KYW (AM)

From Freepedia

This article is about the radio station KYW. For the television station, see KYW-TV.

 frequency        = 1060 (kHz)

KYW is a class A AM radio station on 1060 kHz licensed to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. KYW is owned by the Infinity Broadcasting unit of Viacom, and has an all-news format. The station was one of the four original Westinghouse all-news stations, along with WINS in New York, WIND in Chicago, and KFWB in Los Angeles. Its studios are located on Independence Mall in Center City (downtown) Philadelphia along with sister television stations KYW-TV and WPSG-TV and fellow Infinity station WYSP. Its transmitter is located in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.

KYW began in 1921 in Chicago. It was jointly owned by Westinghouse and Commonwealth Edison. Westinghouse later bought out ComEd's share and became sole owner. In 1934, the assignment of clear channels took a frequency away from Illinois and gave it to Pennsylvania. Westinghouse then moved KYW to Philadelphia, where it has remained ever since. Shortly after the move, it became Philadelphia's NBC affiliate--an affiliation that lasted 54 years. In 1952, KYW acquired a television counterpart when Westinghouse bought WPTZ-TV, the nation's third commercial television station and NBC's first television affiliate.

From 1957 to 1965, Westinghouse and NBC swapped ownership of KYW and WPTZ-TV and Cleveland's WTAM radio and WNBK-TV. Westinghouse changed the Cleveland cluster's callsigns to KYW-AM-FM-TV, and the Philadelphia cluster became WRCV-AM-TV; however, the facilities of both stations remained the same—only the name changed. In 1965, when the FCC reversed the swap, the KYW calls returned to Philadelphia while the Cleveland cluster became WKYC-AM-FM-TV. See KYW-TV for more information about this arrangement.

On September 21, 1965, shortly after Westinghouse regained control of KYW, it converted the station into one of the first all-news stations in the country. It has been one of the highest-rated radio stations in the country since then and has been the far-and-away market leader in Philadelphia for most of that time. Its television cousin took advantage of this popularity by incorporating a version of KYW radio's musical sounder into its news themes from 1991 until 2003. In addition, a short-lived television program entitled "KYW Newsradio 1060 This Morning" aired from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. on sister station WPSG-TV in the early 2000s, adopting KYW's "clock" to television. Due to low ratings and a new affiliation to Traffic.com, the show, having been produced in the aforementioned Independence Mall headquarters, was replaced in late 2004 by "wake upnews".

Popular features of KYW's format include business reports at :25 and :55 after every hour, garden reports by former KYW-TV meteorologist Herb Clarke, an "Opening Bell" show which airs at 9 a.m. each weekday morning and focuses on the day's planned activities on Wall Street, "Traffic & Transit on the Twos" (traffic reports broadcast at :02, :12, :22, :32, :42:, and :52 after every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week), sport reports at :16 and :36 after each hour, and of course an assortment of local, national, and global headlines at the top and bottom of each hour. Accuweather provides the latest in local weather reports for the station's listenership.

After NBC shuttered its radio operations in 1988, KYW became a CBS affiliate and was thus ahead of the ball when Westinghouse merged with CBS in 1995, making KYW a CBS owned and operated station.

KYW is currently the easternmost station in the United States whose callsign begins with the letter K.

External link

• KYW Newsradio 1060
• Query the FCC's AM station database for KYW