It all began on March 31, 1922. That was the date that Louisiana’s first radio station – and indeed, the first licensed station in the Gulf South – went live on the air.
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Broadcasting from the campus of Loyola University, Father Edward Cummings christened the newly-minted WWL with a speech followed by an original piano composition by musician Giuseppe Farate of Tulane’s Newcomb College, kicking off 100 years of radio for the station now known as “The Big 870.”
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Conceived as a fundraising vehicle for Loyola, WWL would come a long way from its meager beginnings in a physics lab-turned-studio in the campus’s Marquette Hall. Today it stands as a world class broadcast and digital operation delivering news, weather, sports and entertainment to its home city of New Orleans as well as the entire Gulf South and a large portion of the United States at-large.
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One of a very few 50,000-watt AM radio stations awarded a clear signal by the federal government, WWL has the power to reach more than 38 states, broadcasting on both 870 AM and 105.3 FM. Adding streaming over the internet to computers and smartphones, WWL is truly worldwide.
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On September 7, 1957, Loyola diversified their broadcasting capabilities by adding WWL-TV to their media portfolio, a move that, at the time, was thought to eventually make WWL Radio obsolete.
Instead, WWL Radio thrived! And it did so by integrating itself and its news coverage into the New Orleans landscape, becoming a crucial lifeline during challenging times and a meeting place for celebrations, a primary source of information to the community.
Even amid the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state of Louisiana’s worst natural disaster in history, WWL Radio remained live on the air – the only local media operation to do so, weathering a multitude of obstacles including massive power outages, widespread flooding and vast destruction.
Through it all, WWL served as a lifeline to the community at a time when communication infrastructure and levees failed in tandem.
In the critical post-storm days and months, WWL continued to serve the community, boosting the voices of advocates pushing to rebuild the areas crippled by Katrina’s carnage and restore New Orleans to its place as one of America’s great cities.
Today, WWL continues to promote the Crescent City and its surrounding areas through its current renaissance while providing news, conversation, information, sports, traffic and so much more.
From the smaller issues that impact all of us day-to-day to larger crises like crime waves, COVID and the ever-present threat of storm damage, WWL Radio soldiers on as the voice of the community.
100 years and counting…