This article related to radio is a
stub. You can help Wikipedia by
expanding it.