Word: wfmt
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Some ten years ago, a young couple in Chicago sold their car, emptied their bank account, and took over a half-dead FM station that had $30,000 in debts and maybe six or seven pap-happy listeners. Changing its call letters to WFMT, they began to play interesting music and talk about things that a child of 3½ probably could not understand. It was risky and somewhat revolutionary, and Bernard and Rita Jacobs thought for a while that they were failing...
Breaking into a broadcast not long after the takeover, Rita Jacobs said, "We wonder if anybody's listening-we're going broke." People were listening, and their number was multiplying. By last week, WFMT had the largest audience of any FM station in the U.S., an average 800,000 weekly. But more significantly, it is successfully competing with AM. While FM is often thought of as something like a worthy charity or an obscure quarterly magazine, WFMT last year grossed $400,000-more than $80,000 of which was profit...
Handsome Payoff. To FCC Chairman Newton Minow, WFMT has long been a sort of vast tasteland. Chicagoan Minow admires the station because it is making what he calls "a real cultural attack." Its programming is about 80% classical music, and the other 20% includes shows of uniformly high quality, ranging from plays and readings by minor and major poets to heady discussions and adequate but not repetitive news. Most celebrated WFMT character is Studs Terkel, who runs a daily 10-11 a.m. program of literate talk with both itinerant and local celebrities, such as Tennessee Williams and Chicago Novelist Nelson...
Audience Participation. In Chicago, as Busoni's Sonata No. 2 reached the last groove and began to swish round and round unattended, anxious listeners (to highbrow radio station WFMT) called the studio, got no answer, notified the police, who rushed to the studio, found Disk Jockey Omar Shapli, 27, bent over a desk, sound asleep...
Sponsors are welcomed, but strictly on WFMT's terms. The sponsor cannot choose the selections to be played and can use neither attention-getting gimmicks nor endless repetition of phone numbers. Commercials are limited to one minute in length and a maximum of 2½ minutes in any hour. Despite these advertising curbs, WFMT reports good results: a commercial for a diamond-tipped phonograph needle brought the sponsor a 150% boost in sales. Says Rita Jacobs: "The kind of listeners we have have very big ears...