Dogs and cats living together: Boston's two NPR news stations to cooperate on news podcast

Combine the newsrooms and have a behemoth of a newsroom. Cut out the BBC and the fucking audio of the TV news hour and combine the Boston-based shows into a two-hour block (or two, one-hour blocks). Maybe during one of the rush hours play news on both, but different flavors of news (say, national and world on one, local and business on the other).

Otherwise we have the joke:

Bostonians have two public radio stations: the one they listen to, and the one they listen to when the first one is having a pledge drive.

It's on 99.5, WCRB, which WGBH owns. It's simulcast on 89.7's second digital channel ("WGBH-HD2"), and on a station in Rhode Island whose call letters and frequency escape me at the moment.

The "W" in "WGBH" is significant; it identifies the station as American. U.S. broadcast stations have call letters beginning with "K" or "W"; the FCC can also issue call signs beginning with "A" and "N", but its policy is only to use "K" and "W" for broadcast stations, using "K" west of the Mississippi River and "W" east of the Mississippi.

Why "K" and "W"? The answer goes back to World War I, when all civilian radio transmitters were ordered off the air. The only authorized stations belonged to the Army or the Navy.

The Army assigned its stations call signs beginning with "A"; the Navy assigned call signs beginning with "N".

These were not broadcasters, but two-way stations used to relay messages. There were no microphones; everything was sent in Morse code.

Now, the Morse code for "A" is "dit-dah". The Morse for "N" is "dah-dit".

At some point during the war the Army and Navy ran out of call signs to assign. They decided to create new call signs by adding an extra "dah" to "A" and "N", respectively.

"A" with an extra "dah" is "dit-dah-dah" , which is "W".

"N" with an extra "dah" is "dah-dit-dah", which is "K".

After the war, when civilian licenses began to be issued, the Department of Commerce -- there was no FCC until 1934 -- continued to use these four letters for call signs; authorities in other countries used "D" (Germany), "I" (Italy), "F" (France), "R" (Russia), "G", "M", "V", "Z" (all British Empire), etc.

The first American broadcasting stations appeared in 1920, sporting "K" and "W" call signs, and so it has continued ever since.

So by dropping its W, WGBH drops its American identity and a century of tradition.

then went, "Awww, crap." Only a Game was kind of corny, but I was sorry to see it end for budget cuts after such a long, intently sincere, widely generous run. As a former high school sportsball player in a nowhere little Masshole town, I loved the modest stories about otherwise unsung young athletes and their wee local triumphs. RIP.

Says you!

trivial non-issue like this?

I find it useful to take in news from across the spectrum, even right-wing propaganda outlets like Fox News. It helps me understand how Trumpies can reconcile considering themselves decent, moral human beings with supporting President I Take No Responsibility and Will In Fact Deliberately Downplay the Crisis, Kill a Quarter of a Million Americans, and Crater the Economy If It Might Marginally Help My Re-Election Prospects.

You forgot the Koch Bros.

It's centrist corporate radio brought to you with some additional donations from listeners.

enough to justify separate stations, except maybe on news coverage, so this move makes sense to me. Not hard to imagine eventual broader consolidation, though. How many other American cities have two public radio outlets?

Broadcast radio is now less important than many other media sources to the youngs. Gotta move with the times, do more podcasts, YouTube-style and other social-media content, whatever channels your eventual primary donor class prefers to frequent.

Could be worse. Imagine the challenges that public arts institutions like the Boston Ballet are facing. The Ballet depends heavily on the donations of wealthy, elderly donors and faces a season where its essential cash cow The Nutcracker likely won't be able to sell live-performance tickets. Meanwhile, it is struggling to attract younger donors to sustain the institution going forward, though its artistic director has tried by steering the company more toward the kind of modern dance that is more appealing to them. It is dead lucky that it held its big annual fund-raising Ball a few weeks earlier than usual this year, barely edging the lockdown. 2021 looks a lot grimmer for it.

You may not care about the ballet, but fine arts of all stripes will be another serious long-term casualty of pandemic mismanagement. What a tragic, miserable failure of leadership there. All it needed was a modicum of empathy and competence, instead of knowing about the gravity of the threat and opting to do nothing.

Not what I would describe as "good" here in Roslindale. We've never been able to get adequate reception unfortunately.