City | Buffalo, New York |
---|---|
Broadcast area | Buffalo, New York |
Branding | Fiesta Latina |
Frequency | 1120 kHz |
First air date | 1947 |
Format | Spanish |
Power | 1,000 watts day only |
Class | D |
Callsign meaning | Buffalo BuFfalo |
Former callsigns | WWOL, WHTT, WMNY |
Owner |
Cumulus Media (Radio License Holding CBC, LLC) |
WBBF (1120 AM) is a radio station located in Buffalo, New York and broadcasting at a frequency of 1120 kHz on the AM band with a daytime power of 1000 watts.
The station is owned by Cumulus Media (which bought stations from Citadel Broadcasting) and is operated under a Lease Management Agreement.
The WBBF call sign is perhaps better known and remembered in upstate New York for its long association with a Rochester, NY radio station, now known as WROC, which for many years was that city's main top-40 radio station and its ratings leader from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s.
The station now known as WBBF signed on in 1947 as WWOL. It signed on an FM counterpart, WWOL-FM, in 1954. During the 1990s, the station simulcast sister station WHTT-FM as WHTT. The station was sold to Mercury Communications in the 1990s and changed its format to a brokered programming format as WMNY.
The WBBF calls were used on several radio stations in nearby Rochester for over fifty years, including stations now known as WROC, WBZA and most recently, WFKL, who dropped the calls in early 2005. Then-WMNY picked up the WBBF calls shortly thereafter.
The station had been a part of the "Totally Gospel Radio Network" operated by FellowshipWorld from September 1996 until December 2006. Totally Gospel moved to a stronger 24-hour signal on sister AM station WHLD and eventually purchased their own FM station in 2010 WFWO.
The station is now a Spanish-language music and talk station. All of the Spanish-language programming on WBBF which was initially produced by Niagara Independent Media, New York, now is operated by a local Hispanic ministry.
When Cumulus Media switched WHLD from adult standards to CBS Sports Radio early in 2013, the company planned to move the former WHLD format to WBBF, but important people in the Spanish speaking community wrote to Cumulus about the station's value to the people. The ministry's programming remained.