Milt Rosenberg to host new midday show on WCGO

Milt Rosenberg

Milt Rosenberg

Milt Rosenberg, the University of Chicago professor emeritus who hosted “Extension 720” for 39 years on WGN AM 720, is about to launch a new Monday-through-Friday radio show on a north suburban station.

Starting Monday, “Milt Rosenberg” will air from noon to 2 p.m. weekdays on WCGO AM 1590, the Evanston-based talk station owned by Kovas Communications.

Producer Zack Christenson described the show as “classic Milt Rosenberg-type stuff — literature, arts, culture, science, history, public affairs, etc.” Rosenberg will take calls from listeners on the program, which will be available for download as a podcast almost immediately after the live broadcast.

“The format will be familiar from his previous show, but given its placement right in the middle of the day, we'll occasionally do things like one topic the first hour, a different topic the second hour, trying to give a little more variety,” Christenson said.

Rosenberg, who turns 90 later this month, was forced to retire from WGN in 2012 after four decades as the erudite evening personality on the Tribune Media news/talk station. A man whose towering intellect and curiosity matched a prodigious ego, Rosenberg presided with ease over a wide array of topics and commanded a worldwide following on the Internet and through podcasts downloaded by the millions.

In 2014 Rosenberg was among the 10 inaugural inductees in the WGN Radio Walk of Fame.

After he left WGN, Rosenberg began hosting an independent podcast on miltrosenberg.com. “The radio show will basically be an extension of the podcast we started last year — same show, added platform,” Christenson said. “We're taking the weekly podcast we've been doing and extending it to five days per week and adding a terrestrial radio component.”

Rosenberg is the second veteran Chicago broadcaster to turn up on the 10,000-watt station in as many months. In March, WCGO began airing Bruce DuMont’s “Beyond the Beltway” from 6 to 8 p.m. Sundays. The nationally syndicated political talk show previously aired on Cumulus Media news/talk WLS AM 890.