MMMM # 192 Media History - WERC, Birmingham, Alabama

     WERC Radio has been in a talk format so long---30 years this year I believe---that most people don't realize it was once a "Top 40" music station....and it had a "Standards" format before that when it was WBRC and owned by the TV station of the same name.

     During those early years the station was located on the top floor of a two-story building on 2nd Avenue North and 18th Street in Downtown Birmingham. There was a Pasquale's Pizza place on the first floor. The photos on the right show the building being torn down, sometime in the mid 1980's. The City bought the building and demolished it for parking, which is still there now..

     Folks who worked there may remember those bright orange walls! Just before demolition, there was some "DJ Destruction" inside...the GM even fired a golf ball or two through some of the big studio windows, I scavenged an old table with a marble top where the mail was dumped for sorting. I still have it in my home.

     I somehow missed the station's change of call letters last summer? To WVBB? That's what the Birmingham Wiki entry reports.

[PLUS: Newt Gingrich had a point last week when he said the the TV Newtorks would never put on a show with a title mocking Muslims. He was talking about a new ABC show called GCB, or Good Christian Belles. (Apparently the book it is based on was title "Good Christian Bitches".)
But there's always a certain amount of hypocrisy in the media. We think nothing of  showing the bodies of dead people from elsewhere, but will become very sacrimonious about it if the body belongs to an American.]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this website.]