WINS (AM)

WINS
City New York City, New York, U.S.
Broadcast area New York metropolitan area
Branding 1010 WINS
(pronounced "ten-ten wins")
Frequency 1010 kHz (also on HD Radio)
(also on HD Radio via WNEW-FM-HD3)
First air date 1924 (1924)
Format News
Language(s) English
Power 50,000 watts
Class B
Facility ID 25451
Transmitter coordinates 40°48′14.00″N 74°06′24.00″W / 40.8038889°N 74.1066667°W / 40.8038889; -74.1066667
Callsign meaning World International News Service
(reflecting past ownership by the company owned by Hearst)
Former callsigns WGBS (1924–1934)
Former frequencies 950 kHz (1924–1927)
860 kHz (1927–1930)
600 kHz (1930–1931)
1180 kHz (1931–1941)
Affiliations ABC News Radio
Westwood One News
Bloomberg Radio
Owner CBS Radio
(sale to Entercom pending)
(CBS Radio East Inc.)
Sister stations WBMP, WCBS, WCBS-FM, WCBS-TV, WFAN, WFAN-FM, WLNY-TV, WNEW-FM
Webcast Listen Live
Website newyork.cbslocal.com/station/1010-wins/

WINS (1010 kHz), known on-air as "10-10 Wins", is a radio station in New York City, owned by CBS Radio. WINS's studios are in the combined CBS Radio facility in the Hudson Square area of Manhattan, and transmitting towers in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

WINS is the oldest all-news radio station in the United States, broadcasting in that format continuously since 1965.

WINS can be heard in the HD Radio format on both its own frequency and at WNEW-FM's HD-3 feed.[1]

History

The station began broadcasting first during 1924 on 950 kHz as WGBS, named after and broadcasting from its owner, Gimbels department store. It moved to 860 kHz sometime around 1927, to 600 around 1930, settling on 1180 around 1931. The station was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, and it adopted its present callsign (named after Hearst's International News Service) the same year,[2] effective January 15.[3]

WINS relocated from the Hotel Lincoln to the WINS Building, 114 East 58th Street, June 19, 1932.[4]

It changed its frequency from 1180 to 1000 on March 29, 1941 as part of the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement and then eventually to 1010 on October 30, 1943. The Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corporation announced its purchase of the station from Hearst in 1945,[5][6] though it would be over a year before Crosley would take control of WINS, in July 1946.[7]

Rock and roll

Crosley sold the station to J. Elroy McCaw's Gotham Broadcasting Corporation in 1953,[8][9] and soon after WINS became one of the first stations in the United States to play rock and roll music. Alan Freed was WINS earliest famous personality as disc jockey. Freed was followed years later by 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.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the transistor radio became popular, especially with young people who could carry radios with them everywhere, rock and roll solidified as a genre, thanks in large measure to what became known as top 40 radio. In New York, four stations battled in the category: WMCA, WMGM, and WABC and WINS. While WMCA was only 5000 watts, it was at the bottom end of the dial, which advantages coverage. The other three were all 50000 watts, but only WABC was both non-directional and a clear channel station. Being lower on the dial than the others, it also had more coverage. Of those three, WINS was the most directional (aimed straight at New York's inner boroughs), with a weaker signal than the others toward the New Jersey suburbs and the Jersey Shore. In 1962, WMGM defected to a beautiful music format under its previous call letters, WHN, while WINS was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation.[10] WMCA became the top-rated top 40 station in the New York area by 1963, then WABC became the dominant Top 40 station in the whole market by 1965. WINS bowed out of Top 40 competition with the song "Out in the Streets", by The Shangri-Las,[11] 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. It became the third radio station in the United States to attempt all-news programming, going with the new format around the clock.[12][13] WINS immediately established a template for its format with an easily identifiable, distinctive Teletype sound effect playing in the background (Most other all-news stations later dropped this, but WINS continues to use it to this day despite Teletype machines themselves becoming obsolete by the mid-1980s), and with slogans such as "All news, all the time"; "The newswatch never stops"; "Listen two, three, four 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 resets every twenty minutes.

In 1995 Westinghouse Electric purchased CBS, a move which made WINS a sister station to its long-time rival WCBS (880 AM). 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, owing primarily to its much stronger signal. From a programming standpoint, they have different styles (hard news, vs. lighter and conversational) to appeal to different listeners. Since the Westinghouse-CBS merger, both stations have continued to perform well in both ratings and advertising revenue. WINS's signal was also improved in 1995, after the company bought and took off the air KLRA in Little Rock, Arkansas.[14] This relieved WINS of the need to "null" its signal in the direction of Little Rock, as the old too-short towers in Lyndhurst were replaced with four much taller ones[15] and a less directional signal.

Despite being owned by CBS, WINS was affiliated with, ironically, ABC News Radio until January 1, 2015, when their distributor, Westwood One, dropped ABC News Radio in favor for an in-house, CNN-powered service, "Westwood One News". WINS did not clear the network newscasts, but did air vocal reports and sound bites.

The Top of the Hour ID words at the beginning was, during 1010 WINS' 50th anniversary in 2015: "Celebrating 50 Years, of All News, All The Time. This is 1010 WINS. You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."

Influence

WINS's switch to all-news was initially derided as a poor programming choice. Tijuana, Mexico-based border blaster XETRA had been programming an English-language all-news format, as was Chicago station WNUS and, previously WAVA-FM in the Washington, D.C. area.[16][17][18] Locally, WABC-FM (now WPLJ) aired a news format for several weeks during the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike.[19] None of the other attempts was a major success, and 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;[20] and KFWB in Los Angeles, in March 1968.[21] 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,[22][23] though that station did not go full-time with all-news until 1970.[24] 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 network, but it was shut down in 1977 after only two years in operation. 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 (now WSCR) into a full-time news outlet with mixed results. And in the summer of 2011, New York would have a third all-news station, and its first one on the FM dial, in WEMP FM News 101.9; in the wake of meager ratings, the format abruptly flipped back to the alternative rock format that had been on the frequency three years prior; later in 2012, Merlin Media, LLC sold the frequency to CBS Radio, which turned it into an FM simulcast of WFAN, making it a sister station to WINS as well as WCBS (AM).

Today, the New York outlets co-exist with the format as CBS-owned sister stations. As of 2016, CBS Radio operates 9 of the largest all-news stations in the country—WINS, WCBS, WBBM, KNX, KYW, KCBS in San Francisco, WBZ in Boston, WWJ in Detroit, and KRLD in Dallas.

On-Air Team

See also

References

  1. ↑ "HD Radio station guide for New York, NY".
  2. ↑ "Hearst buys WGBS, plans improvement." Broadcasting, October 15, 1931, pg. 12. PDF
  3. ↑ "WGBS Now WINS" (PDF). Broadcasting. January 15, 1931. Retrieved 1 October 2014.
  4. ↑ "Station WINS Moves" (PDF). Broadcasting. June 15, 1932. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
  5. ↑ "WINS sold to Crosley for $1,700,000." Broadcasting - Broadcast Advertising, January 29, 1945, pp. 13, 66. PDF
  6. ↑ http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-IDX/45-OCR/1945-01-29-BC-0066.pdf
  7. ↑ "WINS sale to Crosley approved by FCC." Broadcasting - Telecasting, July 23, 1946, pg. 17. PDF
  8. ↑ "McCaw group pays $450,000 for WINS." Broadcasting – Telecasting, August 10, 1953, pg. 70. PDF
  9. ↑ "For the record." Broadcasting – Telecasting, January 4, 1954, pg. 98. PDF
  10. ↑ "Westinghouse buying WINS." Broadcasting, May 7, 1962, pg. 72 (PDF)
  11. ↑ 30 Years Of Wins' 22-minute World - New York Daily News
  12. ↑ "WINS New York going to an all-news format." Broadcasting, March 22, 1965, pg. 92. PDF
  13. ↑ "The toughest test of all-news format." Broadcasting, April 19, 1965, pg. 76. PDF
  14. ↑ Hollis Duncan Recounts KLRA, Little Rock, AR History, by Hollis W. Duncan, KAAY Radio, September 15, 2010
  15. ↑ 1010 WINS, Lyndhurst, N.J. by Scott Fybush, fybush.com, May 20, 2005
  16. ↑ "McLendon wary of WINS test." Broadcasting, April 19, 1965, pp. 76–78. PDF
  17. ↑ http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-IDX/65-OCR/1965-04-19-BC-0077.pdf
  18. ↑ http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-IDX/65-OCR/1965-04-19-BC-0078.pdf
  19. ↑ "Strikebound N.Y. depends on air news." Broadcasting, December 17, 1962, pg. 44: "WABC-FM, which normally duplicates WABC until 6 p.m. (when it turns to a music format of its own), began an all-news schedule for the entire broadcast day last Friday (Dec. 14)–FM Newscope, heard from 7 a.m.-Midnight." PDF
  20. ↑ "WBC turning KYW into all-news plant." Broadcasting, June 21, 1965, pg. 9. PDF
  21. ↑ "Dry run precedes KFWB's switch to all news." Broadcasting, March 11, 1968, pg. 66. PDF
  22. ↑ "WCBS to switch to more news." Broadcasting, July 31, 1967, pp. 45–46. PDF
  23. ↑ http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-BC-IDX/67-OCR/1967-07-31-BC-0046.pdf
  24. ↑ "News all-night." Broadcasting, January 12, 1970, pg. 60 (PDF)
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