WEDR
Encyclopedia
WEDR is an urban-formatted radio station
serving the South Florida region and licensed
to Miami, Florida
. WEDR has an unusually wide music selection for a mainstream urban-formatted
radio station that ranges from typical hip-hop
and R&B to reggaeton
. This is because South Florida is a very diversified region that has various music tastes. WEDR is owned by Cox Broadcasting
alongside sister stations WHQT
, WFEZ and WFLC
, and has their studios located in Hollywood, Florida
.
WEDR has an unusually shaped coverage area due to the station moving its antennae from a class C to a class C1 on a new tower. The main reasoning behind this so that the station's signal doesn't interfere with the close frequencies that serves southwestern Florida. It also began broadcasting in IBOC digital radio
, using the HD Radio
system from iBiquity
in Summer 2005.
acquired them from an AM
radio station in Birmingham, Alabama
. WEDR-FM had rock and country music
formats.
1970 -- WEDR adopts a black format. The station had a weak signal that couldn't cover all of Dade county, but it fared well because it was the only black station in the market.
1988 -- WHQT drops its pop/dance format and adopts an Urban Contemporary format. According to the Miami Herald, "WEDR dipped to a low ranking of 24th in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market, and was eulogized as an outmoded, black-run David squashed beneath the foot of a corporate white Goliath."
1990 -- WEDR changed slogans from "Starforce 99" to "99 JAMZ", an Urban Contemporary
with a notoriously wide variety playlist that ranged from R&B, Soul
, and rap to Reggae
on the weekends.
April 21, 1990 -- The station's signal was increased from 16,000 watts to 100,000 watts. 99 Jamz becomes a factor in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton market. The signal reaches as far as the Caribbean.
1992 -- 99 Jamz becomes the top rated station in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale market.
2003 -- Program Director and morning drive host, James T, migrates to sister station WHQT
. James T. had been at WEDR for twenty years. WEDR began to skew more towards current format being a Mainstream Urban
with the slogan "99 JAMZ, South Florida's Number One For All of Today's Hip Hop and R&B", then to "99 JAMZ, South Florida's Number One For More Today's Hip Hop and R&B" to compete with it new crosstown rival, Clear Channel
-owned WMIB, "103.5 the Beat" (now a Spanish radio station). But they do still play slower R&B and Classic Soul songs during Night JAMZ show in the overnight hours, despite most of them played on sister station WHQT. Today, WEDR is exclusively rivaled at WPOW (Power 96).
July 2004 -- 99 Jamz launches the Big Lip Bandit Morning Show featuring Supa Cindy and Benji Brown (produced by Marcus "Wiiz" Johnson)
2005 -- 99 Jamz kicks-off the highly anticapted, number one night show in South Florida "The Take Over" with K. Foxx and DJ Khaled. In July of 2009, K. Foxx left to do Morning's for New York's Hot 97.
October 2006 -- WEDR's General Manager announces, Derrick Baker as Program Director of 99 Jamz
March 2008 -- 99 Jamz is NOW known as 99Jamz South Florida's ONLY Station for Hip Hop and R&B. WEDR continues to dominant the South Florida Market, with format changes from former competior WMIB, what is now a spanish station.
July 2008 -- 99 Jamz launches the nationally syndicated "Rickey Smiley Morning Show" with Ebony Stelle, HeadKrack, Gary, Rock T and Special K, with Miss Kimmy and Benji Brown on the local end.
2009 -- WEDR's General Manager, Jerry Rushin moves to Cox Media Groups "Market Mananger"
As of today, 99 JAMZ is #1 in the South Florida Market and continues to dominate the competition in PPM
on nights, produced by Antoine "Toine the Don" Edwards Night JAMZ with Felisha Monet on late nights, and an early-morning Gospel JAMZ hour.
Special Friday night programming includes The Bashment Explosion with King Waggy Tee and Mike B. Notable weekend programming includes The Rickey Smiley Weekend Jump off on Saturday Mornings. Community Voices with Cheryl Mizell on Sunday Mornings, Sunday Morning Gospel with Maestro Powell plus The number one rated "Sunday School Hip Hop Session" with Supa Cindy and DJ Griot.
Radio station
Radio broadcasting is a one-way wireless transmission over radio waves intended to reach a wide audience. Stations can be linked in radio networks to broadcast a common radio format, either in broadcast syndication or simulcast or both...
serving the South Florida region and licensed
City of license
A city of license or community of license, in American and Canadian broadcasting, is the community that a radio station or television station is officially licensed to serve by that country's broadcast regulator....
to Miami, Florida
Miami, Florida
Miami is a city located on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida and the county seat of Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the eighth-most populous county in the United States with a population of 2,500,625...
. WEDR has an unusually wide music selection for a mainstream urban-formatted
Mainstream Urban
Mainstream Urban is a term used to describe a radio format similar to an Urban Contemporary format. The format differentiates itself due to two factors: playlist composition and target demographic...
radio station that ranges from typical hip-hop
Hip hop music
Hip hop music, also called hip-hop, rap music or hip-hop music, is a musical genre consisting of a stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted...
and R&B to reggaeton
Reggaeton
Reggaeton is a form of Puerto Rican and Latin American urban and Caribbean music. After its mainstream exposure in 2004, it spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton originated in Puerto Rico but is also has roots from Reggae en Español from Panama and Puerto Rico and...
. This is because South Florida is a very diversified region that has various music tastes. WEDR is owned by Cox Broadcasting
Cox Enterprises
Cox Enterprises is the successor to the publishing company founded in Dayton, Ohio, United States, by James Middleton Cox, who began with the Dayton Daily News. He was the Democratic candidate for the President of the United States in the election of 1920...
alongside sister stations WHQT
WHQT
WHQT, Hot 105FM, is an Urban Adult Contemporary-formatted radio station owned by Cox Media Group that serves the South Florida region. WHQT is licensed to Coral Gables, but its studios are located in Hollywood along with its sister stations WEDR, WFLC, and WFEZ...
, WFEZ and WFLC
WFLC
WFLC is an Adult Contemporary music formatted radio station in Miami, Florida. The station is owned by Cox Radio. It plays music from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, except on weekends, when it plays only 1980s music as part of the "Totally 80s Weekends"...
, and has their studios located in Hollywood, Florida
Hollywood, Florida
-Demographics:As of 2000, there were 59,673 households out of which 24.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.5% were married couples living together, 11.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 42.2% were non-families. 34.4% of all households were made up of...
.
WEDR has an unusually shaped coverage area due to the station moving its antennae from a class C to a class C1 on a new tower. The main reasoning behind this so that the station's signal doesn't interfere with the close frequencies that serves southwestern Florida. It also began broadcasting in IBOC digital radio
Digital radio
Digital radio has several meanings:1. Today the most common meaning is digital radio broadcasting technologies, such as the digital audio broadcasting system, also known as Eureka 147. In these systems, the analog audio signal is digitized into zeros and ones, compressed using formats such as...
, using the HD Radio
HD Radio
HD Radio, which originally stood for "Hybrid Digital", is the trademark for iBiquity's in-band on-channel digital radio technology used by AM and FM radio stations to transmit audio and data via a digital signal in conjunction with their analog signals...
system from iBiquity
IBiquity
iBiquity Digital Corporation is a company formed by the merger of USA Digital Radio and Lucent Digital Radio, with the goal of creating an in-band on-channel digital radio system for the United States and around the world...
in Summer 2005.
History
1960s -- The WEDR call letters have been in South Florida since the 1960s when the station's then owner Ed RiversEurith D. Rivers
Eurith Dickenson Rivers was an American politician from Lanier County, Georgia. He was the 68th Governor of Georgia from 1937 to 1941.-Life and career:Rivers obtained a degree through La Salle Extension University...
acquired them from an AM
Amplitude modulation
Amplitude modulation is a technique used in electronic communication, most commonly for transmitting information via a radio carrier wave. AM works by varying the strength of the transmitted signal in relation to the information being sent...
radio station in Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham, Alabama
Birmingham is the largest city in Alabama. The city is the county seat of Jefferson County. According to the 2010 United States Census, Birmingham had a population of 212,237. The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area, in estimate by the U.S...
. WEDR-FM had rock and country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
formats.
1970 -- WEDR adopts a black format. The station had a weak signal that couldn't cover all of Dade county, but it fared well because it was the only black station in the market.
1988 -- WHQT drops its pop/dance format and adopts an Urban Contemporary format. According to the Miami Herald, "WEDR dipped to a low ranking of 24th in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale market, and was eulogized as an outmoded, black-run David squashed beneath the foot of a corporate white Goliath."
1990 -- WEDR changed slogans from "Starforce 99" to "99 JAMZ", an Urban Contemporary
Urban contemporary
Urban contemporary is a music radio format. The term was coined by the late New York DJ Frankie Crocker in the mid 1970s. Urban contemporary radio stations feature a playlist made up entirely of hip hop/rap, contemporary R&B, pop, electronica such as dubstep and drum and bass and Caribbean music...
with a notoriously wide variety playlist that ranged from R&B, Soul
Soul music
Soul music is a music genre originating in the United States combining elements of gospel music and rhythm and blues. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of...
, and rap to Reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
on the weekends.
April 21, 1990 -- The station's signal was increased from 16,000 watts to 100,000 watts. 99 Jamz becomes a factor in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton market. The signal reaches as far as the Caribbean.
1992 -- 99 Jamz becomes the top rated station in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale market.
2003 -- Program Director and morning drive host, James T, migrates to sister station WHQT
WHQT
WHQT, Hot 105FM, is an Urban Adult Contemporary-formatted radio station owned by Cox Media Group that serves the South Florida region. WHQT is licensed to Coral Gables, but its studios are located in Hollywood along with its sister stations WEDR, WFLC, and WFEZ...
. James T. had been at WEDR for twenty years. WEDR began to skew more towards current format being a Mainstream Urban
Mainstream Urban
Mainstream Urban is a term used to describe a radio format similar to an Urban Contemporary format. The format differentiates itself due to two factors: playlist composition and target demographic...
with the slogan "99 JAMZ, South Florida's Number One For All of Today's Hip Hop and R&B", then to "99 JAMZ, South Florida's Number One For More Today's Hip Hop and R&B" to compete with it new crosstown rival, Clear Channel
Clear channel
A clear-channel station is an AM band Radio station in North America that has the highest protection from interference from other stations, particularly concerning night-time skywave propagation. Usually known as class A stations since 1982, they are occasionally still referred to by their former...
-owned WMIB, "103.5 the Beat" (now a Spanish radio station). But they do still play slower R&B and Classic Soul songs during Night JAMZ show in the overnight hours, despite most of them played on sister station WHQT. Today, WEDR is exclusively rivaled at WPOW (Power 96).
July 2004 -- 99 Jamz launches the Big Lip Bandit Morning Show featuring Supa Cindy and Benji Brown (produced by Marcus "Wiiz" Johnson)
2005 -- 99 Jamz kicks-off the highly anticapted, number one night show in South Florida "The Take Over" with K. Foxx and DJ Khaled. In July of 2009, K. Foxx left to do Morning's for New York's Hot 97.
October 2006 -- WEDR's General Manager announces, Derrick Baker as Program Director of 99 Jamz
March 2008 -- 99 Jamz is NOW known as 99Jamz South Florida's ONLY Station for Hip Hop and R&B. WEDR continues to dominant the South Florida Market, with format changes from former competior WMIB, what is now a spanish station.
July 2008 -- 99 Jamz launches the nationally syndicated "Rickey Smiley Morning Show" with Ebony Stelle, HeadKrack, Gary, Rock T and Special K, with Miss Kimmy and Benji Brown on the local end.
2009 -- WEDR's General Manager, Jerry Rushin moves to Cox Media Groups "Market Mananger"
As of today, 99 JAMZ is #1 in the South Florida Market and continues to dominate the competition in PPM
Programming
Notable programming includes The Rickey Smiley Morning Show with Ebony Steele, Gary with the Tea , Headkrack, Sister Sondra, Rock T, and Special K on weekday mornings. Other notable weekday programming includes mid-days with Shelby Rushin & DJ Kool G, afternoons with Lorenzo "Ice Tea" Thomas & DJ Irie/DJ Entice, The Take Over with DJ KhaledDJ Khaled
Khaled bin Abdul Khaled , better known by his stage name DJ Khaled, is an American record producer, radio personality, DJ, and record label executive. He is a radio host for the Miami-based urban music radio station WEDR and the DJ for the hip hop group Terror Squad. In 2006, Khaled released his...
on nights, produced by Antoine "Toine the Don" Edwards Night JAMZ with Felisha Monet on late nights, and an early-morning Gospel JAMZ hour.
Special Friday night programming includes The Bashment Explosion with King Waggy Tee and Mike B. Notable weekend programming includes The Rickey Smiley Weekend Jump off on Saturday Mornings. Community Voices with Cheryl Mizell on Sunday Mornings, Sunday Morning Gospel with Maestro Powell plus The number one rated "Sunday School Hip Hop Session" with Supa Cindy and DJ Griot.