WBEZ 91.5 streams news, talk, and NPR programming live from Chicago, and you can listen free right now on Radio Shuffle, no sign-up or app required. The station mixes national NPR newscasts with its own local reporting on Chicago politics, culture, and daily life, broadcasting from the John Hancock Center at 5,700 watts and reaching listeners across the Chicago metro area and well beyond it online.
WBEZ first went on air on April 7, 1943, built by the Chicago Board of Education as a classroom teaching tool rather than a public broadcaster in the modern sense. It started on 42.5 MHz, a frequency so few households could even receive that early broadcasts mostly reached a handful of classrooms equipped with the right FM receivers, before the station moved to its current 91.5 MHz home in 1947. The station stayed under school board ownership for decades before joining National Public Radio as a charter member in 1970, a move that reoriented it from pure education programming toward the public radio format listeners know today.
Ownership changed again in 1990, when the Board of Education sold WBEZ to a new nonprofit, the WBEZ Alliance, finally severing the station from its original classroom mandate. The organization rebranded as Chicago Public Media in 2010 and had already relocated its studios to Navy Pier back in 1995, cementing its identity as an independent civic institution rather than a school district asset.
WBEZ's biggest cultural export began almost by accident in November 1995, when host Ira Glass and then-general manager Torey Malatia launched a local show called Your Radio Playhouse, built around the idea that first-person narrative storytelling could carry the weight of serious journalism. Renamed This American Life in March 1996, the show went national just months later through Public Radio International and has since become one of the most widely syndicated and influential programs in American public radio history, still produced out of WBEZ. The station also co-produces the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, giving it a hand in two of public radio's most recognizable national programs at once.
For listeners who want Chicago news and NPR programming from the station that gave American public radio one of its defining shows, WBEZ 91.5 streams free on Radio Shuffle, no sign-up required.