Starting in the 1970s, WILL and other public broadcasters began turning to listeners and viewers for part of their operating funds. Debbie Day, WILL’s first development director, talks about how the Friends of WILL helped Illinois Public Media grow.
At a time when Black composers and performers were underrepresented in the classical music world, WILL-FM’s Roger Cooper filled the gap with “Classically Black”, a nationally distributed series of programs produced for Black History Month from the late 1980s until Cooper’s retirement in 2008.
April 6, 1922, marked the first broadcast of the University of Illinois’ radio station WILL-AM, then operating as WRM. At the time, both listeners and the university were still figuring out the role of radio broadcasting in American life. In the century that followed, WILL built a program schedule dedicated to both learning and culture, expanding to FM, television and online.