Capital New York

WFMU took a $250,000 hit as a result of the storm—no small thing for an independent community radio facility overwhelmingly funded by listener support. It was another reminder that Sandy’s impact will continue to be felt by the region’s cultural institutions long after the last FEMA truck has left.

WFMU, which runs on an annual budget of $1.8 million, lost an estimated $150,000 from the cancellation last weekend of its annual record fair at Chelsea’s Metropolitan Pavilion, said Freedman, who’s been with the station since 1985. It was the first cancellation in the 20-year history of the three-day event, which provides a much-needed cash infusion to help sustain WFMU in the months heading into its annual March fund-raising drive. Beyond that, a brownout that occurred before most of Jersey City lost power altogether last Monday caused significant electrical damage to valuable studio equipment including audio processors, computers and the fire alarm system.

When the storm hit, WFMU had $40,000 in the bank, and $25,000 of that total has since been drained in order to pay the bi-weekly salaries of its seven full-time employees, thus leaving the station in a precarious situation.

Beloved indie radio station WFMU is back on the air, but running on fumes

Your insomnia’s buzzing. It’s June 30, 1987. 3 a.m. No shot at sleep, no shot at sex. You’re up, awake, obsessing over the sudden dip in Wally Backman’s batting average or what the Yankees are going to do about their third starter. Normal, nightly stuff for a New York sports fan. Then you get pensive. About why the Knicks suck; and why the Rangers suck; and why the Jets and the Giants suck even if it’s the wrong season to think about their suckitude. You want to talk it all out. No, you need to talk it all out. But there’s no one there to listen. You can fix this. HoJo’s stroke, Rasmussen’s slider — well, OK, maybe not the Knicks. You’re alone in the world with all this knowledge until, suddenly, you are not.

On July 1, 1987, WFAN, a 24-hour sports talk radio station, broadcasting out of a sub-basement in Queens, hit the air. It didn’t come out of nowhere, exactly. The format had been evolving. Marty Glickman, long-ago voice of the Knicks and Giants, first took questions on air in the 1940s at New York’s WHN. He listened to calls and relayed them to his audience since the technology didn’t yet exist to patch in a caller. Howard Cosell advanced the genre in the ’50s by openly chastising coaches during broadcasts. In the ’60s, Bill Mazer pioneered the current sports talk template, bantering with callers, letting their voices be heard, and then, in the ’70s, John Sterling crystallized it by lambasting them. Enterprise Radio attempted all-sports programming in 1981. They went out of business after nine months.

The Sound and the Fury: The fall and rise of the first all-sports talk station, WFAN

By Alex French and Howie Kahn on Grantland

nyphil:

Today in NYP History: The first broadcast by a major symphony orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, took place on August 11, 1922. The concert was conducted by Willem van Hoogstraten at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City, a walled athletic field of City College that became the site of many of the Philharmonic’s summer concerts.