WCBS/880 AM newsradio: Why we're all going to miss it

Craig Allen has worked at weather forecasting since he was a 17-year-old senior at Farmingdale High, and has been paid to do it for the past 43 years — all of those for WCBS/880 AM newsradio, which you probably know best as "880."  The obvious question on Monday ("How does it feel?") hadn't really occurred to me because it had already occurred to Allen:

"There's no way I can answer all these people," he said by phone from his home studio in Merrick, where half of "traffic and weather together on the 8s" has originated since 1991. Allen was referring to the listeners who had been posting nonstop on his Facebook page versions of the same lament: What am I going to listen to? Who am I going to turn to? What am I going to do?

"They are very upset," Allen told me. "I am blown away by what I'm reading."

What he had felt just hours before had hit him "like a death in the family."

WCBS/880 AM will end forever on Aug. 26, parent company Audacy announced Monday, and will be replaced by ESPN New York, rival to Audacy-owned WFAN. The Mets broadcasts will remain.

What won't remain is a legacy and history that dates back almost 100 years (Sept. 20, 1924), with WCBS ultimately becoming  the flagship of the mighty CBS network. In 1967, 880 — along with WINS/1010 — was at the vanguard of the most successful format in radio history: All news, all the time.

A couple dozen dedicated professionals will lose their jobs, too, including some of the best-known names on New York radio, like Allen, and Wayne Cabot and "Chopper 880's" eyes in the sky, Tom Kaminski, a 35-year veteran. Cabot, who along with Paul Murnane, is 880's veteran morning anchor, called Monday's news a "gut punch."

A hard punch for countless listeners, too.

Anyone with a pair of ears and a car is familiar with 880. My earliest memory dates to the late '70s, from behind the wheel of a '68 Mustang — rusted wheel wells, a hole in the floor, an engine with 300,000 hard miles and a Ford Philco tuner that still miraculously worked. A few stations came in clearly, but the clearest was Newsradio 880, thanks to that flame-throwing antenna off City Island. I don't remember the first anchor I heard, but she was almost certainly Rita Sands, or maybe it was Jim Donnelly, the soul and spirit of 880, who ended a 20-year run there in 1992. Or perhaps Robert Vaughn or Steve Porter or Rich Lamb or Deborah Rodriguez or Long Island reporter Ellen Mitchell or other legends like Harvey Hauptman and Lou Adler.

Any great media organization, as 880 surely has been, is no better than its staff, and the alumni list at this one is a radio who's who — Charles Osgood, Charles Kuralt, Art Athens and Pat Summerall. Long before the glory years at "60 Minutes," Ed Bradley, a young reporter from Philadelphia, got his start at WCBS, too.

Audacy — then called Entercom — bought the CBS stations in 2017, but at least in hindsight it's now obvious the struggling company had always favored 1010 (which had been part of CBS since 1995, when Westinghouse became the parent company). In 2022, 1010 was simulcast on 92.3 FM — a boon for the station, the death knell for 880.

By phone on Monday, Tim Scheld, a longtime reporter there, and 880's news director from 2003 to 2022, told me, "There is something about a local radio station that for people in my generation gave you comfort, and those voices felt like home. If you'd been away for a while, and came back to New York, and heard Wayne Cabot, you'd breathe a sigh: 'Oh, I'm home.'"

Scheld said the station "had always succeeded because the people who came before us were especially talented — like Lou Adler, Jim Donnelly, Rita Sands, Harvey Hauptman, and so many others — and those who worked here felt a degree of responsibility to carry on their legacy. They would talk to you but not down at you, and about what was important to you — not screaming headlines, or the last shooting or something salacious.

"The New York metropolitan area is worse off with 880 going away."

No one could argue otherwise.