WZRC

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WZRC
City of license New York City
Broadcast area New York metropolitan area
Frequency 1480 kHz
First air date 1930
Format Chinese
Power 5,000 watts
Class B
Facility ID 27398
Callsign meaning W Z RoCk
(former satellite network)
Owner Multicultural Broadcasting
(MRB Licensee, LLC)
Website See External Links

WZRC, on 1480 kHz, is a radio station owned by Multicultural Broadcasters and serves the New York City area by running Chinese-language programming.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Formation and the early years

This station started out as WHOM and was founded in 1930 by the New Jersey Broadcasting Corp. In the 1940s the station aired ethnic brokered programming. The station was owned by the Pope family. It ran many Italian-language programs, and included some German and Spanish programming as well. In 1960 it evolved to mostly Spanish. In 1975 the station was sold to SJR communications along with WHOM-FM.

[edit] 1975 – 1982

WHOM-FM would become AC WKTU (then years later disco then rock WXRK, and talk as WFNY-FM). WHOM was renamed WJIT (Radio Jit) and went from diversified Spanish to Spanish contemporary music. WJIT continued this format into the 1980s evolving into a Spanish AC format by then. WJIT 1480 and WKTU 92.3 were sold to Infinity in 1982.

[edit] 1982 – 1998

Infinity in 1989 decided that with a new Spanish station on 97.9 that it should move 1480 WJIT (by then known as talk station 1480 Radio America) to an English format. So it shut down the Spanish format that spring and made the station WZRC. It took a heavy metal based satellite rock format and named the station "Z Rock". The call letters WZRC, were originally used in Chicago by the flagship station for the network, "Z-Rock 106.7 FM" from 1986-1987.

In December 1992 WZRC shortly switched to classic country through a satellite delivered service. But that February WZRC switched to a Korean brokered programming. Infinity continued to own the radio station until after its merger with CBS. At that point it owned 92.3 WXRK (now WFNY-FM), 101.1 WCBS-FM, 102.7 WNEW-FM, 660 WFAN, 880 WCBS, 1010 WINS, and 1480 WZRC. While it was not required to sell WZRC it opted to anyhow and sold the station in 1998 to Multicultural Media.

Multicultural kept the Korean format but after a few years, in 2002, switched to Chinese (to complement Multicultural's Sinocast network broadcast locally on 92.3 FM subcarrier).

[edit] External links