With the announcement today that Tampa's National Public Radio affiliate, WUSF-FM, had purchased a second station — WSMR, 89.1 — that means 89.7 will now go the way of most of its brethren and exclusively air news and information programming, with its second station to go to an all-classical format.
Currently, news junkies in the Tampa Bay area are deprived of much of NPR's original programming. WUSF airs Morning Edition from 5 to 9 a.m. daily, then goes classical all day long. It resumes news programming at 4 p.m. with All Things Considered, the afternoon news program, followed by Marketplace at 6 p.m., either Florida Matters or BBC World Series at 6:30 p.m., and then classical and jazz all night long.
In playing so much music, WUSF had become somewhat of an outlier. Many of the biggest media markets in the country have two NPR stations, with one playing news & information, the other playing music.
JoAnn Urofsky, general manager of WUSF Public Media, said today that the station paid $1.275 million for WSMR.
Read below to see the schedule:
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.