WINS is the oldest all-news radio station in the United States, broadcasting in that format continuously since 1965.

WINS can be heard in the HD Radio format.

The station began broadcasting first during 1924 on 950 kHz as WGBS, named after and broadcasting from its owner, Gimbel's department store. It moved to 860 kHz sometime around 1927, and to 600 around 1930, settling on 1180 around 1931. The station was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, and it adopted its present callsign (named after Hearst's International News Service) the same year,effective January 15.

WINS relocated from the Hotel Lincoln to the WINS Building, 114 East 58th Street, June 19, 1932.

It changed its frequency from 1180 to 1000 on March 29, 1941 as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement and then eventually to 1010 on October 30, 1943. The Cincinnati-based Crosley Broadcasting Corporation announced its purchase of the station from Hearst in 1945, though it would be over a year before Crosley would take control of WINS, in July 1946.

Rock and roll

Crosley sold the station to J. Elroy McCaw's Gotham Broadcasting Corporation in 1953, and soon after WINS became one of the first stations in the United States to play rock and roll music. Alan Freed was WINS earliest famous personality as disc jockey. Freed was followed years later by Murray "the K" Kaufman. Sports broadcaster Les Keiter, a latter-day member of the first generation of legends in that field, served as sports director for a period in the 1950s. Keiter is perhaps best remembered for his recreations of San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants baseball games, which WINS carried in 1958 to keep disconnected Giants fans in touch with their team, who moved west along with the Brooklyn Dodgers the previous year.

By the early 1960s, WINS faced stiff competition for the rock-and-roll audience from three other stations, WMCA, WMGM, and WABC. The competition continued after WINS was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1962. By 1963, WMCA upstaged them all and became the top-rated top 40 station in the New York area (only to be eclipsed two years later by WABC, whose 50,000-watt, clear-channel signal was 10 times stronger than WMCA's). WINS consequently saw a decline of ratings between 1963 and 1965, normally trailing WMCA and WABC by some distance. By this time, WMGM had already defected to a beautiful music format under its previous call letters, WHN, in February 1962.

The last song played on WINS before it became a news station was "Out in the Streets", by The Shangri-Las, on April 18, 1965, at around 8 PM.

"All News, All the Time"

On April 19, 1965, after weeks of speculation, WINS changed its format radically. It became the third radio station in the United States to attempt all-news programming, going with the new format around the clock. WINS immediately established a template for its format with an easily identifiable, distinctive Teletype sound effect playing in the background (Most other all-news stations later dropped this, but WINS kept it, even after Teletype machines themselves became obsolete by the mid-1980s), and with slogans such as "All news, all the time"; "The newswatch never stops"; "Listen two, three, four times a day"; and "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world". The latter tagline was a reference to WINS's format clock, which segments every 20 minutes.

The format has remained unchanged, save for minor tweaks, over the years. Currently, WINS regularly programs traffic reports from Metro Traffic every ten minutes on the "ones" (six times an hour), sports updates every quarter-hour (twice an hour, at :15 and :45), weather reports from AccuWeather as much as six times an hour (three regularly scheduled reports at :12, :32, and :52 past every hour with breaking weather news interspersed in the front of each segment), entertainment news once an hour (at :38) and business news from Bloomberg twice an hour (at :26 and :56). When breaking news warrants, WINS will break format to provide continuous coverage of any event.

In 1995 Westinghouse Electric purchased CBS, a move which made WINS a sister station to its long-time rival WCBS (880 AM). Early on, there had been speculation that either station would drop the all-news format, but these notions were squelched rather quickly. In fact, the performance differences in both stations supplement their continued overlap. WINS's ratings numbers are better within New York City, while WCBS's listener strength is greater in the suburbs, owing primarily to its much stronger signal. From a programming standpoint, WINS's harder approach is offset by WCBS' lighter, more conversational style, especially in peak morning and afternoon drive periods. Since the Westinghouse-CBS merger, both stations have continued to perform well in both ratings and advertising revenue.

Despite being owned by CBS, WINS was affiliated with, ironically, ABC News Radio until January 1, 2015, when their distributor, Westwood One, dropped ABC News Radio in favor for an in-house, CNN-powered service, "Westwood One News". WINS did not clear the network newscasts, but did air vocal reports and sound bites.

Influence