It is with great sadness that tonight we are letting you know that our community radio station 88.3 WQNA FM and home to The Black Sheep Radio Show / Dumb Records Radio Show is coming to an end. WQNA has been on the airwaves in Springfield for forty years coming up this month since 1979. We have been lucky enough to host our own Dumb Records / Black Sheep Radio Show out of the station for the past six and a half of those years.

There is an article in The State-Journal Register that was posted online today and will be in tomorrow’s print version – “Career Center Confirms WQNA Is Up For Sale.” After dwindling to absolutely no student interest in TV and radio in recent years, the Capitol Area Career Center which houses the station’s base and supplies most of the funding to keep things going was left with a tough choice to no longer continue housing the station and putting it up for sale. From the article:

“When you’re serving zero students, you can’t justify pouring $30,000-$40,000 into the station,” Ferriell said. “It’s not a decision that we’ve taken lightly. It was a difficult decision. It’s a great station.”

This does mean that our weekly radio show on Fridays from 4:00 to 6:00 pm on the airwaves as we know it will be soon coming to an end, as well as a great number of other local weekly programs featured on the station of all different genres.

Some WQNA DJs will be getting together for a meeting soon to discuss any options of any type of contingency, or the possibilities of online streaming or podcast-type shows for the future. We are open to hearing these options out for The Dumb Records Radio Show, but are uncertain as to what the future holds for us right now. We have been recording more recent episodes of our radio program and have a few of them streaming on Mix Cloud.

A definite end date to the station is uncertain now, at this point any episode of our radio program could be our last.