| City of license | East Orange, New Jersey |
|---|---|
| Broadcast area | New York City Hudson Valley, New York Lower Catskills, NY Western New Jersey Eastern Pennsylvania |
| Frequency | 91.1 MHz |
| First air date | 1958 |
| Format | Freeform |
| ERP | 1,250 watts |
| HAAT | 151 meters |
| Class | A |
| Facility ID | 3249 |
| Callsign meaning | W FM Upsala (College) |
| Owner | Auricle Communications |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | www.wfmu.org |
WFMU is a listener-supported, independent community radio station headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States, broadcasting at 91.1 (and at 90.1 as WMFU) MHz FM, presenting a freeform radio format. It is the longest-running freeform radio station in the U.S.[1]
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WFMU commenced broadcasting in April 1958, under broadcast license to Upsala College, in East Orange, New Jersey. Although originally a student-staffed and faculty-administered college radio operation, by the 1980s most of the station's staff had no affiliation with the college, and management, though hired by the college, had little involvement with the academic community. Shortly before Upsala's bankruptcy filing and closure on May 31, 1995, Auricle Communications (a newly formed nonprofit corporation whose board of directors included station executives, personnel, and supporters) purchased the license from the college, making it a fully independent radio station. In August 1998 the station's studios and offices were relocated to a Jersey City facility purchased with listener donations.
The station's transmitter is situated atop the First Watchung Mountain in West Orange, New Jersey. WFMU has a repeater station, WMFU (formerly WXHD), in Mount Hope, New York, broadcasting at 90.1 MHz FM in the Hudson Valley, New York, the Lower Catskills, New York, western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.
WFMU has a stated commitment to unstructured-format broadcasting. All programming is created by each individual air personality, and is not restricted by any type of station-wide playlist or rotation schedule. Experimentation, spontaneity and humor are among the station's most frequently noted distinguishing traits. Unlike most commercial broadcasting and non-commercial educational radio stations, WFMU does not offer regularly scheduled news, weather, traffic, sports, or financial information. WFMU does not belong to any existing public radio network, and nearly 100% of its programming originates at the radio station.
WFMU's annual operating budget is approximately US$1,600,000, and is funded primarily by its listeners through an annual 14-day on-air fundraising marathon, as well as a Fall record fair and other events. WFMU is unusual in its philosophy that on-air fundraising drives only take place once a year, unlike most other public and listener supported stations which have multiple pledge drives throughout the year. Most of WFMU's disk jockeys are unpaid volunteers, a few of which have been with the station since the 1970s and '80s. In a 1990 interview, WFMU Station Manager Ken Freedman stated, "we've always rejected underwriting on principle."[2] The station rejects any type of direct underwriting from governmental institutions or from for-profit corporations. Historically, WFMU has occasionally accepted financial support from private foundations, although such support has never funded WFMU's general operations. In 2006 the station accepted a $400,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which was administering The New York State Music Fund for a special project (see below).[3]
WFMU's programming ranges from flat-out uncategorizable strangeness to rock and roll, lots of alternative rock, outsider music, psychedelia, experimental, obscure '50s-'60s blues, non-popular jazz, R&B, soul, reggae, garage rock, hot-rod music, 78s, 8-tracks, indie rock, twee, indie pop, schlock-a-billy, hip-hop, electronica, hand-cranked wax cylinders, punk rock, exotica, downtown art music, radio improvisation, cooking instructions, Old Noise, classic radio airchecks, found sound, comedy, call-in shows, anti-fascist lectures, off-kilter kids' music, interviews with obscure radio personalities, interviews with notable science-world luminaries, spoken word mish-mashes, Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks in languages other than English, Gospel, and country and western music. The station previously hosted a "Listener Hour" every Saturday morning, where any WFMU listener can try their hand at DJ'ing live on the air. This went off the air in June 2009 because competition for DJ slots had become more intense than ever. WFMU's Music Director is Brian Turner.
WFMU was named "Best Radio Station in the Country" by Rolling Stone magazine for four consecutive years (1991–1994)[4] and has also been dubbed the best radio station in either NYC or the US by The Village Voice, New York Press, and CMJ, among others. The station also won three awards ("Best Specialty Programming", "Most Eclectic Programming", and "Music Director Most Likely To Never Sell Out") at the 2006 CMJ College Radio Awards.
A New York Times magazine feature article called WFMU "a station whose name has become like a secret handshake among a certain tastemaking cognoscenti",[5] and cites Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and playwright Eric Bogosian as avowed fans of the station.
Other notable fans and supporters of WFMU include Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum, Kurt Cobain,[6] screenwriter/director Ethan Coen, MAKE magazine editor-in-chief and Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder, Led Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant, musician Suzanne Vega, artist Cindy Sherman, indie rock superstar Ted Leo, Sonic Youth guitarists Lee Ranaldo[7] and Thurston Moore, comic book artist and writer Evan Dorkin, film director, producer and actor Kevin Smith, musician Moby, The Cars vocalist/record producer Ric Ocasek, musician Max Tundra, television talk-show host Conan O'Brien, comedian and broadcaster Phill Jupitus, and Blixa Bargeld, singer of the German band Einstürzende Neubauten.[8]
Although WFMU has traditionally eschewed news-oriented programming, the station volunteered its airwaves in September, 2001 to become the temporary home in the New York area for Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! program (which was renamed Democracy Now! In Exile), after it was "banished" from WBAI and the Pacifica Radio Network during a highly controversial "coup" of WBAI's station management by Pacifica's national Board of Directors.
In a similar example of its support of community broadcasting, WFMU began voluntarily hosting the webcast of legendary New Orleans jazz music station, WWOZ, when its studio and transmitter were destroyed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. WFMU also took online donations on behalf of WWOZ, raising over $70,000 towards the rebuilding of the station.
WFMU also received worldwide attention in May 2001, when national and international media outlets covered DJ Glen Jones's successful attempt to break the Guinness World Record for longest consecutive radio broadcast, staying on the air a full 100 hours, 41 seconds.
A famous 1990 telephone performance on WFMU[9] by Daniel Johnston was the primary inspiration for filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig to create the documentary film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. The film won the award for Best Documentary Director at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
The late Jeff Buckley made his radio debut on WFMU in late 1991 and returned numerous times before signing with Columbia Records and achieving international stardom.
In 2006, WFMU was awarded of a grant from the New York State Music Fund, a program created by the Office of the New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to make contemporary music of all genres more available and accessible to diverse audiences and within New York State. WFMU's grant included funds to create a podsafe online music library, to be called The Free Music Archive, which launched on April 10, 2009.[10] The website describes itself as "a social music website built around a curated library of free, legal audio."[11] Currently it hosts over 22,000 [12]podsafe songs for free for streaming or download, many under Creative Commons licenses.[13] The Fund grew out of settlements with major recording companies investigated for violating state and federal laws prohibiting "pay for play" (payola). Grant winners were chosen on criteria that included, among other things, their record of broadening awareness of artists, genres or styles with limited access to commercial broadcast or other mass distribution vehicles.[14]
The station's past and present on-air DJ lineup includes many notable people from the world of art, music and television.
Along with its traditional radio broadcast, WFMU is also broadcast live over the internet in a wide variety of streaming formats (including Ogg Vorbis), and all programming is archived on the WFMU website in 128k MP3 format for four weeks, then permanently thereafter in RealAudio format.
In 2005, WFMU expanded its online broadcasting efforts by offering 15 hours a week of Internet-only live programming ("free of the FCC's incomprehensible language restrictions", explains WFMU Station Manager Ken Freedman), as well as an independent 24 hour-a-day webcast of Nachum Segal's Jewish Moments In The Morning program.
In January 2006, WFMU announced the availability of the station's live stream and archives to cellular phones and other mobile devices running the operating systems Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) and Palm OS.
Podcasts of 23 WFMU shows (some exclusive to the podcast itself) are also available.
The official WFMU blog, WFMU's Beware of the Blog, was launched in 2004, and has become very popular even among non-WFMU listeners. Original content for the WFMU blog is contributed by station personalities as well as a variety of listeners and associates such as Otis Fodder and Kliph Nesteroff. Blog items are regularly featured on the front pages of high-traffic pop-culture sites such as Boing Boing and MetaFilter.
In November 2007, WFMU became the first radio station in the world to offer live streaming to the Apple iPhone.[15]
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