WNKU has been sold

It was announced last Tuesday that the local radio station WNKU would be selling to the Bible Broadcasting Corporation for $1.9 million. The station, run by Northern Kentucky University, made an announcement on their website confirming the authorization of the sale of the station. For the past 30 years, WNKU has been broadcast throughout the Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati areas at 89.7 FM. According to the statement, WNKU programming is expected to go off the air within the next few months.

Listener loyalty

Loyal listeners of WNKU are not going down without a fight, some going so far as launching a petition to save the radio station from extinction. As of right now the petition has obtained over 4500 signatures from listeners in the community. The petition can be found on the website, cincymusic.com. According to an article posted by CincyMusic, “WNKU has been a beacon for discovering new music- especially local music in the past 30 years.” Even bands like Walk the Moon, who got their start in Cincinnati, have signed the effort to save the station. During a public hearing prior to the sale of the station, many supporters of WNKU plead that the station would not be sold. According to Ian Bolender, a partner of CincyMusic who helped organize the petition, “you’re not just selling a radio station, you’re selling off the well-being of our music community. Without WNKU, a lot of artists would’ve never broke in this market.” According to John Taylor, an avid WNKU listener, “you can’t replace the expertise of a DJ hand-selecting through music. I’ve discovered artists like Sturgill Simpson, who just won a Grammy, long before he was famous because of WNKU.”

NKU makes a statement

In a statement released by Rich Boehne, the chair of NKU’s board of regents, it was explained that the “marketplace has changed and it’s against (WNKU).” Boehne has said that Northern Kentucky University subsidizes millions of dollars each year for the station, but now those dollars will be directly invested into the education of students. Despite these subsidies, WNKU has grown a deficit of $2.6 million since 2012 and that number grows each year. The station has been sold to the Bible Broadcasting Corporation, a radio company that specializes in contemporary Christian music.

So far, no response has been issued to the petition to save the station. Only time will tell if it will have any effect on the decision to sell the station. The coming months will have supporters listening closely for updates.

The link to the petition to save WNKU is listed below:

https://cincymusic.com/save-wnku