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NBC News and Information Service

KeithE4 said:
WRC was not the only AM to air NBC NIS. Maybe the only NBC O&O on AM, but not the only one.
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That was indeed what I meant, Keith. I guess I presumed too much would be presumed from the context of talking only about NBC's owned stations. (Presumably.) :p

In fact, I am reasonably sure that NBC's O&Os were the only FMs that carried NIS.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Llew, that was actually part of NBC's problem. They refused to commit their AMs to NIS and move their existing AM music formats to FM, at a time when the audience was discovering FM as a more static-free music medium. But what the audience did not get was the idea of "all-news on FM", which is how NBC positioned it when running promos on their AMs.

This not only made the format fail in those markets -- including #1, New York City -- but sent a message to the industry that NBC wasn't fully behind NIS, which made a lot of stations hesitate to sign up. NBC had actually hoped for the main network affiliate to be the NIS station in each market as well, but that only happened in a small handful of cases.

The closest NIS stations to Los Angeles, in fact, were up in Ventura County and over in Palm Springs. Neither got a signal into L.A. itself. And this was at a time when NBC was affiliated with a 50kw AM (KTNQ) in L.A., which was fulfilling its network contract by running the top-of-hour news on delay on its FM, KGBS.

The one market where NIS did run on AM, Washington DC (on WRC), it was a great success in ratings and revenue.

I have wondered what would have happened if NBC had committed their AMs to NIS. I think that not only would the all-news network have survived, NBC would have found itself with a complement of very successful music FMs.
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Don't know about other markets, but at least in the Bay Area, NBC's AM - KNBR 680 - was solid in the ratings at that time. IIRC, they were still running an MOR format, but they had a big commitment to sports play-by-play, and had already turned afternoon drive over to a sports-talk show, beginning their eventual transition to all sports. They had little or no motivation to blow up KNBR and put NIS on 680. And the mid 70s in the Bay Area was way to early to consider moving successful non-music formats to FM, with KGO, KCBS and KNBR all in the Top 5. In fact, 610/KFRC was still doing well with Top 40, and it was around this time that RKO General sold off 106.1 because they had the short-sided view that music still had a future on AM
 
Oh, I'm sure NBC has its reasons and was able to rationalize the decision they made. But it did hurt them in terms of credibility when trying to sell it and it was therefore crippled before it even took to the air.

Who knows ... NBC might have led the charge of moving music to FM in the Bay Area. If they had moved KNBR, RKO might not have sold KFRC-FM. I agree that ABC and CBS wouldn't have tried moving KGO and KCBS to their FMs ... but essentially NBC did exactly that (move a non-music format to FM) with KNAI.

The other wildcard, of course, was that Jim Gabbert was starting to build audience perception of contemporary music being a format for FM with KIOI (K-101) by that point in time. How that was taken into consideration and/or dismissed in the decision-making process by NBC, we will never know.
 
Its been 40 years since NIS ceased programming.As said,if the service was on major market AM stations it might have survived. Still the best national all news service I ever heard. Watch the documentary on You Tube.Very interesting.
 
Thanks for posting the NIS documentary and the final hour. I was a listener during all of NIS's short life and worked at the Kansas City affiliate for a period of its regular run plus the night of the 1976 election. THAT was quite a rush because of the higher-than-normal amount of local news content including election results, plus everything seemed turbo-charged that night at the network level. And from that documentary, it appears NBC made the decision to begin winding down NIS right after that election.

I have to agree with other posters that certain NPR programming has some of the feel of an NIS, partly because of the news emphasis (though NPR is longer-form) but also because of all the time cues and network joins since NPR tweaked the formats a couple years ago. I've heard larger market NPR stations that load more local news into Morning Edition, making it sound even more like NIS. Now, if NPR would only use the old NIS sounders! :p

Thanks for sharing, everyone!
 
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