WMRA Public Radio

WMRA Public Radio is the NPR member station for the central Shenandoah Valley and Central Virginia, with studios at 983 Reservoir Street in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The station is a department of James Madison University, and its license is held by the James Madison University Board of Visitors. WMRA signed on in 1969 as a student-run station at what was then Madison College, and in 1975 it moved to 90.7 FM, joined NPR and hired its first professional staff.

WMRA (90.7 FM, Harrisonburg) reaches listeners from Winchester to Lexington and the Charlottesville area through full-power repeaters WMRL (89.9 FM, Lexington) and WMRY (103.5 FM, Crozet), a translator in Winchester, and WMLU (91.3 FM, Farmville), a Longwood University station that carries WMRA programming for much of the day. Since 2008 WMRA has also operated WEMC (91.7 FM), Eastern Mennonite University's station, which has been an all-classical service since 2014.

The station airs NPR news and talk programming alongside local reporting from its own newsroom and a corps of freelance reporters, weekend music programs, Spanish translations of its stories about the region's Spanish-speaking community, and Valley Voice, a radio reading service for people who are visually impaired. Its news department has won awards from the Public Media Journalists Association and the Virginia Association of Broadcasters.

WMRA staff are James Madison University employees, and staff openings are posted through JMU's hiring system. The team covers news reporting and editing, on-air hosting and production, programming and music direction, membership and volunteer services, corporate support sales, business administration, operations and engineering. WMRA also pays freelance reporters per story for local news pieces.