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Only One Sports Station and Two News Stations are Live & Local Overnight

G

Gregg.

On the Chicago board, folks have been discussing the move of WSCR to an FM simulcast. Until recently, WSCR was one of the few radio stations in the U.S. with a live and local overnight show. I checked a few months ago and it had a local program overnight on weeknights, with the Infinity Sports Network overnight on weekends.

Now I see on the website that all seven overnights a week are from Westwood One Sports (the new name for Infinity Sports Network/CBS Sports Radio Network). So that means WFAN New York is the only sports station doing a live and local show overnight.

As for News stations, WINS New York and WTOP Washington are the last with a local anchor overnight. KNX Los Angeles and KCBS San Francisco had also been live overnight until the end of 2025, when the two stations went to combined all-news programming.

As for Talk stations, on WABC "The Other Side of Midnight with Lionel" is done in-house but it is syndicated. WABC does do live shows overnight on weekends.

So that's it. WFAN for Sports, WINS and WTOP for News and WABC for Talk on weekends are the only live and local spoken-word stations overnight. I guess there are still a few music stations with a live overnight DJ.
 
And that doesn't include the national shows that are live overnight. Right now Fox Sports Radio is the only one going full 24 hours. Since Westwood One decided to stop live at 3am. I don't know about Coast to Coast AM or possibly other night shows.
 
If a tree falls in a forest, and there's no one around, does it make a sound?

That's what you need to ask. Take a look at TV. How much live TV is there after midnight? I mean, REALLY live. The budgets for late night talk shows are dropping. If it's happening in network TV, you can imagine how bad it is in local radio.

The reason for this is there's very little audience, and as a result there's no money. If there's no money, there's no reason to do it. At one time, some big powerful radio stations made enough money during the day to cover them overnight. Now they many can barely staff daytime.

Yes at one time, there was a market for overnight radio. But if you go back to the 40s and 50s, a lot of stations signed off at midnight. The market for live radio after midnight really started drying up in the 80s when syndication took it over. Now even syndication can't make money with it.
 


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