All-news Radio - History

History

According to a Wikipedia site for 1100 KFAX radio in San Francisco, Calif., what had been KJBS radio changed to KFAX in late 1959 when the station changed formats from music, news, and sports, to become the nation's first all-news radio station. However, this experiment proved unsuccessful.

Broadcasting pioneer Arthur W. Arundel is credited with creating the first 24-hour All News station, radio or television, in the United States in January 1961 on his owned and operated WAVA in Washington. The station’s success was largely driven by a Nation’s Capital audience then riveted to news of the Vietnam War and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Arundel helped other stations in New York and Chicago also to convert to his All News All the Time format and then met direct competition from Washington Post-owned WTOP in 1969.

Radio programmer Gordon McLendon, who has been credited with pioneering top 40, all-sports, background music and telephone talk formats, is also an acknowledged pioneer in the all-news format. XTRA News went on the air May 5, 1961 from XETRA, a station licensed to Tijuana, Mexico, that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles, followed shortly afterwards by W-NUS in Chicago.

Its format, which can be heard to this day on many all-news stations, was to start each half hour with world and national news, preferably from a network, then switch to locally-anchored area news, filling out the half hour with sports, business news and features. XETRA had no outside reporters and got all of its local news from the AP and UPI wire services. Both stations operated using a 15 minute news cycle (newscasts repeated every 15 minutes)

Another early prototypical all-news format was in use by WABC-FM in New York during the 114-day 1962 New York City newspaper strike which lasted from December 8, 1962 to March 31, 1963. The format only lasted as long as the strike, though, and reverted to its regular format of Broadway show tunes and simulcasting of its AM sister station after the strike ended. The following year, ABC's Detroit FM station, WXYZ-FM made a similar effort during a newspaper strike. Both stations, which previously had simulcast their AM sister stations, carried ABC Radio Network news programs (including those not usually by the AM Top 40 stations), AM local newscasts plus wire service stories read to fill the balance of the time.

Group W, the broadcast division of Westinghouse, adopted an all-news format 30-minute cycle (despite the later slogan "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.") that eschewed network newscasts so that local and non-local news could be freely mixed, according to what was more interesting or important on any given day. Westinghouse also used field reporters at its all-news stations, which included 1010 WINS New York, KYW Newsradio 1060 and KFWB News 98 Los Angeles. WINS began broadcasting its all-news format in April 1965. A second New York all-news station, WCBS began all-news programming on August 28, 1967, although its first broadcasts were on its sister FM station after a plane crashed into its tower, knocking the AM station off the air. CBS converted some of its other AM outlets to this WCBS "Newsradio" format over the next several months and years, including WBBM-AM, KCBS-AM, KNX and WEEI (which CBS sold in the 1980s).

In 1975, the NBC Radio Network shut down its profitable weekend music and information service NBC Monitor to launch the News & Information Service (NIS), the first all-news radio network. It was closed two years later in a cost-cutting move though it had strong ratings in some key markets.

In 1994, an effort similar to NIS was launched by the Associated Press. It was officially known as AP All-News Radio and had many affiliates from coast to coast. However, it was informally better known by its promotional title of "The News Station." The Associated Press discontinued the all-news format in July 2005. Although Associated Press as of 2012 does have all-news feeds on Tunein.com.

The last national all-news radio service in the United States, the audio feed of CNN Headline News, began a long phaseout in 2007. Headline News's audio feed was popular among all-news stations, particularly after the AP disbanded their format in 2005, until the TV station decided in 2006 to abandon its all-news format and add talk show programming in prime time, when many smaller stations do not have air staff and rely on a network feed. Most of the Headline News affiliates became talk radio stations, with a handful of daytime-only stations keeping the feed. CNN also for a time offered a second all news-channel with the hour filled with CNN Radio newscasts on the hour and half-hour and business, sports and feature segments from CNN Radio and Headline News at specific points each hour, plus time segments for local news to be inserted. Many smaller affiliates, however, preferred Headline News audio which was more suited to turn-key (or unattended, automated) operation. CNN Radio ceased operations April 1, 2012.

While not a full-time NIS, the CBS Radio Network provides significant content for many, if not most, all-news radio stations in the United States, especially local stations in smaller markets. Talk Radio Network introduced an all-news service, America's Radio News Network, in 2009, beginning with a midday news block and since expanding into other dayparts; the network does not yet program overnights or weekends, but allows for tape delay for such purposes. Cumulus Media Networks offers a late-evening newsmagazine hosted by John Batchelor seven nights a week, while Dial Global offers two hourlong morning news magazines (NBC's First Light and Jim Bohannon's America in the Morning) six days a week.

All-news has for years been a top-rated radio format in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities, but as big city traffic worsens and people work longer hours that increase the urgency of planning their day ahead, the focus of such stations has increasingly been on traffic and weather, often updated every 10 minutes. Attempts at long-form commercial all-news stations, such as Washington Post Radio, have been largely unsuccessful.

A newcomer to all-news in the early 2010s was Randy Michaels, who (through his Merlin Media company) acquired FM stations in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in preparation for all-news formats in those cities (although the Philadelphia station also included talk programs). Michaels gave up on the format after approximately one year and changed formats on both the New York and Chicago stations to music formats.

As of 2012, Cumulus is planning to implement all-news in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Nashville after the start of all-news on KGO in San Francisco and KLIF in Dallas. The stations will be branded as the News and Information stations.

In September 2012, Clear Channel included a web only All-News radio channel on iHeartRadio called "24/7 News." "24/7 News" has since been customized for local cities in the top twenty radio markets.