The Day the Music Died

Sleepy listeners to WITT, a soft-spoken popular-music FM radio station in Tuscola, Ill., may have wondered whether some lunatic had just been named station manager. A news program came on at 6 a.m., as it does every morning--but it did not go away. At this moment, the news is still playing on WITT, and there is no indication when Glenn Miller and the top 40 will return.

The Tuscola station is merely one of the latest converts to the "all news" format, a music-free marathon of news, sports, weather and feature programs that has become the hottest formula in radio. Pioneered in 1961 by XTRA, a station in Tijuana, Mexico, that beamed its signal to Southern California, all-news had until last week been adopted by fewer than 20 of the nation's 7,140 AM and FM outlets. But those form an elite group: New York City's WCBS, the nation's most listened to station; KNX in Los Angeles, which has climbed from eighth place to first place in L.A.-area ratings after switching to all-news in 1968; and first-or second-place stations in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco, all of which have moved up sharply in the ratings after going all-news.

Big Expenses. One important reason that relatively few stations have adopted the format, despite its impressive success, is its equally impressive cost. Instead of a skeleton crew of disc jockeys and rip-and-read announcers, an all-news station typically has platoons of street reporters, anchor persons, helicopter-borne traffic spotters, weather analysts, consumer reporters, writers, editors, directors and producers. New York's WCBS, for example, has 60 editorial employees, nearly three times its pre-all-news complement, and Chicago's WBBM went from 32 staffers to 64 when it made the switch in 1968. Says WBBM General Manager Bill O'Donnell: "We could run two or three stations with the overhead of this one."

Why, then, is Tuscola's tiny WITT plunging into that high-priced circle? Last week, for the first time, all-news radio was brought within the means of every 50-watt hymn-and-hog-price station in the nation. NBC, which has been taking losses since 1973 on its network radio broadcasts, is trying to reverse those fortunes with a round-the-clock, syndicated all-news package. News and Information Service, as the venture is called, originates from the old Monitor studio in Rockefeller Center and is fed live over telephone lines to subscribing stations for 50 minutes of every hour. The other ten minutes are set aside for local news, but stations can devote up to 36 minutes to local programming if they choose to. When the service first opened its mouth at 6:06.30 a.m. last Wednesday, some 80 stations had signed up--from Tuscola's WITT to NBC'S own FM station in New York City, newly renamed WNWS--for a monthly fee of from $750 to $15,000, depending on the size of the local market.

Last week's debut included irregularly spaced servings of national and international news from network correspondents, as well as book and movie reviews, interviews with Jerry Lewis and Pearl Bailey, features on natural childbirth and photography, and a two-part series on the war against cancer. Says NIS Director Roy Wetzel, who designed NBC's all-news package: "People will listen to radio news for more than an hour if you provide them with something interesting."

The universal applicability of that statement remains to be seen. All-news is a proven success in major cities, where there is enough compelling local news to fill much of that abundant air time, as well as enough interested listeners to care. But will all-news play in Tuscola?

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