For those of you not following the shocking developments tonight at WAMU 88.5, the NPR affiliate ordered its online presence frozen, and all of it staff have been summoned to an emergency meeting at 9:00AM tomorrow.

They are financially sound as an organization. Last year they had a 750k surplus, which was the best in several years. They continued to grow membership, and their car donation numbers have been steady for the past decade. Details can be found here.

However, 88.5FM is *technically* owned by American University, which houses the legendary news station and public radio outlet on its campus. American University, like many universities save for a tiny segment of elite schools, is seeing dramatically shrinking enrollment. The university has a serious budgetary shortfall resulting from want of tuition dollars. If I had to venture a guess, the announcement set for tomorrow morning likely has to do with that relationship, and how it impacts the future of the radio station.

You can read more about American University's finances in this article by The Eagle.

But, I could be wrong. While WAMU is in a healthy financial position, and is only 7 weeks into the new fundraising year, there could be challenges resulting from rumored layoffs by National Public Radio (NPR) itself. WAMU is an affiliate of the NPR network. Or, perhaps a review or audit of finances has shown WAMU to be in not the healthy financial picture it has reported in its annual reports. Those reports can be found on their website. In the meantime: NPR’s offices will be locked and closed tomorrow, and most their internal systems’ functionality has been locked for all NPR staff. Odd behavior, to be sure.

Either way, we’ll know tomorrow morning.