What does the future of AM news radio look like? We asked Paul Murnane
WCBS 880AM morning show co-host Paul Murnane discusses the importance of AM radio on Thursday, April 20, 2023.
Kevin R. Wexler, NorthJersey.com
WCBS, News Radio 880 AM, has a long history in New York City and the suburbs. On Monday, it was announced that the station as it was known will no longer exist. Here’s a look at its beginnings and a timeline of its major events over 60 years and counting.
1924: WCBS was founded on September 24 by Alfred H. Grebe, a radio manufacturer. Its call sign at the time was WAHG and was located at 920 kilohertz (kHz) on the AM scale.
1925: The frequency changes to 950 kilohertz and shares airtime with WGBS, Gimbel’s Department Store.
1926: The call sign is changed to WABC (for Grebe’s Atlantic Broadcasting Company) following an agreement with the North Carolina radio station Asheville Battery Company, which owns the call sign. The studios are moved from Richmond Hill in Queens to Steinway Hall on West 57th Street in New York City.
1928: Columbia Broadcasting System purchases WABC for $390,000, making it the company’s flagship radio station. Grabe’s secondary station, WBQQ, is part of the package, and the call letters become officially hyphenated WABC-WBQQ. WABC can also be heard worldwide on shortwave station W2XE.
1929: CBS and WABC will occupy six floors at 485 Madison Avenue. Over time, they will occupy the entire building as well as additional locations across the street and throughout New York City.
1932: The frequency changes again to 860 kHz.
1940: The Federal Communications Commission eliminates the dual call letters and WABC-WBQQ is now called WABC.
1941: The frequency changes for the last time to 880 kHz.
1946: The American Broadcasting Company is founded in the mid-1940s. CBS does not agree to have its flagship station bear the initials of its competitor, and after negotiations with a station in Springfield, Illinois, to abandon the call sign it had used since 1927, WABC becomes WCBS.
1964: WCBS moves into “Black Rock,” the corporate headquarters of CBS, a skyscraper designed by modernist architect Eero Saarinen at 51 W 52nd Street.
Mid-1960s: “Up to the Minute”, an afternoon news and information program, is broadcast. It is the prototype for what would later become “Newsradio 88”.
1967: WCBS Newsradio begins August 28th.
1970: The last record from “Music Til Dawn,” which premiered in April 1953, airs “That’s All” on January 4, marking the beginning of WCBS’s transformation into a news-only station.
1972: The weekday morning variety show “Arthur Godfrey Time” ends.
2000: WCBS leaves Black Rock and moves to West 57th Street to convert to digital broadcasting. Around this time, the station also begins calling itself Newsradio 880.
2024: ESPN New York replaces WCBS on August 26.
Source: “The Airwaves of New York” by Bill Jaker, Frank Sulek and Peter Kranze; “WCBS: A Radio Island in the Stream” by Charles “Buc” Finch; New York City TV & Radio History; the New York Times
