Around lunchtime on a warm day in September, WYBC General Manager Jules Morris and I comb through stacks of paperwork from the Yale University radio station’s files. Car horns, traffic noises, and the sound of church bells seep through the windows of the office space on the second floor of a nearly 100-year-old apartment building facing busy Broadway Street in New Haven, Connecticut. Behind us, a wood-paneled wall serves as a backdrop for an assortment of framed photos, awards and plaques from the mid-20th century. While perched on a weathered cream colored couch, we flip through 70-year-old letters that were sent to WYBC from an all-star selection of luminaries from the time. In 1955, WYBC teamed up with the Yale Daily News to produce a series of broadcast forums. Based on the collection of letters received, the station aimed far and wide in an attempt to attract renowned and interesting speakers to campus.
WYBC Begins in 1941 as Carrier Current Station WOCD
While marveling over the correspondence from politicians, scholars, authors, poets and religious leaders; we were transported back to the campus-only days of WYBC. Launched as WOCD (for “Oldest College Daily”) in 1941, the AM carrier current station began as a project of the Yale Daily News and had offices in the newspaper’s building. Early programming included a quiz show, radio drama, round table discussions, remote broadcasts and sports play-by-play. Originally on 905 AM, WOCD moved to 640 AM by the 1942-1943 academic year and the station remained on that spot on the dial for decades.
Call Letters Change to WYBC in Mid-1940s
During the 1944-1945 academic year, WOCD split from the Yale Daily News and by 1946 had changed its call letters to WYBC (for “Yale Broadcasting Company”). The following year, WYBC helped to form the Ivy Network, which brought together college radio stations in order to collaborate and facilitate the sale of advertising spots. In 1948, Yale Broadcasting Company incorporated in the state of Connecticut as a non-profit organization.
Addition of WYBC-FM in 1959
Over the years, WYBC has worked to expand its reach through a variety of methods. A second carrier current station (WYBC-A) was added in the mid-1950s and continued until 1968. In 1959, WYBC launched another station, WYBC 94.3 FM in New Haven. A commercially licensed station, WYBC-FM allowed students to broadcast off campus for the first time. The AM carrier current station continued until at least the mid-1980s and was eventually used in part as a training station for WYBC-FM.
By 1985, WYBC-FM was struggling financially, had equipment problems, and was also grappling with questions about its role on campus and in the broader community. At the time, students and non-students were on the air and also had roles in managing the station. Controversial programming and administrative changes were made, removing some community-hosted shows from the schedule.
WYBC 1340 AM Debuts in 1998
However, in the ensuing years, fewer and fewer student DJs had shows over WYBC-FM, as the format shifted to urban contemporary hits radio. To address this, in 1998, WYBC purchased the license for the former WNHC-AM 1340, changing the call letters to WYBC. A piece in the Yale Daily News (September 15, 1998) reported that, “With more diverse music, greater freedom, and a home for student DJs, officials said the new AM frequency will complement the more professional sounding WYBC-FM.”
Student-focused WYBCx is Born, While WYBC 1340 AM shifts to Public Radio Programming
By the early 2000s, most student shows were hosted on WYBC 1340 AM, while the FM station was more outwardly focused to the local community. However, things shifted for the AM station as well, with it entering a time brokerage agreement with WSHU public radio in 2011. A few years prior, students began work on internet-only station WYBCx, which became the new student radio entity for WYBC.
WYBC Stations in 2025
Today, Yale Broadcasting Company owns and oversees WYBC-AM, WYBC-FM and WYBCx. The FM station is professionally-run and the AM station airs the WSHU lineup of NPR and other public radio content. Additionally, a Yale undergraduate student has a journalism-focused paid internship at WYBC-AM. Both terrestrial stations operate under lease agreements, which provides income to Yale Broadcasting Company.
While WYBC General Manager Jules Morris is technically in charge of all of the stations, she doesn’t run the day-to-day operations of the AM and FM signals. For big picture decision-making, she works in collaboration with the Yale Broadcasting Company’s Board of Governors (made up of alumni and community members), which helps with financial oversight and also helps to provide institutional memory for the stations.
Touring WYBCx
Morris’ home base is in the Yale Broadcasting Company-owned building that houses the offices and studios for student station WYBCx across three floors of a former apartment building. A restaurant is located on the ground floor and rent from that business is another source of income for Yale Broadcasting Company.
A Yale University junior, Morris joined WYBC her freshman year and became Program Director last year before taking on the General Manager role this semester. “I knew I wanted to do college radio,” she said, adding that, “I knew it was really important culturally or it had been really important culturally.” Her interest in college radio began during her childhood in New York, when she tuned in to the Barnard College station. She recalled, “I would listen to WBAR all the time when I was a kid just because…my parents had students who had shows or I would want to find new music.”
Variety of Programming and Projects at WYBCx
Morris said that WYBCx is currently in a “transitional” period and that luckily there is a “big group of people” who are really committed to the station. Leadership positions include chairs of various departments, including broadcast, zine, podcast, design, events, board engineering, sound engineering, “Teen Takeover,” and sports. It’s a pretty amazing mix of activities for the station, which ranges from a high school after school program to live sports broadcasts to a printed music magazine (at times called Relatively Dark Blue Neither Purple Nor Green) to the concert and interview series “The Moon,” which was inspired by Tiny Desk Concerts.
Physical Music and Artifacts at WYBCx
WYBC artifacts are tucked into various nooks and crannies on the three upper floors of the station’s 4-story building. CDs are stashed in kitchen cabinets and closets contain zine archives, posters, program schedules and other station ephemera. Vintage vinyl is here and there, including recordings of biblical readings, FDR speeches, classical records, and random 7″s. Awards throughout the space range from a 1997 award from music industry publication The Gavin Report to a 1950s certificate granting an “honorable mention” for the WYBC-produced documentary “This is College Radio.”
A skeleton poking out of a plastic bin is one of the many items brought over from the old “radio house,” where WYBC members lived for many years. A 10-minute walk from WYBCx, the rental was not only a place for radio folks to live, but its basement was also used for house shows. Morris said that sadly, “this last year nobody wanted to live there, so we lost it.” Subsequently, they had to clear out the basement, which was full of audio equipment and other accumulated items from the past 10 to 15 years.
As we poked around the second floor of WYBCx, Morris showed me the podcasting area, administrative spaces and equipment storage. She was excited about a forthcoming project in which they will be renting out equipment and sound engineering services for campus events.
A cozy hangout space with a couch, chairs and rug is on the third floor. And that floor also contains some of the station’s record library within a room with a conference table and work space for “Teen Takeover.” Morris pointed out various CDs and mentioned, “We didn’t even have until this year a way to play CDs on air,” adding “Now we just got hooked up.” Next on the agenda is to get a record player set up.
Excited about the chance to play CDs over the radio, Morris told me that she is trying to get “the broadcast heads to organize a show that’s people going through the CDs that have been sent” in by bands and promoters. She imagined a program in which DJs would pop in a random release just to check it out. As we glanced around the CDs in that space, I spotted a punk rock tribute to the 1980s, a Mr. T Experience release, and a Chumbawamba CD in the kitchen.
Cheery Top-Floor Studio at WYBCx
After trekking up another flight of stairs, one arrives in the WYBCx studio. Under a sloped roof sits a desk with a cluster of chairs, mixing board, computer, DJ mixer, microphones, headphones and speakers. String lights hang on an adjacent wall and the opposite wall is full of posters. While sitting in the broadcast space, one faces a large open area that is set up for performances. Bright orange walls, carpet, and ceiling brighten that section; which is outfitted with a drum set, keyboard, microphones, monitor speakers and music stands.
As Morris and I entered the studio, we heard loud hip hop music playing from the speakers. It was between regular shows and she explained that an automated playlist of music was being broadcast until the next DJ’s shift. As we looked out over the colorful space in front of us, Morris told me that this is where they record live music sets. However, live music isn’t confined to the WYBC space. In the couple of months since my visit, WYBCx has hosted several shows and a “pop-up rave” in various locations around New Haven.
While wrapping up my tour, Morris expressed both her excitement about the future of WYBC and also her appreciation for the station’s legacy. She said, “I want this to be a big year…and archives are such a big part of that.”
Thanks to WYBCx + Archives of Station Tours
Thanks to Jules Morris for the tour of the WYBCx space and for sharing some fascinating historical materials with me during my visit. I’ve been building a WYBC collection in the College Radio collection within the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC) on the Internet Archive, so it was amazing for me to finally see the Yale radio operation in person. Additionally, since I’ve done research within the Yale University archives over the years, the visit helped to bring that research to life. To learn more about the early 1950s at WYBC and community radio pioneer Lorenzo Milam’s time at the station, see my piece, Lorenzo Milam’s College Radio Days. This is my 188th radio station tour report and my 130th college radio station tour. You can view the entire collection of my radio station visits in numerical order or by station type in our archives.
