NorthEast Radio Watch 8/12/2024: The End of WCBS

In this week’s issue… Audacy LMAs 880 to ESPN NY – iHeart cuts slam Erie – Remembering Bill Abbate

By SCOTT FYBUSH

After 57 years as one of two all-news stations on the NEW YORK dial, the end has arrived for Audacy’s WCBS (880), and it’s coming quickly.

The news arrived in a surprise announcement Monday morning: as Good Karma Brands prepares to end its LMA of WEPN-FM (98.7) from Emmis at the end of August, it has entered a new three-year LMA with Audacy to put its ESPN New York programming on the 50,000-watt AM signal of 880, a deal that will also see Mets radio rights remaining on 880 as a part of the new ESPN format there.

If the exact nature of 880’s new identity was a stunner, the end of the all-news format on the station isn’t, at least not to anyone who’s been paying attention in the last few years as Audacy has moved to wind down the expenses of running two all-news formats in the same market.

Remarkably, WCBS and WINS (1010, and more recently 92.3) have now functioned as sister stations under common ownership for longer than they spent as fierce competitors. WINS came first, launched by Westinghouse in 1965, followed two years later by CBS’ conversion of 880 from a stodgy full-service station to a rival all-news outlet. They battled in every sense until 1994, when Westinghouse bought CBS and assumed the CBS name – and even after that, WCBS and WINS operated independently of each other for several decades, at first from separate buildings and later from different floors of the cluster’s home in Hudson Square.

After CBS sold its radio stations to Entercom, and especially after Entercom’s transition to Audacy, change began to come more rapidly, especially after WINS added its FM signal and after a new deal with the station’s unions last year that allowed for most of the behind-the-scenes newsroom operations of the two stations to be combined.

While WCBS continued to produce some of the highest revenue of any US radio station, especially an AM-only signal, the writing was clearly on the wall for its long-term future with the news format. In addition to sports preemptions for the Yankees and later the Mets, the 880 format began to drift away from full-time news, adding more long-form programming and weekend paid programming.

And now, as of August 26, it will be over entirely. Brigitte Quinn will host a look back at the long and very proud history of 880 during her show on August 22, and we’d guess there will be a few days of simulcasts to pull remaining WCBS listeners over to WINS, which will become the only all-news station in town, following by several decades the similar closures of what were once all-news rivals in Chicago and Los Angeles. (Historians will note that in those markets, the former Group W all-newsers, WMAQ and KFWB, gave way to their bigger, stronger former CBS rivals, WBBM and KNX. New York has always been its own story.)

So what happens next in the biggest radio transition New York has seen in decades?