Bonus Article for the "The Voice"

Many of you already have received our latest quarterly newsletter called, "The Voice." In the rush to get out the newsletter crammed with information, one article was missed in the final printing. Here's that article from WVPE Program Director, Lee Burdorf who wrote:

WVPE gets its audience measurements from Arbitron, the leading radio research organization, which samples hundreds of Michiana residents for three months twice each year. For the fall 2009 survey, we were pleased to achieve 24^th best share in the nation – WVPE’s total audience compared as a percentage to the total audience in the market listening to radio.

The spring 2010 ratings brought an even nicer surprise. The Arbitron surveys show 83,800 people listened to WVPE each week in the rating period – April-June. We haven’t had ratings that high since 2004 when it was almost 75,000; last spring it was 58,400. The average listening audience for any given quarter hour in spring 2010 was 5,100. The previous high was 3,400.

The station became the #1 Michiana radio station Saturdays from 8am-3pm. And our #1 show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me can boast a weekly audience of nearly 22,000 people.

While we anticipate the signal increase will keep these fabulous numbers in future Arbitron surveys, we hope many of these new listeners will see value in pledging support to keep the programming coming their way.

Changes to the 3rd City

At the top of every hour WVPE says the legal ID. After we say "Elkhart/South Bend," we then say, "Your NPR Station for [insert rotating city name here]."

The 'rotating city name' list is all cities in our listening area who have at least 3 active members. We periodically update the list to match our current membership records; we updated the list this past week.

Unfortunately, the towns of Ligonier, Mill Creek, Topeka, & Union Mills in Indiana, PLUS Paw Paw & Vicksburg in Michigan fell out of the WVPE rotation as some members did not renew.

Because of the signal expansion, the towns of Akron, Albion, Claypool, Logansport, Star City & Winamac in Indiana, PLUS Coloma, Harbert, Lawton & Union Pier in Michigan were added to our rotation.

Congratulations to the new communities. We'd love to add more cities. If you do not hear your town in our rotation, encourage your neighbors to become members. [AH]