page_title: WCPN
section_title: Revival as WCPN
hierarchical_section_title: WCPN / History / Revival as WCPN
caption_attribution_description: Playhouse Square
context_page_description: WCPN – branded "90.3 WCPN" – is a non-commercial educational radio station licensed to Cleveland, Ohio. Owned by Ideastream, the station serves Greater Cleveland and much of surrounding Northeast Ohio. The WCPN studios are located at Playhouse Square in Downtown Cleveland, with a transmitter site in the Cleveland suburb of Parma. Broadcasting a mix of public radio and jazz, WCPN is the Cleveland affiliate for National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and the BBC World Service. In addition to its standard analog signal, WCPN broadcasts over two HD Radio channels, and is available online.
  WCPN traditionally dates its start to September 8, 1984, when it began regular operation under its current broadcast license and call sign. However, other accounts trace its history to the station it supplanted, WBOE, which in 1938 was the first formally recognized educational radio station in the United States under the auspices of the Cleveland Board of Education, and in 1941 became the first educational station operating on the FM band.
context_section_description: Prior to the purchase of WBOE by the Cleveland Public Library being consummated, WBOE's license was found to have lapsed, and thus was expired. While the Cleveland Board of Education filed a license renewal application for WBOE on July 11, 1979, Cleveland Public Radio decided to contest WBOE's transfer to the library, filing a competing application on October 17, 1979 to operate a station on 90.3 MHz. In June 1981 the FCC announced that, because the two applications were mutually exclusive, it would have to hold a competitive hearing in order to chose between the two. The remaining CRRS subchannel broadcasts were suspended in May 1982, and the station remained completely silent until the fall of 1984.
  In the absence of WBOE, Kent State University's WKSU-FM, which carried NPR programming beginning in 1973, became the de facto sole NPR member in northeast Ohio, while Cleveland earned a dubious distinction as being the only major-market city in the United States without a designated public radio outlet. Due to a recent power increase, WKSU added the Cleveland area to its primary coverage, with the city receiving a city-grade signal. However, WKSU lacked programming directed specifically to the immediate Cleveland/Cuyahoga County region, as its main cities are Akron and Kent; an additional power upgrade for WKSU filed with the FCC was contested by the Cleveland Public Library, even as the library system's director was not opposed to it.
  On September 9, 1982, the Cleveland Board of Education had before it a resolution, numbered 371-82, entitled "Facilities Agreement With Cleveland Public Radio and Cuyahoga Community College". Cleveland Public Radio finally got permission to take control of the station assets after agreeing to expand its board of directors from 24 to 31 members, adding three persons each from the Cleveland Public Library and the Cuyahoga Community College, plus one from the Board of Education for the first 10 years of the new station's existence; in turn, the Cleveland Public Library withdrew their license application. As part of the compromise, Cleveland Public Radio also agreed to provide airtime for school board news and to provide vocational training for students, and would air programming provided by Cuyahoga Community College. Due to the way this arrangement was handled, the FCC dismissed the Cleveland Board of Education's license renewal application on October 18, 1982, officially deleting WBOE's license, and concurrently issued Cleveland Public Radio a construction permit for WBOE's replacement, which on June 20, 1983 was assigned the call letters WCPN. Prior to the start of regular programming, the Cleveland Radio Reading Service was reactivated in May 1984, again limited to persons with special receivers who could pick up the subchannel transmissions.
  Although many NPR stations featured classical music, in Cleveland WCLV (95.5 FM) already had a classical format, so WCPN decided to adopt a jazz music format. WGAR (1220 AM), by then a country music outlet, donated its entire jazz record collection to the station. A kick-off party with 1,200 people in attendance was held on August 5, 1984. WCPN began regular programming on September 8, 1984, and, following the playing of a Beatles album for testing purposes and to help people tune in to the station, made its formal debut broadcast at 10:00 p.m. with a live show featuring vocalist Mel Tormé from the Cleveland Masonic Auditorium. The original format was "45% jazz and 55% news and public affairs", and the station expanded to 24-hour service on January 1, 1985.
  In 2001, WCPN merged operations with WVIZ, the PBS member station for Cleveland, to form a non-profit organization named Ideastream. The two stations moved to new facilities in downtown Cleveland at Playhouse Square—dubbed the Idea Center—in the fall of 2005, and were joined by WCLV (104.9 FM) in 2010. WCLV's owners, Radio Seaway, donated the station to Ideastream in 2011.
  Despite WCPN's separate history, one visible reminder of WBOE's past is in display at the Idea Center: a large Works Progress Adm
caption: WCPN's current studio facilities at Playhouse Square in Downtown Cleveland, dubbed the Idea Center; the complex also houses co-owned PBS member station WVIZ and classical music outlet WCLV.
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