WINS (AM)
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| WINS | |
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| City of license | New York City |
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| Broadcast area | New York City area |
| Branding | 1010 WINS |
| Slogan | All news, all the time |
| Frequency | 1010 kHz (Also on HD Radio) |
| First air date | 1924 (as WGBS) |
| Format | Commercial, News |
| Power | 50,000 watts |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 25451 |
| Transmitter Coordinates | |
| Callsign meaning | World International News Service (reflecting past ownership by the company owned by Hearst) |
| Owner | CBS Radio |
| Sister stations | WCBS, WCBS-FM, WFAN, WWFS, WXRK |
| Webcast | Listen Live! |
| Website | www.1010wins.com |
WINS (1010 kHz), known on-air as "Ten-Ten WINS", is a radio station in New York City, owned by CBS Radio. Its studios are located in midtown Manhattan, and its transmitters are located in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
WINS is known for broadcasting an all-news radio format, which the station has carried continuously since 1965.
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[edit] History
The station first went on the air in 1924 on 950 kHz as WGBS, named after and broadcasting from its owner, Gimbel's department store. It moved to 860 kHz sometime around 1927, and to 600 around 1930, settling on 1180 around 1931. It was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, and by 1934 had adopted its present callsign (named after Hearst's International News Service). It changed its frequency from 1180 to 1010 on March 29, 1941 as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement NARBA. The Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corporation purchased the station from Hearst in 1946.
[edit] Rock and Roll
Crosley sold the station in 1953 to the Gotham Broadcasting Corporation, and WINS became one of the first stations to play rock and roll music. Among its early and famous personalities included disc jockeys Alan Freed and Murray "the K" Kaufman. Sports broadcaster Les Keiter, a latter-day member of the first generation of legends in that field, served as sports director for a period in the '50s. Keiter is perhaps best remembered for his recreations of San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants baseball games, which WINS carried in 1958 to keep disconnected Giants fans in touch with their team, who moved west along with the Brooklyn Dodgers the previous year.
By the early 1960s WINS faced stiff competition for the rock-and-roll audience from three other stations, WMCA, WMGM, and WABC. The competition continued after WINS was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1962. But by 1963, WMCA upstaged them all and became the top-rated top 40 station in the New York area. WINS consequently saw a decline of ratings between 1963 and 1965, normally trailing WMCA and WABC by some distance. By this time WMGM had already defected to a beautiful music format under its previous call letters, WHN, in February 1962.
[edit] "All News, All the Time"
On April 19, 1965, after weeks of speculation, WINS changed its format radically. The station became the first all-news station[citation needed] in the United States, going with the format around the clock. WINS immediately established a template for their format, with an easily-indentifiable, distinctive teletype sound effect playing in the background (some other stations later dropped this, but WINS has kept it), and the slogans, "All News, All the Time", "The Newswatch Never Stops", and "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world". The latter tagline was a reference to WINS' format clock, which segments every 20 minutes. For a time in the late 1970s, WINS had a third slogan, "New York wants to know - and we know it".
The format has remained unchanged, save for minor tweaks, over the years. Currently, WINS regularly programs traffic reports from Shadow Traffic every ten minutes on the "ones" (six times an hour), sports updates every quarter-hour (twice an hour, at :15 and :45), weather reports from AccuWeather as much as six times an hour, entertainment news once an hour (at :38) and business news twice an hour (at :26 and :56). When breaking news warrants, WINS will break format to provide continuous coverage of any event.
In 1995 Westinghouse Electric purchased CBS, a move which made WINS a sister station to its long-time rival WCBS. Early on, there had been speculation that either station would drop the all-news format, but these notions were squelched rather quickly. In fact, the performance differences in both stations supplement their continued overlap. WINS' ratings numbers are better within New York City, while WCBS's listener strength is greater in the suburbs, possibly owing to its much stronger signal. And, from a programming standpoint, WINS' harder approach is offset by WCBS' lighter, more conversational style. Since the Westinghouse-CBS merger, both stations have continued to perform well in both ratings and advertising revenue.
[edit] Influence
WINS' switch to all-news was initially derided as a poor programming choice. Several years earlier, Tijuana, Mexico-based border blaster XETRA programmed an English-language all-news format, which was unsuccessful, as was also the case with Chicago station WNUS. As a result, many in the radio industry predicted a quick demise for WINS. However, Westinghouse Broadcasting supported the format and WINS eventually prospered with it. Westinghouse made similar format changes at two other stations: KYW in Philadelphia, in September 1965; and KFWB in Los Angeles, in March 1968. Together, WINS, KFWB, and KYW served as the prototype all-news stations, and all three succeeded in attracting both listeners and advertising revenue over the years.
CBS was the first broadcaster to make an attempt to mimic Westinghouse's all-news formula. Locally in New York, WINS' success as an all-news station spawned CBS to make a similar transformation with WCBS in August 1967, though that station did not go full-time with all-news until 1970. After completing the conversion of WCBS to all-news, three of CBS' other owned-and-operated AM stations also adopted the format. With this move, CBS-owned WCAU in Philadelphia and KNX in Los Angeles competed directly against KYW and KFWB, respectively, with varying results. In 1975, NBC Radio tried an all-news approach themselves with its News and Information Service radio network, but the service shut down after only two years in operation. And, in the mid-1970s Westinghouse's second Chicago station, WIND, carried the format part-time while competing against CBS-owned, all-news WBBM. WIND was not successful, and Westinghouse tried again after selling WIND in 1985 and acquiring WMAQ in 1988, converting WMAQ into a full-time news outlet with mixed results.
Today, the New York and Los Angeles outlets coexist with the format as CBS-owned sister stations. In fact, CBS Radio today operates nine of the country's largest all-news radio stations.
[edit] External links
- Official website of 1010 WINS
- History of the station
- WINS Historical Profile & Interviews - 1978
- Query the FCC's AM station database for WINS
- Radio Locator Information on WINS
- Query Arbitron's AM station database for WINS
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