WINS (AM)

WINS (1010 kHz), known on-air as "Ten-Ten Wins", is a radio station in New York City, owned by CBS Radio. WINS's studios are in the combined CBS Radio facility at 345 Hudson Street in the TriBeCa section of Manhattan, and transmitting towers in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

WINS is one of the nation's oldest all-news radio stations, broadcasting in that format continuously since 1965.

History

The station began broadcasting first during 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 1000 on March 29, 1941 as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement and then eventually to 1010 on October 30, 1943. The Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corporation purchased the station from Hearst in 1946.

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 1950s. 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.

It is said that the last song played in 1010 before it became a news station was "Out in the Streets", by The Shangri-Las^[1], on April 18, 1965, at around 8 PM.

"All News, All the Time"

On April 19, 1965, after weeks of speculation, WINS changed its format radically. The station became one of the first all-news stations in the United States, going with the format around the clock. WINS immediately established a template for its format, with an easily-identifiable, 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", "Listen 2, 3, 4 times a day" and "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world". The latter tagline was a reference to WINS's 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 Metro 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 (three regularly scheduled reports at :12, :32, and :52 past every hour with breaking weather news interspersed in the front of each segment), 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's 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's 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.

Influence

WINS's 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 WAVA in the Washington, D.C. area, and 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 spurred 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, five 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 from NBC in 1988, converting WMAQ into a full-time news outlet with mixed results.

Today, the New York outlets coexist with the format as CBS-owned sister stations. As of February 2011, CBS Radio operates seven of the largest all-news stations in the country—WINS, KYW, WCBS, WBBM, KNX, KCBS in San Francisco, and WWJ in Detroit.

Notes

External links

• Official website of 1010 WINS
• Query the FCC's AM station database for WINS
• Radio-Locator Information on WINS
• Query Arbitron's AM station database for WINS
• WINS Historical Profile & Interviews - 1978
• Aerial view of WINS studios from Google Local