Long before podcasts, before FM, before most Americans had ever heard a voice come out of a box in their living room, a university president in Columbus stood up and announced the city's first radio station. That station is still on the air today, just under a different name and a different format.
Announced by a University President in 1922
On April 24, 1922, Ohio State University president William Oxley Thompson announced the launch of what would become Columbus's first radio station, according to WOSU's own institutional history. It went on the air under the call letters WEAO, making it just the sixth educational broadcasting facility established anywhere in the country. In September 1933, the Federal Radio Commission approved a call sign change to WOSU, aligning the station's identity directly with the university that had built it.
Built an Audience Broadcasting Football
WOSU's earliest popularity had nothing to do with news or classical music. According to the station's history, it gained a following almost immediately by broadcasting Ohio State football games out of the newly constructed Ohio Stadium, turning game days into some of the station's first must-listen programming and tying the young station directly to a tradition that still defines the city more than a century later.
A Pioneer Station That Helped Educational Radio Survive
WOSU's role extended well beyond one campus. As a land-grant university station, it pioneered early radio audience research and developed "school of the air" programming, instructional broadcasts aimed at classrooms, at a time when educational broadcasting's survival was genuinely uncertain. WOSU's own historical record puts it plainly: educational broadcasting could have failed entirely without a handful of land-grant institutions like Ohio State willing to keep stations like this one running, a commitment that helped lay groundwork for the public broadcasting system that exists today.
From All-Classical to NPR News
The FM signal at 89.7 signed on in December 1949, according to Wikipedia's history of WOSU-FM, initially simulcasting the AM station before building its own schedule. For nearly three decades, from 1980 to 2008, WOSU-FM ran an all-classical format. That changed on January 14, 2008, when the station shifted to a mixed news and classical lineup, folding in NPR's morning and afternoon news magazines along with popular NPR weekend programs, a transition that eventually solidified into the dedicated 89.7 NPR News identity the station carries now.
Still Owned by the University That Started It
More than a hundred years after Thompson's announcement, WOSU remains affiliated with Ohio State University, now operating as a full public media organization spanning 89.7 NPR News, a separate Classical 101 service, television, and podcasts. Few American radio stations can trace an unbroken line back to 1922, and fewer still are still run by the exact institution that built them in the first place.
Tune in to WOSU 89.7 NPR News on Radio Shuffle for public radio journalism from the station that started broadcasting Columbus a century ago.