WINS (AM)

Rock and roll (1953–1965)

Crosley sold the station to J. Elroy McCaw's Gotham Broadcasting Corporation in 1953 for $450,000,^[11][12] and soon after WINS became one of the first stations in the United States to play rock and roll music. In autumn of 1954, Alan Freed was hired as a disc jockey on WINS.^[2] In 1958, Murray "the K" Kaufman joined as the all-night DJ, naming his show the Swingin' Soiree.^[13] Sports broadcaster Les Keiter, a latter-day member of the first generation of legends in that field, served as sports director for a period in the 1950s. Keiter is perhaps best remembered for his recreations of San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants baseball games, which WINS carried in 1958 to keep disconnected Giants fans in touch with their team, who moved west along with the Brooklyn Dodgers the previous year.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the transistor radio became popular, especially with young people who could carry radios with them everywhere, rock and roll solidified as a genre, thanks in large measure to what became known as top 40 radio. In New York, four stations battled in the category: WMCA, WMGM, WABC, and WINS. While WMCA was only 5,000 watts, it was at the bottom end of the dial, which advantages coverage. The other three were all 50,000 watts, but only WABC was both non-directional and a clear channel station. Being lower on the dial than the others, it also had more coverage. Of those three, WINS was the most directional (aimed straight at New York's inner boroughs), with a weaker signal than the others toward the New Jersey suburbs and the Jersey Shore. In 1962, WMGM adopted a beautiful music format under its previous call letters, WHN, while WINS was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation.^[14] WMCA became the top-rated top 40 station in the New York area by 1963, then WABC became the dominant Top 40 station in the whole market by 1965. WINS bowed out of Top 40 competition with the song "Out in the Streets", by The Shangri-Las,^[15] on April 18, 1965, at around 8 PM.

"All news. All the time." (1965–present)

On April 19, 1965, after weeks of speculation, WINS changed its format radically. It became the third radio station in the United States to attempt all-news programming, going with the new format around the clock.^[16][17] WINS immediately established a template for its format with an easily identifiable, distinctive Teletype sound effect playing in the background (Most other all-news stations later dropped this, but WINS continues to use it to this day despite Teletype machines themselves becoming obsolete by the mid-1980s), and with slogans such as "All news, all the time"; "The newswatch never stops"; "Listen two, three, four times a day"; and "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world". The latter tagline was a reference to WINS's format clock, which resets every twenty minutes.

In 1995, Westinghouse Electric purchased CBS, a move which made WINS a sister station to its long-time rival WCBS (880 AM). Early on, there had been speculation that either station would drop the all-news format, but these notions were squelched rather quickly. In fact, the performance differences in both stations supplement their continued overlap. WINS's ratings numbers are better within New York City, while WCBS's listener strength is greater in the suburbs, owing primarily to its much stronger signal. From a programming standpoint, they have different styles (hard news, vs. lighter and conversational) to appeal to different listeners. Since the Westinghouse-CBS merger, both stations have continued to perform well in both ratings and advertising revenue. WINS's signal was also improved in 1995, after the company bought and took off the air KLRA in Little Rock, Arkansas.^[18] This relieved WINS of the need to "null" its signal in the direction of Little Rock, as the old too-short towers in Lyndhurst were replaced with four much taller ones^[19] and a less directional signal.

Despite being owned by CBS, WINS was affiliated with, ironically, ABC News Radio until January 1, 2015, when their distributor, Westwood One, dropped ABC News Radio in favor for an in-house, CNN-powered service, "Westwood One News". WINS did not clear the network newscasts, but did air vocal reports and sound bites.

On February 2, 2017, CBS Radio announced it would merge with Entercom.^[20] The merge will separate WINS and WCBS radio (both AM 880 and FM 101.1) from WCBS-TV. The merger was approved on November 9, 2017, and was consummated on the 17th.^[21][22]