WERE (1490 AM) is a commercial radio station licensed to serve Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and carrying a talk radio format known as "NewsTalk 1490". Owned by Urban One, the station serves the Greater Cleveland region. WERE is one of two Cleveland-area stations that carries The Rickey Smiley Morning Show and also features syndicated personalities Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Since 2008, an emphasis has been placed on brokered programming. Built and launched in 1947 as WSRS, a suburban station focused on Cleveland Heights proper, this station became the second in the Cleveland market to use the WJMO call sign in 1959. During this period, WJMO carried a rhythm and blues/soul music format continuously from 1959 to 1999, reputedly longer than any other such station in the United States, and was one of the first major-market radio stations to have an African-American serve as their general manager. At the same time, a number of legal issues surrounding owner United Broadcasting, repeated technical violations committed, strained relations between station management and the station's staff and audience, and a controversial ownership transfer in 1992 attracted criticism and scrutiny by the public, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), at one point putting the station's broadcast license in question. A series of ownership buyouts in the late 1990s saw the station adopt an urban gospel format, then come under control of Radio One (now Urban One); a 2007 format swap resulted in picking up the format and calls of WERE from , which it has maintained to the present day. WERE's studios are located along the Euclid Avenue Corridor on Cleveland's east side, while the station transmitter resides near University Circle, adjacent to the Case Western Reserve University campus. In addition to a standard analog transmission, WERE's programming is available online and simulcast on the HD digital subchannel of co-owned WZAK. WSRS (1947–1959) Early years Samuel R. Sague established this station as WSRS on December 12, 1947, the call letters being derived from his initials; an FM sister station, WSRS-FM (95.3), followed one week later. Both the AM and FM stations were licensed to Cleveland Heights, and positioned themselves as focusing on the Cleveland suburb specifically as opposed to all of Greater Cleveland. WSRS-FM duplicated the AM station's programming full-time, but Sague—an early proponent of FM broadcasting—referred to it in a Cleveland Press profile as WSRS that was simulcasting