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Illinois Public Media
Illinois Public Media is the public broadcasting service of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — operating NPR member stations WILL (580 AM) and WILL-FM (90.9 FM) plus PBS member station WILL-TV, its radio lineage dates to 1922, making it one of the oldest university broadcasting operations in the United States.
About Illinois Public Media
The story begins on April 6, 1922, when station WRM signed on from the University of Illinois Electrical Engineering Laboratory in Urbana — broadcasting with the only two vacuum tubes on campus, so fragile they had to be cooled by blasts from an electric fan. The call letters became WILL in 1928, and in 1935 the station settled on the 580 AM frequency it still uses today. The FM branch began in 1941 under the WIUC callsign — the first FM license ever granted to a university in the United States — and became WILL-FM on 90.9 MHz in 1954. WILL-TV followed on August 1, 1955. In 1948, WILL hosted the Allerton Conference of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, an event widely regarded as a forerunner of NPR and PBS; twenty years later, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood debuted nationally on WILL-TV in 1968.
The three stations were brought together under the Illinois Public Media banner in 2009. The organization is a nonprofit unit within the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, operating from Campbell Hall for Public Telecommunication on the university's campus. Its flagship services include the NPR news/talk programming of WILL-AM 580, the classical and news service of WILL-FM, PBS programming on WILL-TV, and locally produced staples such as the statewide radio talk program The 21st and the Illinois Newsroom.
Today Illinois Public Media reaches central Illinois and beyond with NPR, PBS, and classical services. Its digital home is will.illinois.edu.
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