History
On November 12, 1953, former FCC employee Harry Hayman received a construction permit for a radio station in Morningside operating at 250 watts daytime-only on 1580 kilohertz. The call letters WPGC, representing Prince George's County were issued soon afterwards.
In May 1954, WPGC began as a multi-formatted radio station. Maxwell Evans Richmond purchased the station from Harry Hayman for $10,000 on November 10, 1954.
On April 14, 1955, WPGC was issued a permit to raise power to 10,000 watts. It also moved its offices from Morningside to a facility in Southeast, Washington, D.C. in studios formerly used by WBUZ (95.5). In 1956, the station simulcasting its programming on 95.5, by then renamed WRNC; the station is now WPGC-FM, which it became after WPGC bought 95.5 outright.
On June 28, 1965, the WPGC stations were granted a modification of their licenses to move their studios to Bladensburg while continuing to identify their city of license as Morningside. By then, the station played Top-40 programming with a format similar to WABC and WMCA in New York City and CKLW in Detroit, and was the most popular such station in the Washington area, rivaled only by WEAM (1390; now WZHF). Responding to the black population growth of the Washington area, WPGC began to alternate playing so-called "white" rock records with Motown and soul music.
After Max Richmond died in 1971, his estate received FCC approval on August 7, 1974 to sell the WPGC stations for $5.8 million to First Media Corporation. The transaction was finalized on October 17, 1974.
On April 9, 1979 the FCC granted WPGC a permit to raise power from 10 kilowatts to 50 kilowatts directional.
After 15 years in the Parkway Building in Bladensburg, the station moved to new state-of-the-art studios overlooking the Capital Beltway in Greenbelt in 1980; the station subsequently relocated to its current studios in Lanham.
WPGC was finally granted nighttime operation in 1986. That October, the station received night power, operating at 270 watts. First Media sold all of its properties for $177 million to Cook Inlet Partners, a group of Alaska Natives, in early 1987.
The station switched to a business talk format in 1988. In 1989, its night power was upgraded to 500 watts directional; the next year, it reverted to 270 watts, though still directional.
Infinity Broadcasting acquired the WPGC stations from Cook Inlet in June 1994 for $60 million. The next year, the station returned to music programming as "Flava 1580", with an all hip-hop/go-go format. The format was unsuccessful, and ultimately evolved to gospel in November 1996 as "Heaven 1580".
WPGC dropped the gospel format October 7, 2008 and began simulcasting WPGC-FM. The simulcast ended on November 10, 2008, when the station switched to a talk format. The station also dropped the WPGC call letters after 54 years, taking on the WHFS callsign that CBS had dropped from what is now WJZ-FM a week before.
On December 1, 2011, WHFS changed their call letters to WNEW as a placeholder move in preparation for those call letters to be installed on the FM dial in a lateral swap. The WHFS callsign temporarily reside on a West Palm Beach, Florida sister station which previously held the WNEW calls after CBS moved them there in 2007 after the former New York FM station of the same name changed formats and calls.
On October 1, 2012 WNEW changed their format to a hybrid government news/business news/talk format, branded as "1580 Gov. Biz Radio".
Read more about this topic: WNEW (AM)
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