New York’s 1010 WINS Celebrates 60 Years Of Being ‘Part of the Fabric of the City.’

It’s been 60 years since WINS-AM (1010) New York, then part of the Westinghouse Broadcasting chain, left a crowded field of top 40-formatted stations to become the market’s first station to promise listeners “All News. All The Time.”

With the exception of adding an FM frequency at 92.3 in 2022, and dropping its long-running teletype sound effect, “1010 WINS,” now owned and operated by Audacy, is basically the same as it was when it debuted on April 19, 1965, including its tagline “You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.”

“I always thought of WINS like bagels, Ray’s Pizza, the coffee cart guys, taxi drivers — part of the fabric of the city,” John Montone, a WINS reporter from 1982 to 2021, tells Long Island Newsday. “We were the place for listeners to go to for news, before they left their house, to get their buses or trains, or when they got in their cars for the traffic reports.”

One other thing that hasn’t changed is WINS’ strength in the New York market, as it currently ranks second only to iHeartMedia’s adult contemporary “Lite FM” WLTW, based on Nielsen’s March 2025 survey of persons 6+.

“Clearly being on FM helped, and we certainly have picked up 880 listeners, too,” WINS VP of News Ben Mevorach says, referring to the station’s former and only all-news competitor in the market, WCBS-AM (880), which Audacy shut down last August. Since then, several of WCBS-AM’s news anchors, including Paul Murnane, Wayne Cabot and Brigitte Quinn, have joined WINS on a part-time basis.

Mevorach, who became WINS’ News Director in 1999, says even then he began to “modernize” the station’s sound in anticipation of a possible jump to FM. “I looked at the way we were presenting the news, and at all the other news stations, and it really was very clear to me back then that if we don’t evolve, and we continue to do news from the 1970s, as successful as it has been for so many years, we will be out of business in a relatively short period of time,” he says.

As a result, today’s WINS has become more personality-oriented, led by morning co-anchor Scott Stanford, who joined the station in 2023, and 17-year WINS veteran Larry Mullins in afternoon drive. Both have added bits of lighthearted humor in between reporting the day’s top stories. Mullins says, “I can get a little brash on the air, [but] it helps people relate to me.”