Imus in The Morning - History

History

Following a successful run as an on-air personality in Cleveland, Don Imus was hired by WNBC to host Imus in the Morning in late 1971. Imus is credited with introducing New York, and the larger Top 40 radio community, to the shock jock style of hosting. His initial run in New York ended in August 1977, when NBC management ordered a purge of WNBC's on-air staff in order to revive sagging ratings. Imus returned to Cleveland, but NBC brought him back to New York only two years later. On September 3, 1979, Imus started off his first program back on WNBC with his old character/voice/bit, "The Reverend Billy Sol Hargis". The show regularly parodied songs and voices, satirizing national and local events and persons.

After WNBC was sold to Emmis Communications in 1988, a frequency shift on New York's AM radio dial saw WFAN, Emmis's sports-talk station, move to WNBC's 660 AM dial position. WNBC signed off in October 1988, and WFAN decided to retain Imus, replacing its original morning drive-time show hosted by Greg Gumbel.

Initially limited to the broadcast range of WFAN in the New York metropolitan area, the show's radio audience and influence expanded considerably once Westwood One began syndicating it in 1993.

During the WNBC years, Imus in the Morning was conducted out of NBC's radio studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The program then moved to the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens, WFAN's longtime studio home, but in 2005 the program moved to a dedicated Imus in the Morning set at MSNBC's studios in Secaucus, New Jersey, although certain cast members remained at the WFAN studios using a split-screen format. When at the Imus Ranch, Don Imus would broadcast the show from Ribera, New Mexico, while the rest of the cast remained in New York and New Jersey.

For the first 15 months of Imus' simulcast on RFD, the show originated from a custom set created for RFD located in the Cablevision Rainbow studios (home to the Fuse TV studios) in midtown Manhattan's Penn Plaza. In April 2009, the show moved to the multipurpose WABC radio studios; Imus cited the high cost of the Cablevision studios as being the reason for the move.

In September 2009, the show moved to Fox Business Network's television studios in Rockefeller Center, where Fox Business began simulcasting the program on October 5, 2009.

The final half-hour of the program consists mainly of replayed interviews and comedy bits played earlier in the program.