About Us

This station began as WFIW in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. In 1932, WFIW was bought by George Norton Jr., its transmitter was moved to Louisville, and the call letters were changed to WAVE-AM.

WAVE-AM was the long-time radio sister of WAVE-TV (channel 3). For many years, it aired a full-service MOR format, which later shifted to oldies. In 1988, WAVE-AM was sold to Radio One (not related to the company that would eventually buy stations in the Louisville market in the late 1990s), which forced the radio station to change call letters to WAVG. In the Fall of 1989, the station dropped local programming and switched to a satellite-fed oldies format. On September 4, 1990, WAVG switched to an adult standards format. In 1991, WAVG was sold to Sunnyside Communications. On January 8, 1997, Sunnyside announced they would sell WAVG to Pulitzer, then-owners of WLKY-TV, who announced plans to flip the station to an all-news format, with AP News Radio programming and simulcasts of WLKY’s newscasts. The changeover took place at Noon on June 16; at the same time, the WAVG call letters and standards format would move to 1450 AM, while 970 adopted the WLKY-AM call letters. In August 2000, Hearst-Argyle (which bought all of Pulitzer’s broadcasting outlets the year before) sold the station to current owner Salem Communications, and flipped it to a news/talk format.

On January 5, 2015, WGTK rebranded as “970 The Answer.”