All News format out, ESPN Radio takes over

I was always listening to 880, as they had better coverage of the tri-state area and 1010 Wins was focused on the city proper. Traffic and weather together on the 8s.

 

My mom used to listen to WNEW AM in the mornings. The oldies station, which was far less cool than my friends. I do know a ton of big band and Sinatra songs from the 1940s and 50s though.

When we lived in Manhattan and would drive back from the Shore, Mrs. W was in charge of moving the radio to catch the traffic on the 8s on 880 and then the 1s on 1010 so we knew the best was the cross the Hudson.

 

I met Fran Schneideau once or twice back in the day when there was a big news story in Fairfield County.

The 880 folks were always total pros.

 

We listened to am/fm radio for the prizes. Tickets to sitting with WorldB, to Stray Cats tickets in a basement theater. Big time, yeah!

 

I’m so sad about 880. Grew up listening to it and it’s still my go to when I’m wondering why Waze is sending me to the truck lanes on the Turnpike instead of the cars only.

 

I listened to ’BBM when I was in college.

Millard Hansen, who had a great radio voice, was the late-night anchor. One night, he was reading the scores and started, “the Blackhawks beat the Edmonton … ” Apparently not knowing they were the Oilers, he continued, “ … group, 6-4.”

 

Or the cash lanes instead of the EZ-Pass

 

The AM stations around the country that were radio pioneers are legendary. I'd list them but every big city has several with close to 100 years of service. Just in San Francisco alone, we all grew up with Don Sherwood on KSFO, Dr. Don Rose on KFRC, Dave McElhatten on KCBS, Frank Dill on KNBR, Jim Dunbar on KGO, and Tom Donahue on KYA.

Donahue actually saw this coming. According to Wiki ... Donahue wrote a 1967 Rolling Stone article titled "AM Radio Is Dead and Its Rotting Corpse Is Stinking Up the Airwaves", which also lambasted the Top Forty format.

AM has been on its death bed since the early 1970s when the FM dial began being added to car radios. The stereo quality and static-free advantages of FM killed AM Top 40. Every AM station I worked at no longer broadcasts its original format. One had its license renewed as a Spanish-language station, one carries Catholic broadcasting and the others simulcast FM.

News and sports are really the only things keeping AM's head above water in some markets, although there are a few low-power stragglers in markets that don't have a strong FM competitor.

In the case of Atlanta's WSB, I believe the FM is more highly rated than the AM. Mostly old people read newspapers and mostly old people listen to AM radio. Sad, but true.

And to second @Liut, if you haven't been fired at least twice, you didn't have a career in radio. I qualified. Once because of the Arbitron book and the station axed the entire staff. The second because the station changed formats and didn't need a news guy anymore.

 

You can still do that, just with an app. I was using the iHeart app to listen to Los Angeles' KFI today on my drive home. My go-to music station is in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, not Mississippi).
Hell, there's a local AM station I listen to through the app because the sound quality is better. My home radio is in a bad spot to get the signal clean, and both the AM and FM signal fade out on the car radio by the time I get to work, so I just stream it. When that station is glitching on the app, my backup is another one from Columbus, Ohio, that follows the same programming schedule.
It isn't the same magic, though, as getting the skip signal bouncing through the atmosphere.
A couple of years ago we had one of those weird mornings where the FM signals get all juiced up and screwy. The local signals were getting hijacked by what I presume are far more powerful stations on the same frequency but hundreds of miles away. I picked one up from San Antonio (about 600 miles away), and others out of Texarkana and Little Rock, which are both several hundred miles distant. I sat there in my car for a few minutes, listening to them and flipping through to seeing if there were any other weird strays on the dial. Made me feel like a kid again.

 

That is precisely why this is happening. Audacy recently declared bankruptcy and needs to turn the overall red of the company ledger to black. In Chicago, it had already put two big signals on one tower (WSCR 670 and WBBM 780) and now will move both to a tower it will rent from another station to sell the WSCR tower site in Bloomingdale for $18 million. Radio has been broadcast from there since 1929 (Westinghouse’s KYW, then sold to RCA for NBC’s WMAQ).

 

Let’s see if I can do this from memory:

“750 WSB, Atlanta’s news, weather, traffic and Georgia Bulldogs station. Depend on it.”

“6 a.m., this is Scott Slade. Right now 73 and mostly cloudy here in Midtown. Today will be an 8 on the Melish Meter and we’ll have Kurt Melish’s full forecast coming up. First let’s go to the WSB 24-hour traffic center. Mark Arum what have you got for us?”

“Already a mess this morning on the top end Perimeter eastbound just before Ashford-Dunwoody Road. Two left lanes blocked as they work to clear a rollover crash with injuries. Triple team traffic continues with Captain Herb Emory flying over downtown.”

“So far so good on the Connector in both directions. About a 12 minute ride from the Brookwood split down to I-20 but volume starting to pick up. We do have a stalled vehicle at the intersection of West Peachtree and Ponce de Leon, so avoid that if possible.”