WXXI

About WXXI

WXXI began in 1958, when local educators and community leaders formed the Rochester Area Educational Television Association to bring educational programming to the city's airwaves. After raising funds for its own non-commercial signal, WXXI-TV signed on in September 1966 from studios in the former East High School building in Rochester. The station later built a new Public Broadcasting Center, opened in December 1974, alongside the companion FM station that became Rochester's first full-market non-commercial educational radio service.

The radio service split into two formats over the following decades. In 1984 the organization acquired Rochester AM station WSAY, which became WXXI (1370 AM) — a regional daytime signal covering the six-county Rochester metropolitan area — and moved all NPR news and talk programming there, leaving WXXI-FM as a 24-hour classical and fine-arts station. In 2023 the council added WXXI-FM 105.9 as an FM simulcast of its news/talk service.

Today WXXI is owned and operated by the nonprofit WXXI Public Broadcasting Council from the WXXI Public Broadcasting Center on State Street in Rochester. It produces Second Opinion, the only regularly scheduled healthcare series on public television, which ran for 18 seasons on more than 280 PBS stations nationwide. The organization has also acquired The Little Theatre cinema and CITY Newspaper (now CITY Magazine). Its digital home is wxxi.org.