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NBC News and Information Service

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Oscar Madison said:
OK, you said it.
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No I didn't. I was responding to a discussion about some commercial stations objecting to running national news programming and accompanying spots in drive time. I said that it was not a problem for NPR. Somehow, you extrapolated from that comment that I said All Things considered and all news radio are similar. I was never involved in comparing the content of the programming, but rather the time at which it aired. NPR and NIS are similar in that they offer Long form national network news programming for radio stations. The specific programming they offer is different. Understand?
 
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I'll contribute this about the ABC Radio long form programming (or, actually, special events).

The only one I remember is the coverage of the Presidential elections. Of course, since I had a short radio career and very interested in things radio and TV, I always had a clock set to the second. Therefore, while I was listening to the ABC coverage I could hear the anchors start and finish their report in the times usually set aside for the various ABC networks. After the outcue from one newscast there was a short pause and then the anchor would announce "continuing coverage" on ABC Radio.

On an unrelated note, (but having the clock set to the second): I got a kick out of one announcer on a distant station who started a thought and was able to weave the legal station ID into the thought just before end of the four minute "legal ID window" on the half hour. He followed his thought with, "Boy, I did that just in time." And sure enough, I watched the second hand sweep past the twelve indicating it was :32:00 past the hour.
 
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mike847 said:
I'll contribute this about the ABC Radio long form programming (or, actually, special events).

The only one I remember is the coverage of the Presidential elections. Of course, since I had a short radio career and very interested in things radio and TV, I always had a clock set to the second. Therefore, while I was listening to the ABC coverage I could hear the anchors start and finish their report in the times usually set aside for the various ABC networks. After the outcue from one newscast there was a short pause and then the anchor would announce "continuing coverage" on ABC Radio.
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I'm glad you remembered that... some stations would run the long-form coverage, while others would just take the five minutes where their normal network news ran.

ABC did a classy job in those days. Much better than years later when they would do a short update for radio, then "back to Peter Jennings" and bring the pot up on the TV audio.
 
CNN's all news feed was only recycled audio from Headline News. Even with that minimal expense, they couldn't sustain syndicated all news radio. Now CNN doesn't even do all news TV.

NIS at least was a radio operation, and didn't just pull TV audio. Unlike today's network "branded" news feeds.

Fox is starting a radio all news channel for SiriusXM but up to now, their "news channels" (including the one from Fox) have been just TV audio.
 
epaddon said:
I'd like to echo the thanks for making the debut of NBC NIS available because as a long-time collector of old radio news, this was something I was really unfamiliar with and now that I've had a chance to listen to what it was all about, I think it was a concept that deserved to last longer than it did. I've been able to sample a large number of other network radio newscasts from this era through pastdaily.com and by contrast the CBS World News Roundup broadcasts have a much stodgier quality to them presentation wise compared to the approach NBC was trying.

As a result I've been looking about for the other examples of NIS to be found on the net and this is what I've come up with:


January 23, 1976. WWTC Minneapolis http://www.radiotapes.com/WWTC.html
August 11, 1976. WNIS-FM Chicago http://chicagoradioandmedia.com/multimedia/audio/6756-wnis-fm-newscast-august-11-1976
December 31, 1976. WWNS-FM New York http://formatchange.com/wnws-fm-becomes-y97-wyny/ (the final minute before the format change and the end of NIS in New York)
January 7, 1977. WEAN-Providence, RI. http://northeastairchecks.com/checks/wean.ram
February 27, 1977. WNNS-FM, Louisville http://www.lkyradio.com/WAMZ.htm

Let's hope there are other examples to be found! But in the meantime, these initial three hours was pure gold.
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I just came across another excerpt, this from WNUS-West Springfield, MA on October 30, 1976. 14 minutes starting at 6:25 PM and JIP at the conclusion of the last Red Sox game of the season. So add that to the list of NIS airchecks known to exist.
 
Oscar Madison said:
CNN's all news feed was only recycled audio from Headline News. Even with that minimal expense, they couldn't sustain syndicated all news radio. Now CNN doesn't even do all news TV.

NIS at least was a radio operation, and didn't just pull TV audio. Unlike today's network "branded" news feeds.

Fox is starting a radio all news channel for SiriusXM but up to now, their "news channels" (including the one from Fox) have been just TV audio.
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Actually, from suffering through several hours of Headline News on the radio...it WAS the TV audio of the actual newscast. I always cringed when the reporter on scene told viewers to look at some item. There was no effort on the part of CNN to edit the TV report for radio listeners. Talk about lazy and wanting to make a buck. Needless to say I never spent much time with Headline News on the radio.

Associated Press had a long form 24/7 effort called, "The News Station." It was pretty good, but not enough radio stations carried it. It was painful to hear the announcer at the end of the very last hour. Instead of the standard, "This is the News Station," he said, "This was The News Station." And that was the end of that.

(sigh)

To borrow a line from an old Stan Freberg bit, "Whatever became of radio?"
 
mike847 said:
Actually, from suffering through several hours of Headline News on the radio...it WAS the TV audio of the actual newscast. I always cringed when the reporter on scene told viewers to look at some item. There was no effort on the part of CNN to edit the TV report for radio listeners. Talk about lazy and wanting to make a buck. Needless to say I never spent much time with Headline News on the radio.
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It was precisely that lack of effort that lost them at least one affiliate which broke its contract with CNN after only a few months ... KDB/1490 in Santa Barbara, CA.
 
Just found this thread. Thanks for the memories! I don't think anyone mentioned this: NIS was fed entirely by landline and, occasionally, the network would go down. What was the understaffed station to do? Simple. NIS provided several (three, I recall, but there may have been more) reel to reel tapes of "generic" NIS programming. Same programming clock, but with non-dated stories prerecorded to fill the time. I seem to recall we had more than one outage and I wonder if the discriminating listener noticed we tended to run the same generic stories over and over? The other oddity (if you aren't ahead of me) was that network outages did not always conveniently happen on the hour, so having to start a tape in the middle of the hour created unusual places for local breaks. Ah, what fun in the olden days!
 
There was a lot of time where I didn't get to listen to NIS, so I cannot speak to that. However, there was a different station that carried some of NBC's Talk Network. One night the local station didn't breakaway for a local commercial break. After a few seconds of silence up came a newscast that wasn't meant for that radio station. (I think it was NBC Black network. Maybe somebody else could refresh my memory.) Anyway, after the newscast, the Talknet program continued. ;-)
 
GaryOmaha said:
I don't think anyone mentioned this: NIS was fed entirely by landline and, occasionally, the network would go down. What was the understaffed station to do?
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Seems to me there was also the option of a phone coupler, no? I can't remember when that option began.

Your station could call an 800 number and get phone quality service until the network returned. I'm pretty sure that was available for Talknet, which began a few years after NIS.
 
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I liked NIS too. In the SF Bay Area, NBC ran it on one of their two O&Os - 99.7FM; and changed the call letters from KNBR-FM to KNAI (News and Information, I presume), rounding the frequency off to "FM 100." I doubt the ratings were ever more than marginal - AM was still the band for news and information in those days, so KCBS and KGO dominated. KNAI lasted less than two years, and in 1977 became music station KYUU (first light rock, then hit music) which was a ratings bonanza for NBC for quite a few years.
 
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.
 
K.M. Richards said:
The one market where NIS did run on AM, Washington DC (on WRC), it was a great success in ratings and revenue.
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IIRC they were running an urban format on FM, WKYS which they called Kiss FM, and it was also successful. It continues to this day, altho owned now by Radio One.
 
K.M. Richards said:
The one market where NIS did run on AM, Washington DC (on WRC), it was a great success in ratings and revenue.
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WRC was not the only AM to air NBC NIS. Maybe the only NBC O&O on AM, but not the only one. KRUX in Phoenix also aired it. Because it competed with the more-established KTAR (also all-news at the time), it wasn't successful at all, and KRUX returned to rock after about a year.

Per this ad, WWTC in the Twin Cities aired it as well, and I vaguely remember a Milwaukee AM (WRIT?) that also carried it.
 
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