Losing Heritage Radio Stations Again (And Again)

It’s hard being an obit writer in radio these days. The impending loss of all-news WCBS-AM New York was announced while I was still figuring out what to write about Kiss 100 London. That station helped make R&B and dance core sounds in UK and European radio over the course of the ’90s; now it’s moving from FM to DAB-only (not quite the end of viability in the UK as it would be here, but still significant). Before I could write that story, the CBS-AM news shook the industry. As I wrote this column, another heritage AM, CHML Hamilton, Ontario, was shut off outright.

Like songs, I have place memories of radio stations. WCBS is the station of late-night driving with my dad on the New Jersey Turnpike, but, really, anywhere in the Northeast. I had already discovered the CBS Morning News, and WCBS had a lot of the same network reporters and commentators. My father rarely listened to Top 40 just to keep up with his kids; it was WCBS that gave us something to talk about.

The loss of heritage radio stations has seemed like a barrage in recent years. With the changes at Kiss and WCBS came the realization that I’ve been losing heritage stations for almost as long as I’ve been listening to radio. 

My college years coincided with the effective demise of almost every AM Top 40 station I had ever listened to. Some went Country. Some evolved to AC, something which almost never worked. Some, such as WLS Chicago or KFRC San Francisco, took a few years longer than others. Ironically, WCBS-AM was probably my most enduring station of childhood because it wasn’t a music station.

Occasionally, as with WLS, those heritage brands transitioned to FM, although since AM Top 40’s travails coincided with a format downturn, surprisingly few did so at the time. The rise of Oldies brought some of those brands back. My most-influential Top 40, Detroit/Windsor’s CKLW, was revived twice with FM oldies; now, it’s the inspiration for CKWW-AM’s Oldies format. (CK is also the inspiration for former PD Charlie O’Brien’s Big8Radio.com.) When I first wrote this column, I’m was waiting to see what new owners do with CKWW. As it turned out, they launched Classic Hits on both CKWW and on another legendary Hamilton AM, CKOC. The new AM580 isn’t the CKLW tribute that the old one was, but both stations have local airstaff, which is encouraging.

To cover the radio industry as a reporter has been to experience radio stations as ephemeral and even the enduring ones as ever-changing. Even stations we now think of as “CHR for 40 years,” such as WHTZ (Z100) New York, were rarely exactly that. Z100’s brand remained the same, but barely camouflaged a change to Alternative, then, briefly, Rock AC in the ’90s.  When WPLJ New York became a K-Love affiliate in 2019, it left three legacies to celebrate; some of the same listeners had likely followed WPLJ from AOR to CHR to Hot AC.

Covering format changes was more fun and rarely devastating when radio was healthier — each format change was a beginning, not just an ending. Like the songs themselves that radio played, each was a potential hit, or maybe even something for next year’s Intriguing Stations column. And the stations I was sorriest to lose weren’t always heritage stations; often, they were the quirky offerings I liked that had never caught on.

The most discouraging changes were the sales that claimed still-competitive radio stations. In 2009, the then-WAMO Pittsburgh’s sale to Catholic broadcasters who took it out of the format mainstream was still an anomaly. By 2022, market-leading Country KRTY San Jose’s sale to K-Love and move to online-only was not. So were music stations moved aside so News/Talk outlets could move to FM, or heritage AMs perfunctorily shut down.

The loss of heritage stations is dispiriting — another instance where radio still being bigger than its competitors hardly seems to matter. There is broader damage from the decreasing number of all AM/FM choices. Also from the increasing number of stations switched to formats, such as sports betting, that aren’t meant to compete for ratings. Each scenario could lead to decreased listening levels overall. Few endings are a new beginning now.

There are plenty of heritage radio stations that haven’t gone anywhere. A few years ago, looking at radio ratings from 1984 led to a column on how many brands were still on the radio with a similar format nearly 40 years later. In Washington, D.C., that was nearly half of the radio stations that were above a 1 share at the time. In New York, it was about 45%. (Boston, at 30%, was one of the lowest, and that was before the sale to K-Love of WAAF.)

Some heritage brands, particularly those that have gone from Top 40 to Classic Hits or AOR to Classic Rock, have format continuity of a sort, but don’t occupy the same place in the cultural discussion. I was always happy to have an Oldies station drawing on CKLW’s heritage, but what I really missed about the station as Top 40 was seeing what R&B hits it would propel into the mainstream. The Detroit station that most does that now, WKQI (Channel 95-5), is related to CKLW in spirit only. It’s great, though, when WMMR Philadelphia or a relaunched KITS (Live 105) San Francisco are still part of the new music dialogue.

Some enduring radio brands also become reminders of radio’s diminishment. What good are heritage call letters if the voice-tracker can’t even be bothered to work them into a break? Being so local and so dependent on living in real time kept WCBS-AM sounding vital, but also made it more vulnerable to radio’s current realities.

When new lessee Good Karma moves its New York outlet for ESPN to WCBS-AM’s frequency, it will leave an opening at 98.7 FM that ROR readers have been speculating on for a year. It’s a lot to hope for a new mainstream or market-galvanizing launch now. In the best scenario, that new station cannot be “Newsradio 880.” But it could be a station that means something to New Yorkers. Or gives radio a renewed sense of sign-ons, not just sign-offs.