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NBC's NIS All-News Affiliates (1977-78)

K.M. Richards said:
The call letters on 610 back then were KSVA, which were two calls removed from the heritage call letters now used on the station running The Eighties Channel™ in Albuquerque ... KRKE.
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If you're really going after heritage, you would say KGGM. :D

610's nighttime has a nice lobe toward Denver; I can get it more clearly than KKOB but some of that is because KKOB has to contend with splatter from local 760 KDFD w/ just 1 kw at night but I'm in the pattern and I suspect KDFD may be pushing the modulation too hard. Tonight KNML had an Isotopes baseball game; KKOB had University of New Mexico Lobos football. Of all the Albuquerque AM stations, I found last year in Santa Fe that only 610 and 770 can be received well. Probably at one time, 920 and 1150 would have done OK, too, but those two have downgraded significantly.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Actually, NBC did try to get its primary affiliate in L.A. -- KFI/640 -- to take NIS, but Cox had just purchased it from original owner Earle C. Anthony a couple of years earlier and totally rebuffed the network. I know this because NBC told KAAP's owner (Bill Wallace) when they pitched him on it, and he told me when he was "interviewing" me for the PD slot post-NIS. (I put "interviewing" in quotes because Mr. W called me, I never formally applied, and our original conversation started out as a discussion of the terrible MOR format and the market in general ... it wasn't until he said he thought a gold-heavy "adult top 40" would work and I agreed with him that he suddenly offered me the PD chair. I think he had that in mind all along.)

The all-news format was very successful on AM 1400 and even with the FM simulcast it was the one period in the station's history that I was unable to exceed the billing for.
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In Reno, KOH was the NBC primary, and it took NIS. A little awkward there, because there'd been a KNIS-FM in the market for five years at that point---a religious non-comm.

After NIS imploded, KOH and KOLO swapped affiliations....KOLO got NBC and KOH took Mutual---just in time to carry Larry King.
 
boiseengineer said:
Many years ago ended up with bunch of these.
You could change the frequency inside. This one was FM only.
Not sure who has these now. Given to many people again years ago. Still have the pictures!

View attachment 7699
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We actually had a sample of this radio at KAAP, although we never bought any. (One reason was that it was inexplicably tuned to our FM frequency.)

I used to use it for a totally unintended purpose: We broke the simulcast to run Angels baseball, Rams football, and UCLA football and basketball on AM 1400, but continued the regular programming on "Stereo 97" ... including top of the hour newscasts. I used to put the earplug in one ear and kept my headphones on at low level monitoring the AM. During the games, we would use the "audition" channel to feed the newscast to the automation, and the "program" channel for the game. Kept one cart machine on "program" with the legal ID and all I had to do when the network gave us the station identification cue was fire that cart, while still doing the news as if nothing else was happening.

This was the advantage of having the same call letters on both AM & FM ... following the news script, just substituted "KAAP-FM" for "KAAP AM and FM" for the legal. No one listening even noticed (and from what I could tell in terms of no listener calls during sports to complain, pretty much our entire audience was listening to the FM).
 
Mark Roberts said:
If you're really going after heritage, you would say KGGM. :D
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610 was known as "kir-kee" in its many years of doing top-40. Don Davis and I get a big kick out of using those calls, especially since we use them around the clock and not just at the legal.

Mark Roberts said:
610's nighttime has a nice lobe toward Denver; I can get it more clearly than KKOB but some of that is because KKOB has to contend with splatter from local 760 KDFD w/ just 1 kw at night but I'm in the pattern and I suspect KDFD may be pushing the modulation too hard. Tonight KNML had an Isotopes baseball game; KKOB had University of New Mexico Lobos football. Of all the Albuquerque AM stations, I found last year in Santa Fe that only 610 and 770 can be received well. Probably at one time, 920 and 1150 would have done OK, too, but those two have downgraded significantly.
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If you say so. I only concern myself with 1100, sunrise to sunset.
 
Weiserguy said:
There were no 1978 NIS affiliates. NBC pulled the plug on NIS in mid-1977. (I forget if it was May or June or July, but it was within spitting distance of the end of the second quarter.)
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As I posted in the thread on all-news stations in general (which, BTW, duplicates a lot of this thread's information), NIS' lifespan was June 18, 1975 to May 29, 1977. (I was hired to fix the disaster which was the post-NIS simulcast on KAAP-AM/FM about a year later.)
 
semoochie said:
I remember NIS debuting at the beginning of the Republican National Convention in 1976. They made a big deal about it!
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K.M. Richards said:
As I posted in the thread on all-news stations in general (which, BTW, duplicates a lot of this thread's information), NIS' lifespan was June 18, 1975 to May 29, 1977.
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Assuming K.M.'s accurate about the date NIS launched -- and I can confirm from memory his date is approximately right -- then NIS would have been live for ~13 months by the 1976 political conventions. It's possible you lived in a market where the eventual affiliate didn't launch until the following year, but in NYC the NBC O&O (97.1 WNWS) went live on the same date NIS launched, and that was no later than 4th of July weekend in 1975.
 
Weiserguy said:
Assuming K.M.'s accurate about the date NIS launched -- and I can confirm from memory his date is approximately right
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My dates came from those reported in Broadcasting at the time:
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/75-OCR/1975-06-16-BC-OCR-Page-0042.pdf (article on NIS, two days prior to launch)
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/76-OCR/1976-11-29-BC-OCR-Page-0044.pdf (one of many articles citing the announced end date; all were consistent)

semoochie said:
I remember NIS debuting at the beginning of the Republican National Convention in 1976. They made a big deal about it!
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The archives of Broadcasting override your own memories.
 
K.M. Richards said:
My dates came from those reported in Broadcasting at the time:
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/75-OCR/1975-06-16-BC-OCR-Page-0042.pdf (article on NIS, two days prior to launch)
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/h...BC-IDX/76-OCR/1976-11-29-BC-OCR-Page-0044.pdf (one of many articles citing the announced end date; all were consistent)



The archives of Broadcasting override your own memories.
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I've had some pretty major false memories before! This one will just have to join the pack but I'm sure that's when KYXI switched.
 
semoochie said:
I'm sure that's when KYXI switched.
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You're probably right about that. The only minor error your memory forced on you was in thinking that was when the network itself began operations.

I can confirm this much to validate your basic memory, though: KYXI ran an ad in Broadcasting's February 17, 1975, looking for a "warm personality as afternoon drive announcer for top MOR station", which would mean they didn't have NIS under consideration at the time of its launch (which was a mere four months later).

Also, they stayed in the news format after NIS, and had signed with AP Radio in January 1977. They were listed as such in an article a couple of months after NBC pulled the plug, in an article on the Arbitron ratings for the major markets. They were #10 in Portland but even the two Beautiful Music stations (KUPL and KXL-FM) were beating them, as were the three top-40s (KGW, KPAM-AM/FM and the AM KXL), the MORs (KEX and KOIN), the Country station (KWJJ) and the album rocker (KGON).
 
K.M. Richards said:
You're probably right about that. The only minor error your memory forced on you was in thinking that was when the network itself began operations.

I can confirm this much to validate your basic memory, though: KYXI ran an ad in Broadcasting's February 17, 1975, looking for a "warm personality as afternoon drive announcer for top MOR station", which would mean they didn't have NIS under consideration at the time of its launch (which was a mere four months later).

Also, they stayed in the news format after NIS, and had signed with AP Radio in January 1977. They were listed as such in an article a couple of months after NBC pulled the plug, in an article on the Arbitron ratings for the major markets. They were #10 in Portland but even the two Beautiful Music stations (KUPL and KXL-FM) were beating them, as were the three top-40s (KGW, KPAM-AM/FM and the AM KXL), the MORs (KEX and KOIN), the Country station (KWJJ) and the album rocker (KGON).
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KGON kept sister KYXI alive for years until AOR's 18-24 ratings collapsed and the format refocused on 25-34 but by that time, KYXI had changed format and after one failed experiment, became All Sports and remains so to this day albeit two frequencies later.
 


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