Another Radio Story Ends: WCBS-AM Is Leaving Home, Bye-Bye
Like newspapers, magazines and television, the radio biz has scratched its head for a couple of decades about how to remain relevant in a media world increasingly dominated by social media and clickbait on phones.
For broadcast radio, many smart voices argue, the best shot lies in doubling down on “live and local.”
They have a point and that’s one reason it hurts for New York to be losing all-news WCBS-AM, whose 880 frequency as of August 27 will become the New York home for ESPN Radio.
Since New York will still have an all-news station in WCBS-AM’s surviving sister WINS (1010 AM), this won’t leave the city without full-time radio news. What it will do is eliminate one of its best-established outposts for live and local.
Radio at its classic best has always been the most intimate medium. It’s a voice talking directly to you and me, live in real time. It’s a conversation, whether the host/anchor/deejay is playing music, ranting about the Mets or telling us that there’s a rush-hour backup at the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
Radio can still be a conversation when the voice is coming from a studio in Florida or a compound in Pahrump, Nevada. But the most satisfying conversations, the ones that cumulatively embed a sense of community, come when the voice is part of our town.
F’rinstance: No matter how hard megacorporate owners try to homogenize American popular music, every city and every region still has its own sound, its own vibration. A nationally syndicated show, by definition, can’t capture that. A good local radio station does, as proven over the years pretty much everywhere. In New York, that has meant stations from WABC and WMCA to WBLS and WCBS-FM, Hot-97 and Lite-FM.
And WCBS-AM and WINS.
WINS went all-news in 1965, betting that an idea pioneered a few years earlier in other markets could work in New York. WCBS-AM started a weekday daytime news format in 1967 and went all-news a couple of years later. (For the record, Steve Porter was the first voice on the air. The second anchor was Charles Osgood.)
Few in the radio biz thought WINS was a winner of an idea. Even fewer thought the city could possibly support two all-news stations.
The doubters were wrong. By the late 20th century, both were scoring solid audiences and top-level ad revenue. They also took the smart path of sounding different from each other.
WINS was, and largely remains, the Sgt. Friday of radio stations. For those who don’t remember Sgt. Friday, he was the ultimate no-nonsense TV cop on the 1950s show Dragnet and one of his trademark lines was “Just the facts, Ma’am.”
WINS adopted he same mantra. With the clatter of a teletype machine in the background, WINS promised. “Give us 22 minutes and we’ll give you the world.” And sure enough, the next 22 minutes would be stuffed with headlines, traffic, sports, weather and, okay, ads.
WCBS-AM also delivered headlines, traffic, sports, weather and ads, but was more flexible. It would let a good story, news or human interest, run a little longer. Its reporters and anchors, from Jane Tillman Irving to Wayne Cabot, Paul Murnane, Harley Carnes, Rich Lamb, Ed Ingles, Peter Haskel, Deborah Rodriguez and so many more, came to feel like family. Craig Allen’s weather and Tom Kaminski’s traffic reports from Chopper 880 were part of the New York voice.
Kaminski was in Chopper 880 heading downtown from the George Washington Bridge on the morning of September 11, 2001, and he delivered the first, or close to the first, broadcast report that smoke and flames were coming out of the Twin Towers.
The next two hours, in which Kaminski joins anchor Pat Carroll and WCBS-AM reporters in trying to sort out something unthinkably surreal, are fascinating. At first they talk about a small commuter plane. Then the station patches into civilians near the Towers who say no, this was a big plane and it did not hit the buildings by accident.
Carroll, Kaminski and the team become live, on-air hybrids: professional newsgatherers trying to get the story on the fly, and horrified New Yorkers, wondering aloud what in the world just happened.
WCBS-AM, obviously, was not alone in this pursuit. WINS was doing the same thing, along with all the newspapers and television stations. With today’s omnipresent camera-phone coverage still a couple of years away, a WCBS-AM became the village square, the place people gathered to share outrage, sadness and disbelief.
Most mornings over the last 57 years, fortunately, have been less fraught. But on a chilly February morning, or a warm July afternoon, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers still turned to 880 to hear the weather, check the traffic and get a quick sense of whether there’s anything new they should know about the town they live in.
In a world where the “mainstream media” has found itself increasingly distrusted, a WCBS-AM has remained for many an oasis of credibility, news without an agenda.
WCBS-AM’s parent company Audacy, which is leasing the station to ESPN’s parent Good Karma on a three-year deal, said it decided to fold WCBS-AM because of “journalistic headwinds,” a depressing but fair summation of the declining audience that almost all heritage media are facing these days.
Audacy is keeping WINS, at least for now, and seems inclined to fold some of the WCBS-AM staff into its sibling rival. While that will entail adjustments and leave yet another large batch of journalists unemployed, it’s at least something.
It’s bad enough when some of your friends move out of the neighborhood. It would be worse if they all moved out at once.
