its programming. WWJ is the flagship station for Michigan Wolverines football. In cases where there are schedule conflicts, it also carries sports events normally broadcast by its sister stations. (For example, WWJ airs Detroit Tigers baseball games when 97.1 The Ticket is broadcasting Detroit Red Wings hockey.) In these cases the regular news programming can still be heard online. In March 2005 WWJ began streaming its programming over the Internet. In August 2005 the station began offering podcasts of newsmakers, interviews, and some of the station's feature programming. In August 2006 it began broadcasting in the HD Radio format. WWJ programming was live 24 hours a day until July 2015, when, to cut costs, it began airing pre-recorded reports overnight. By 2016 the station returned to live news around the clock. WWJ broadcasts full-time with 50,000 watts, using a five-tower directional antenna system during daytime hours, and its entire six-tower array at night. WWJ has the highest field strength — 7,980 mV/m at a distance of 1 km — in a single direction (nighttime pattern) of any U.S. AM station. With this powerful signal primarily sent to the north, the station can be heard in parts of northern Michigan during nighttime hours, including the Upper Peninsula and Mackinac areas, and much of southern Lower Michigan during the day. The northeastern reaches of Metro Detroit receive only a fair signal because of the need to limit WWJ's signal in that direction in order to protect a facility that once broadcast on AM 950 from Barrie, Ontario. History In her 1960 review of the station's history, Cynthia Boyes Young cautioned that: "The actual beginnings of the Detroit News radio station, later to be known as WWJ, were not recorded at the time, and the story can only be partially pieced together from the reminiscences of radio pioneers." Three years later, Robert Preston Rimes found that "...fragmentary, incomplete, and sometimes, inaccurate histories existed". Preparations WWJ has traditionally recognized August 20, 1920, as its founding date. This was the day that the Detroit News inaugurated daily broadcasts from a studio established in the newspaper's headquarters building, located at the corner of Lafayette and 2nd Avenues. These initial broadcasts, by what was then called the "Detroit News Radiophone", were sent under an amateur station license operating with the call sign "8MK". The person most responsible for establishing the Detroit News Radiophone service was the newspaper's