> I live in Ohio but I'm interested in knowing more about the
> history of WXRT. From what I've been able to figure out, it
> seems like the format of the station reflects the people who
> work there rather than vice versa. Is Infinity happy with
> the AAA format and the billing they deliver? Is
> management/airstaff stable and happy? I ask because they
> seem pretty steady in a volatile radio market, not just in
> Chicago but in the overall landscape of current FM as an
> industry.
>
> Any comments or feedback about XRT would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
A straight bit of history.
WXRT was a brokered foreign-language station owned by the Lee family (a sister station to WSBC, which at that time shared the 1240 AM frequency with two others) that signed off at midnight in 1972. A group of people who had just quit WDAI and WGLD, two "progressive" stations that had become formatted AOR (before the term was coined), came to XRT wanting to buy the overnight hours. The Lees agreed and the program started in the summer of 1972, called "Classical Rock." The program was getting some underground buzz and when the contracts ran out for the 10 p.m. time slots about six months to a year later, the "Classical Rock" people took over those slots. A little while later, the 8 p.m. slots became available and "Classical Rock" bought those times. Over the next few years, "Classical Rock"'s principals became station employees and they adapted the "Chicago Fine Rock Station" slogan. By 1976 they were starting at 3 p.m. and by 1977 the station had become 24-hour rock.
In those days, the music selection was much more eclectic--you would hear classical music back-to-back with Emerson, Lake and Palmer--and the station didn't run any recorded spots, following the policy of WFMT. (They did run beds for concert/record spots that the jocks would read live copy over.) By 1979, Norm Winer had become PD and dragged the station kicking and screaming into the New Wave era. This was probably the height of XRT's hipness quotient.
In the 90s, when Q101 went modern, XRT fought tooth-and-nail with them for the approval of the modern rock audience, but soon discovered that their more longtime audience wasn't all that wild about the grunge and that they didn't want to do be as tightly-formatted as Q, so they became more AAA in focus and more after making their veteran listeners happy and less about being hip and trendy. That's pretty much where they are today, which satisfies most of their listeners and angers those with more adventurous tastes. But the station continues to get good numbers with their affluent target audience (much of which they share with WBEZ) and continues to bill well, so despite being now owned by Infinity, has had less corporate meddling than a lot of others stations like them (say, KBCO in Boulder or Cities 97 in the Twins). (It helps being out on the Northwest Side at Belmont and Cicero, farther from the suits than most stations--and Infinity hasn't tried to move them back, although I have the feeling that when the Block 37 building for channel 2 gets built, all of the Infinity cluster will probably be moved in there.) And they do boast perhaps the most stable air staff schedule of any Chicago FM.
XRT is not a mass appeal station (and I wonder if they'll be able to adapt to the Q101 generation as they get older), but for now I would guess that they're pretty low priority for Infinity to want to change any time soon.
