1989 in radio

The year 1989 saw a number of significant events in radio broadcasting.

Events

• KMEZ breaks away from its FM sister station to adopt a business-oriented news/talk format as KDBN.
• ABC Radio has acquired Satellite Music Network. This division is now known as "ABC Music Radio".
• The NBC Radio Network ceased to operate as a separate programming service; owner Westwood One merges it with the Mutual Broadcasting System, moving the networks' news and engineering departments from New York to Mutual's facilities in Arlington. The lone non-news program that remained on NBC Radio, the Sunday-morning religious program The Eternal Light, was also canceled.
• May 1 - At the grand opening of the Disney's Hollywood Studios, the most attended studio-park in the world, it chooses Pittsburgh's KDKA-AM as its inaugural guest broadcaster in its interactive radio studios.
• May 24 – The last NBC Radio owned-and-operated station, KNBR 680-AM in San Francisco, was sold off to Susquehanna Broadcasting (which merged with Cumulus in 2005). KNBR changed from an adult contemporary format to all-sports the following year, a format it still holds.
• October 9 – KSJN (AM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota becomes KNOW.
• November - WQXI flips callsigns to WSTR, becoming Star 94 in Atlanta.
• November 13 – London Greek Radio, one of the United Kingdom's first all-ethnic radio stations, begins broadcasting.
• December – Kayla Satellite Network purchases Chuck Harder's Sun Radio Network (forerunner to I.E. America Radio Network. Harder's show was soon dropped from the network and he later started a new radio network, the Peoples Radio Network.

Debuts

• March – Mark Belling joins WISN in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
• KDWN in Las Vegas, Nevada offers Art Bell a five-hour radio talk show time slot in the middle of the night, which later evolved into Coast to Coast AM.

Closings

Births

Deaths

• Herbert Morrison, American radio reporter (b. 1905)