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Iowa Iowa Public Radio

Mark Roberts

Mark Roberts

I was in Des Moines last week and noticed that the IPR stations covering the city had top-of-hour IDs that did not include all the stations for each IPR network.

What I heard identified were the following:

IPR Classical (via KICP - I got lucky and had an ID with translators!)
KICP Patterson-Des Moines
KICL Pleasantville
KICJ Mitchellville
KICG Perry
WOI-HD2 Ames-Des Moines (no "FM"!)
K249EJ Des Moines
K284CN Ames

IPR News & Studio One (via WOI-FM)
WOI-FM Ames-Des Moines
KNSK Fort Dodge
KNSC Carroll
KNSL Lamoni

IPR News (AM-only network)
WOI Ames

Note that this leaves out stations in eastern Iowa. For example, I didn't hear IDs for WSUI, KSUI, KHKE, or the IPR stations in Ottumwa, nor for the AM station in Mason City (KRNI).

So, does anyone know: is IPR running its programming from two or possibly three centers? Clearly one center is IPR headquarters on Grand Avenue in Des Moines. Is the other one in Iowa City...or Cedar Falls...or....? And is KRNI doing its own thing?

I'm curious: I would have expected everything to originate out of Des Moines, which is a typical Iowa pattern for media, but is that the case for IPR? This seems to be a rather complex network.
 
I don't think much of IPR comes from Des Moines at all. It's basically a fairly recent merger of the WOI stations in Ames, the WSUI/KSUI stations in Iowa City and the Cedar Falls stations. I believe there are still studios at each of the universities. They split underwriting and IDs for each of the three regions, and I think newscasts as well.
 
Time to go down another Radio Rabbit Hole! - thanks to archives that I subscribe to that have a complete set of issues of the Des Moines Register. What follows is a summary.

The formation of Iowa Public Radio dates to 2004, with an executive director being chosen in 2005. She was Cindy Browne, who had worked in public broadcasting in Minnesota. She had to resign in 2008 due to health issues, and she passed away that year. Even with health issues, she was able to consolidate station schedules beginning January 1, 2007. Further consolidation occurred the next couple of years. This was somewhat controversial. Listeners to the individual stations were upset that some of their favorite programs (including one that resembled Prairie Home Companion) would be shifting time or would go off the air altogether. There was also the complication that WSUI/KSUI and WOI each had their own public-affairs program titled The Talk of Iowa. The biggest controversy, though, was over The Diane Rehm Show, which was scheduled to air weekday mornings, repeating weekday evenings. "Nearly 750 complaints" were received, especially from fans of On Point, which KUNI in Cedar Falls had been airing in that time slot. On Point then replaced Diane Rehm in the morning slot, but not the evenings starting the third week of January 2007. (I told you this was a rabbit hole.)

It's unclear when there was a split between the classical and news networks. The classical network, at least in the Des Moines area, is served by rimshots surrounding the city, and seems to be a secondary network to News/Studio One. Moreover, the decision to split one FM network's time between news and "Studio One" isn't described. Most of the stations in the network already existed in 2007. "Studio One" was a concept that came from KUNI, which had been airing a full-time eclectic/AAA format. That format ceased in 2007, but remnants were still on the schedule, and by 2008, there were newspaper ads describing the network as "News and Studio One," as it remains today.

The licenses were retained by the state universities, under the supervision of the Iowa Board of Regents which governed all three, because they were still providing financial support to the network. There was a goal established to phase out this support by 2016, then by 2017...and finally the phase-out happened last year, at which point the Regents voted to transfer the licenses to IPR.

One thing that surprised me was that the Ottumwa stations were originally put on the air by Iowa State University, not the University of Iowa. (This part of the story comes from Ottumwa Courier archives.) This was the outcome of a 10-year-long campaign by the Wapello County Board of Supervisors to improve public radio coverage in the Ottumwa area. Federal grants finally came through in 2005 and the Ottumwa Courier reported that the stations (one for each network) came on the air in 2007. There were also competing applications that had to be dealt with. The Courier carried complete minutes of the board of supervisors meeting (required to be published in a newspaper of general circulation under Iowa law), and the topic - and impatience with FCC procedures - came up frequently in those minutes, as well as in Courier editorials.

Yet, even with these origins, the Ottumwa stations' IDs don't appear with the IDs for the central Iowa stations. Finally: an excuse to re-visit Ottumwa! - to see where those IDs are coming from. I suspect I can't get those stations well, if at all, in Centerville, which I re-visited last year for the first time in 50 years.

The network appears to be partitioned between central and eastern Iowa but I still believe programming and operations are based in Des Moines. There may be a few specific programs produced at Ames, Cedar Falls, and Iowa City, but all indications are that programming is centralized in Des Moines.

Another thing to note is that the FM stations in this network cover only the eastern 2/3 of Iowa, mostly. The public radio stations in Sioux City (repeater in Okoboji) and Council Bluffs have had no interest in joining the network. KWIT in Sioux City is owned and operated by a technical college and still runs a news/classical/jazz/blues/AAA format; KIWR in Council Bluffs runs what amounts to an alternative-rock format. IPR's AM stations still can cover most of these areas; Council Bluffs can also get NPR programming from KIOS in Omaha.
 
I reached out to Iowa Public Radio and one of their engineers explained the set-up to me. Each of the three IPR formats is the same throughout Iowa - no variation by region. But the station breaks are split between a western zone, which is mostly central Iowa, and an eastern zone (e.g., Dubuque, Cedar Falls, Iowa City, Ottumwa). The web streams get their own breaks as well, i.e. you won't hear individual station IDs on the IPR web streams. There are studios at each of the three universities - Ames, Cedar Falls, Iowa City. The "Studio One" programming originates from Cedar Falls; some local talk programming originates from Iowa City; but any of the studios can originate programming and news reporters are stationed at each location. Master control is at Ames.

Finally, a reason to visit Ottumwa for the first time in 50 years!
 
K231DI Des Moines, recently acquired by IPR, is running the News & Studio One service. This would appear to duplicate WOI-FM, which is a class C that puts a strong signal over Des Moines. It isn't listed on the IPR website. Hmmmm....
 
Mark Roberts said:
K231DI Des Moines, recently acquired by IPR, is running the News & Studio One service. This would appear to duplicate WOI-FM, which is a class C that puts a strong signal over Des Moines. It isn't listed on the IPR website. Hmmmm....
Click to expand...
I was trying to follow what will happen to 94.1 K231DI Des Moines. Maybe Iowa Public Radio does not know what they want to do with it yet because having 94.1 simulcast WOI-FM does not help anything I would think. I wonder if they were offered 94.1 and decided to buy it before they had a plan. I had thought they would use it for their 24-hour a day news channel. 94.1 has not been added to their online station list either.
 
brian marchand said:
I was trying to follow what will happen to 94.1 K231DI Des Moines. Maybe Iowa Public Radio does not know what they want to do with it yet because having 94.1 simulcast WOI-FM does not help anything I would think. I wonder if they were offered 94.1 and decided to buy it before they had a plan. I had thought they would use it for their 24-hour a day news channel. 94.1 has not been added to their online station list either.
Click to expand...
Are they going to up the power for it or not?
 
It is peculiar that if they were going to run an existing other service such as 24-hour news or classical that it isn't on the air already.

My only thought is maybe a new HD sub of WOI-FM that's coming?

Power cant be increased much, if any, due to short spacing and interference issues.
 
brian marchand said:
I was trying to follow what will happen to 94.1 K231DI Des Moines. Maybe Iowa Public Radio does not know what they want to do with it yet because having 94.1 simulcast WOI-FM does not help anything I would think. I wonder if they were offered 94.1 and decided to buy it before they had a plan. I had thought they would use it for their 24-hour a day news channel. 94.1 has not been added to their online station list either.
Click to expand...
That might seem to be the most natural, and easiest, extension of IPR's existing services, especially considering that the WOI(AM) nighttime signal in Des Moines is so-so. News & Studio One on FM goes to Studio One from 7 pm to 5 am, though News (the AM-only service) is mostly repeats from 7-11 pm and then the BBC World Service overnight.

radiorobert said:
It is peculiar that if they were going to run an existing other service such as 24-hour news or classical that it isn't on the air already.
Click to expand...
Classical seems covered by the 97.7 translator, which is on the KDPS tower just west of downtown. The 94.1 translator, in a slightly odd location north of downtown, wouldn't add that much more coverage for IPR Classical.

radiorobert said:
My only thought is maybe a new HD sub of WOI-FM that's coming?

Power cant be increased much, if any, due to short spacing and interference issues.
Click to expand...

Thinking about it some more, I'm thinking that a fulltime Studio One service might be in the offing for 94.1. This would require an HD-3 channel to be activated on WOI-FM (at least). A stream of Studio One is already being programmed 24/7, so I would expect any additional expense to be minimal.

Yeah, this is speculation, and I don't usually engage in speculation, but IPR provides a real service to (at least the eastern 2/3 of) the state.

One other odd thing: right now the audio level on K231DI is slightly higher than it is on WOI-FM...for the same program material!
 
Yes. WOI was originally a daytimer. When the rules were loosened on the clear channel frequencies in the 1980s, they added dirctional night service. There's skywave from KFI, plius the other 640 stations that were able to add/increase night power.
 
ngriffin said:
Yes. WOI was originally a daytimer. When the rules were loosened on the clear channel frequencies in the 1980s, they added dirctional night service. There's skywave from KFI, plius the other 640 stations that were able to add/increase night power.
Click to expand...
It's a basic 2-tower cardioid pattern aimed east from Ames. Nighttime 0.5 mv/m contour slices right through Windsor Heights. Looks like that went in around 1982.

The nighttime signal is listenable in Des Moines, but you wouldn't confuse it for a local signal, either. It's probably worse in West Des Moines.
 
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