Radio station in Norfolk, Virginia
WNOR (98.7 FM "FM99") is a radio station licensed to Norfolk, Virginia, United States, serving the Hampton Roads (Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News) radio market. WNOR is owned and operated by Saga Communications. It airs an active rock radio format.[1]
WNOR broadcasts in the HD Radio (hybrid) format. Studios and offices are on Greenbrier Circle in Chesapeake; the transmitter is next to Riverside Memorial Park in Norfolk.[3] The Class B signal covers Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina.
History
On July 19, 1962, WNOR-FM first signed on the air, owned by the Norfolk Broadcasting Company. It was the sister station to WNOR (1230 AM) and presented a mix of easy listening "semiclassical music" and show tunes.[4] WNOR-AM-FM was sold for $1.23 million in 1967 to Arnold and Audrey Malkan and Stanley Wilson.[5] The new owners then sued the sellers, claiming among other things that WNOR-FM used equipment that did not meet Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements.[6]
The station maintained an all-female air staff until 1974, when the general manager felt the concept had run its course; citing high turnover, he released two female DJs and reassigned others, telling Broadcasting, "Females and males alike would rather hear a male voice on the radio."[7]
In 1969, WNOR-FM began airing a progressive rock format at night.[8] Eventually, the rock music proved more popular than easy listening, with WNOR-FM abandoning the "split-format" approach in 1974. The station's Arbitron ratings quickly took off, culminating in the station's rise to number one in the rock radio ratings beginning in the early 1980s[9] and the total-market ratings from 1986 to 1988 as well as being the market's highest-billing station from 1986 to 1993.[10]
By the 1980s, the station had moved to an album-oriented rock format, based more on album sales than the previous progressive rock format. In 1980, Marvin Josephson Associates acquired the WNOR stations;[11] company president Edward K. Christian led a leveraged buyout of the Josephson radio stations in 1986, forming Saga Communications.[12] Saga decided to simulcast the FM station's rock format on the AM station. WNOR gained notoriety in 1992 when, as an April Fool's Day prank, it claimed that the Mount Trashmore landfill in Virginia Beach was about to explode; callers jammed the 9-1-1 telephone system in the area, and the station apologized at the behest of local police.[13] Saga then suspended the morning show hosts for two weeks in an effort to show, per CEO Ed Christian, that the station was "taking very seriously its obligation to refrain from deliberate distortion or falsification of programming";[14] later that year, the FCC admonished the station.[15]
In 1994, Saga Communications acquired another FM station in the market, WAFX in Suffolk. WAFX had flipped to classic rock in 1989, with the two stations feuding over the use of the term in the market,[9] and the new station made a dent in WNOR's ratings.[16] While WAFX shifted to classic hits,[17] WNOR-FM evolved into a current-based, harder-edged direction, bringing it into the active rock format; the changeover in music mix was completed in February 1996.[8] In 1999, the AM station went to an adult standards format and changed its call sign to WJOI.[18][19]
In 2019, Saga demolished the tower used to transmit WNOR and WJOI for 48 years; the new 545-foot (166 m) mast was completed in January 2020.[20]
