WBEZ

Chicago Public Media Inc.

About this app

The WBEZ app lets you listen to the news and voices of Chicago on your schedule, wherever you are. Listen to live radio broadcasts, on-demand audio features and podcasts with the best storytelling locally and around the nation. You’ll enjoy original WBEZ Chicago programming and shows from our partners, including NPR, BBC and more.

Take your trusted news on the go. Listen to the news live wherever your day takes you. The WBEZ app delivers Chicago news, national news and international news right to your hand.

You never have to miss a minute again. You can rewind at any moment and replay any live show from the last week to catch up on anything you missed. With the WBEZ app, continue to get investigative journalism, cultural reporting, news headlines and more on your timeline.

Discover something new. Browse through the best audio stories and shows WBEZ Chicago has to offer. Each day, featured stories are curated just for you from our newsroom. Plus, you can find popular podcasts from WBEZ, NPR and other featured partners; including titles such as Curious City, Nerdette, Motive and Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! There’s something for everyone with the WBEZ app.

WBEZ Chicago is listener-supported and Chicago’s NPR news station, one of the largest and most respected public media stations in the country.

Ratings and reviews

I really love WBEZ, and this app needs help. Like for others, it constantly drops for me. This has been a chronic problem across several types of phones and across several wifi networks so it must be an app issue. Unfortunately, it makes this app unusable. Works for a minute or two and then drops. UPDATE solved the issues. Went into app management and allowed all permissions for the app and now works perfectly!!! 5 stars!

It starts streaming when I click the play button fine, but when I click to stop sometimes it stops, sometimes it starts a second stream. When I click a third time it stops the second stream. I've had to go into app settings to kill the app to actually stop play. Also it dies on occasion. I'm connecting via WiFi so I don't think that problem is with my connection. Edit: now it completely doesn't work. At all.

Content gets 5 stars, but it pains me to say this app is reliably unreliable. It errors out regularly in the middle of playbacks so I'm forced to restart the whole thing and fwd 30 seconds at a time until I find where it left off. Even when I listen live, it errors out regularly. In general, the app has some bag bugs and serious performance issues. I've stopped using it for the most part. I really wish they'd invest more in the app as it's a necessary channel to compete for listeners.

What's new

Multiple featured stories are now available through our new discovery carousel over the Browse Screen. Find a full history of our radio highlights through the new Top Stories screen. 24 hour replay has also been introduced for select programs on our Radio Schedule.