WBAL Radio 1090 AM - Baltimore, MD

WBAL Radio 1090 AM - Baltimore, MD

WBAL (1090 kHz) is a commercial AM radio station licensed to Baltimore, Maryland and owned by the broadcasting division of the Hearst Corporation. Airing a News/Talk radio format, WBAL broadcasts on a Class A clear-channel frequency, with 50,000 watts from a transmitter facility in Randallstown, Maryland. Listeners in and around Baltimore can also hear the station on FM translator station W268BA at 101.5 MHz.

The station shares its studios and offices with sister stations WBAL-TV (channel 11) and WIYY (97.9 FM) on Television Hill in Baltimore's Woodberry neighborhood. WBAL and WIYY are the only two radio stations owned by Hearst, which is primarily a publishing and television company.

WBAL is non-directional by day but uses a directional antenna at night to protect the other Class A stations on 1090 AM, KAAY in Little Rock and XEPRS in Rosarito, Mexico. With a good radio, WBAL's nighttime signal can be heard in much of Eastern North America, reaching as far as Finland, Sweden, Nova Scotia and Bermuda. Its daytime signal easily covers most of Maryland as well as the Washington metropolitan area, and parts of Delaware, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Programming

On weekdays, WBAL airs 9 hours of all-news blocks, some of them simulcast from co-owned WBAL-TV. During middays, two local talk shows are heard, Clarence M. Mitchell, IV (known as "C4") at 9 a.m. and Brent Hollander at 1 p.m. Evenings often feature sports programming. And overnights, the nationally syndicated Lars Larson Show is heard.

Weekends include local shows and syndicated programs, including Dana Loesch, Brian Kilmeade, Meet The Press, This Week from ABC and Bill Cunningham. Some weekend hours are paid brokered programming. WBAL carries national news from ABC News.

Sports

WBAL is the co-flagship station with WIYY for Baltimore Ravens football and United States Naval Academy college football.

Since the Baltimore Orioles began their inaugural season in 1954, WBAL was their flagship station for most of that team's history, though not continuously. For example, it carried Orioles games every season from 1987 to 2006, after which the team's games were broadcast on crosstown rival WJZ-FM. Orioles games returned to WBAL from 2011 to 2014 before the team switched back to WJZ-FM in 2015. Ravens games have been broadcast on WBAL and WIYY since the 2006 season.

Other teams whose games have been broadcast on WBAL include the Baltimore Colts, the University of Maryland Terrapins and the Towson Tigers.

History

The WBAL Building, on Television Hill in Baltimore, has housed WBAL Radio since 1962.

WBAL began broadcasting after being dedicated on November 2, 1925, as a subsidiary of the Consolidated Gas Electric Light and Power Company, a predecessor of Constellation Energy.[2] WBAL's initial broadcasting studio was located at the utility's offices on Lexington Street. It was an affiliate of the NBC Blue Network.[2] On January 12, 1935, with radio becoming more commercialized, there was little justification for a public service company to own a radio station. WBAL was sold to the Hearst-controlled American Radio News Corporation, which operated it along with two daily newspapers, The Baltimore News-Post and The Baltimore American (later merged as the Baltimore News-American).[2]

In the 1930s, WBAL became the flagship station for the international broadcast of radio evangelist G. E. Lowman, whose shows originated in Baltimore until 1959.[3] During the 1960s, WBAL had a full service Middle Of The Road music format stressing personality and news. The station played a mix of standards with some softer songs from the Top 40.

Former logo of the radio station

By the early 1970s, the station had a full-service adult contemporary music format with the exception of weekday evenings, where the station aired talk programming.[4]

Among its personalities during that period were program host Jay Grayson, Harley Brinsfield, who had a long-running Saturday night jazz music program,