All News format out, ESPN Radio takes over

We were always a 1010 WINS family growing up but that’s a shame.

 

When WNBC-AM flipped to all sports and took on the WFAN call letters, it rated a story on the nightly TV news. I doubt this demise will get a send off equal to that one.

 

Outside of ny.sj.com, is this really news?

 

Flagship entity of the CBS (first) radio network? Nah.

 

Does WINS still play that teletype sound bed while they're reading the news?

 

I haven’t listened in so long. Waze got rid of the need for traffic alerts and weather is at your fingertips

 

It isn’t quite as clear as 780 WBBM out of Chicago, but there were nights you could pick up 880 in the Deep South. Go up to Tennessee and reception was better. In younger years when I did too much overnight driving, I would sometimes lock in one of the two and spend a little while behind the wheel pretending like I lived someplace else while absorbing the local stories and commercials.

But hey, 20 minutes of who the Lakers should trade for will keep somebody alert at the wheel I’m sure.

 

My go-to when I moved to New York was 1010 WINS because it was used in "The Paper" to open and close the movie.

 

1010 WINS even got a quick parody of its tagline in an Elmo’s World segment.

 

I grew up listening to WBBM NewsRadio Ssssseventy-Eight because that’s what my Dad listened to all the time when he drove us around in his big old mid-70s model Ford LTD. It only had an AM radio, and only when my Mom was in the front passenger seat would it be turned to WLS (which used to play music).

I think many of the big-city AM news stations will go the way of WCBS, if they haven’t already. I know a lot of AM stations in smaller markets across the Midwest switched to either sports talk or news talk (the wrong Rush) in the 1990s and 2000s.

 

LA once has two news stations om AM, KNX and KFWB, the latter becoming a sports station, then a Bollywood station before adopting a Mexican format. San Francisco has KCBS and also had KGO, a talker that had a great newsroom, before deteriorating into sports gambling.

Some will say NPR fills some gaps (especially in San Francisco with KQED-FM), but how many listeners are there for long form radio?