WCBS Radio Ends After Six Decades as ESPN NY Takes Over

WCBS Radio Ends After Six Decades as ESPN NY Takes Over - The New York Times

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WCBS Radio, the Soundtrack of Countless Cab Rides, Goes Quiet

The news radio mainstay is turning its airwaves over to ESPN, ending its continuous coverage of the five boroughs. The Mets broadcasts will remain.

Since New York City’s 2003 blackout, Ralph Katz of Manhattan has kept two transistor radios and fresh batteries stashed in bedroom and bathroom drawers.

“If that happens again, this may be the only way I’ll get my news,” said Mr. Katz, 75, a retired public relations executive and longtime WCBS Newsradio 880 listener.

“When I get up in the morning, I want to know what’s going on — what’s breaking, what’s happening, what subway is delayed, where the traffic jams and other problems are — to set up the day.”

But his favorite AM news station will soon be gone.

WCBS said this week that its nearly 60-year run as an all-news station will end this month. The station will become WHSQ and host ESPN New York sports talk.

It is an almost inevitable development as reliance on radio news continues to decline, with the rise of podcasts and smartphones delivering news, weather and traffic information.

Local radio was once a pillar of the New York City news ecosystem. WCBS helped make up the running backdrop of frenetic city life. Residents listened to it in the shower, at the breakfast table, in their cabs. It blended with the clamor of the delis and bodegas. It provided the small informational necessities that enable urban living — traffic and weather every 10 minutes on the 8s — and chronicled the epochal events that shaped New York.

Local news coverage in general has declined in recent decades. City desks downsized, and many neighborhood papers vanished or were bought up by chains and cut back. Newsstands once draped with dozens of papers now carry few or none or have disappeared entirely.

But WCBS, which began its all-news format in 1967, retained a loyal base of stubbornly analog New Yorkers. These listeners are mourning the loss of one of the city’s last straight news format stations.

“It became part of the skyline of New York,” said Jonathan Kahn, 68, a lifelong New Yorker and self-described “radio guy” in Queens.

He called WCBS one of the last vestiges of live radio on the AM dial, one that provided “the immediacy of radio, the reporters’ personalities and the news on the hour.”

“With WCBS, there’s always someone there in a newsroom on the other end of the speaker,” Mr. Kahn said. “You don’t get ‘This just in’ listening to a podcast, and you don’t get ‘We interrupt this broadcast’ on a streamed show.”

Officials with Audacy, WCBS’s parent company, cited “headwinds facing local journalism nationwide” and said the station would switch to the sports format on Aug. 26. Mets games will continue to be broadcast on the station.

Loyal WCBS listeners may switch to WINS, the other all-news station that Audacy owns in New York, which has enjoyed a larger audience.

The Writers Guild of America East, which represents part of the WCBS newsroom, said that 23 staff members it represents were being laid off.

Sam Wheeler, the guild’s executive director, called the closing of the station “a giant loss for New York City and the news industry at large” and criticized Audacy’s decision as “another example of consolidation by a major media conglomerate, which ultimately deprives the public of critical local news stories with different perspectives.”

An Audacy spokesman, David Heim, declined to comment on the layoffs.

Whether at the diner counter or slogging through midtown traffic, the station’s news readers helped brief millions of listeners in a New York minute.

Its lead stories were delivered at the top of the hour punctuated by staccato snare-drum beats. Then came traffic reports on the tunnels and bridges from Tom Kaminski in Chopper 88 and weather updates with the meteorologist Craig Allen. To New Yorkers, the features and names became internalized mantras.

The station played a vital role in covering stories like the terror attacks of Sept. 11, the blackout, the Hudson River emergency plane landing in 2009 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“Pre-smartphones, when people didn’t have access to a TV, they had their car radios and battery-operated radios and they listened to 880 for hours,” said Peter Haskell, a reporter at WCBS who retired in 2022 and worked on all those stories in his 28 years. “And that’s how they got information on flooding and power outages and news from public officials.”

Mr. Haskell said the station developed strong listener loyalty.

“One woman once told me, ‘Don’t tell my husband, but you’re the first voice I would hear every day — you woke me up in the morning,’” Mr. Haskell said. “It speaks to how intimate and personal radio is, and to how 880 had this role for so long, playing such an important part of people’s lives.

“It’s such a big, sprawling metropolis, but radio has this deep powerful connection,” he said. “You’re having a one-on-one conversation drawing listeners in. People hear the reporters in their home, in the car and in the office every day, and these people begin to feel like a friend to them.”

The writer and commentator Fran Lebowitz said she heard about WCBS’s closure on Monday from WINS, which she usually favors over WCBS because its signal is stronger on her radio.

“I was thinking after hearing the news that it’s probably a matter of minutes before we don’t even have radios anymore,” said Ms. Lebowitz, adding that since she does not use a computer or cellphone, she listens to news radio “400 times a day, on and off.”

Ms. Lebowitz, 73, said that when she mentions her radio news habit to younger people, “They say, ‘The radio? What’s that?’”

“I may be the youngest person who listens to radio anymore,” she said, adding that in the early 1970s when she drove a hack, “Every cab had it on all the time, because they have the traffic reports.”

One of the drivers was Davidson Garrett, 71, who listened to news radio for the four decades he drove a yellow cab in New York before retiring in 2018.

“It was the soundtrack to the city,” he said. “I was a big news junkie, and I drove at night, so it was my lifeline. It helped keep me from falling asleep behind the wheel and was really the only solace you had as a cabdriver. When you’re stuck in gridlock and you’re going out of your mind, the radio really calmed people down.”

“Passengers would ask you to turn it on,” Mr. Garrett said. “A lot of passengers, particularly men, liked to listen to the game or if big news was happening.”

On the air Tuesday morning, the anchor Paul Murnane told listeners about the station’s closing before segueing to a segment on chronic problems plaguing New Jersey Transit, adding, “We won’t miss the commute.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the man who does traffic reports for WCBS Newsradio. He is Tom Kaminski, not Todd Kaminsky.

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Corey Kilgannon is a Times reporter who writes about crime and criminal justice in and around New York City, as well as breaking news and other feature stories. More about Corey Kilgannon

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