American University, which owns noncom NPR-affiliated News-Talk WAMU-FM Washington, DC, is buying Inspirational WWED-FM Fredericksburg, VA from Educational Media Corp. for $375K. Educational Media also recently announced the sale of WWED’s simulcast partner, WWEM-FM Lynchburg, VA, to Pathway Christian Academy for $136K.
Last summer, we reported that WWED and WWEM (previously Classical) were to go dark on 8/1/13. That never happened. The Classical format continued as a webcast on ClassicsRadio.org.
WWED launched in 2005, and tried several different formats, including praise and worship, gospel, bluegrass and contemporary Christian. WWED and WWEM switched to a classical music format in February of 2012. They switched to Inspirational in August of last year.
RBR-TVBR observation: Like we said last year, the Fredericksburg market is fairly well served by Classical WETA-FM Washington, DC, which is the most powerful station there. Classical/Jazz/NPR WCVE-FM out of Richmond to the south is also a flamethrower. So perhaps too many choices for that format are to blame for the loss of Classical. Nonetheless, WAMU should have better coverage in the market, as Fredericksburg is about 50 miles to the south of WAMU’s transmitter in NY DC (see maps). We thought EMC would sell the 89.5 frequency in Fredericksburg to the University of Mary Washington. Its current station, WMWC, says it streams live on the internet, but has no RF signal. We couldn’t get it to stream for us and the website hasn’t been updated for well over a year.
