In the early days of AM radio, the pioneer AM radio stations were given 50,000 watt “Clear Channel” licenses (nothing to do with today’s Clear Channel company). The clear channel designation allowed the station to continue to broadcast at 50,000 watts at night, allowing stations – like WBZ in Boston – to cover large portions of the country. Larry Glick was a fixture on WBZ for about 15 years late at night.
As a child in Pittsburgh, I remember listening to Larry Glick in the late 1960s – KDKA is on 1020 and WBZ is on 1030 so you needed to point the AM radio towards Boston to keep the stations seperated. Larry worked at a time when there wasn’t a demand to squeeze in 15 minutes per hour of commercials and radio consultants dissecting every word that you say and comparing it to PPM meter spikes. He was a radio person with a real personality and he didn’t much care if you liked it or not.
In the 1980s, the FCC rethought Clear Channel stations and decided to give more preference to local AM stations to stay on at night using directional transmitters. By then, syndication had largely displaced the clear channel talk stations. WOWO in Fort Wayne (an original 50kw station) for example was purchased by the company that owns WLIB in New York City. WOWO was turned into a regional station – dropping to 9,800 watts at night so that WLIB (which had been a daytime only station) could broadcast to New York City at night. By 1986, the FCC rules changed that all new AM stations were required to stay on at night.
The migration of News/Talk stations to FM and the FCC starting the push last year for AM stations to add FM translators hints at the future. In other parts of the world, AM stations are going dark for the final time. Time marches on.