City Syracuse, New York Frequency 570 kHz | Broadcast area Central New York First air date September 15, 1922 | |
Branding Newsradio 570 WSYR - Now on 106.9 FM Slogan Syracuse's News, Weather and Traffic | ||
WSYR (570 kHz) is a 5,000 Watt AM radio station licensed to Syracuse, New York and serving Central New York. Owned and operated by iHeartMedia, it broadcasts a Talk radio format under the moniker "Newsradio 570 WSYR." The station has simulcast on WSYR-FM (106.9 FM) since January 2011.
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Programming
WSYR's programming is characteristic of most talk radio stations owned by iHeartMedia. It airs a local morning show, hosted by Mark Wainwright. Afternoons are hosted by Bob Lonsberry, who broadcasts his show from the studios of sister station WHAM in Rochester.[1] The rest of the weekday schedule comes from syndicated talk shows from iHeartMedia's syndication subsidiary, Premiere Networks: The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Sean Hannity Show, Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis, and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory.[2] WSYR also carries The Glenn Beck Program from TheBlaze Network and Savage Nation with Michael Savage from The Westwood One Network. WSYR is a Fox News Radio affiliate.
The weekend schedule includes shows on money, cars, home repair and repeats of shows run during the week, such as Limbaugh and Hannity. Also heard on weekends are syndicated shows from The Tech Guy Leo Laporte, Handel on The Law with Bill Handel and Bill Cunningham. A Sunday morning talk show with George Kilpatrick ran from 1994 to 2014; Kilpatrick now hosts a program on co-owned 620 WHEN, an Urban adult contemporary station[3] Another long-running weekend show, The Weeder's Digest with Terry Ettinger, was canceled the same weekend Kilpatrick left WSYR.[4]
History
WSYR is Syracuse's oldest continuously operating radio station. It was founded on September 15, 1922 as WMAC, owned by Clive Meredith and based in the nearby town of Cazenovia. (WFBL, now at 1390, also first signed on in 1922.) In 1928, it moved to a new studio atop the Hotel Syracuse under new calls, WSYR. For decades, beginning in 1948, it was owned by the Newhouse chain alongside the Syracuse Post-Standard and Syracuse Herald-Journal. In 1946, the owners added an FM station (now 94.5 WYYY) and in 1950, a television station (now WSTM-TV). For a brief time, it had another television sister when Clear Channel Communications (now known as iHeartMedia) acquired WIXT (channel 9) and brought back the WSYR-TV calls after a 26-year absence. The new WSYR-TV was sold off along with the rest of Clear Channel's television division in 2007.
In late 2010, numerous indications based upon FCC filings, domain registrations, and a format change at a sister station, suggested that WSYR was preparing to launch an FM simulcast on FM 106.9. The simulcast became official at 7 p.m. on January 2, 2011, as co-owned WPHR became "Newsradio 106.9 WSYR-FM." For a time, the FM side gained priority in on-air advertising and on the Web site banner. However, the AM side remained the primary station, and over the next two years most references to the FM side were cut back, to the extent that the station now refers to itself as "Newsradio 570 WSYR, Now on 106.9 FM."
Sports
For decades, WSYR was the flagship station of the Syracuse Orangemen football and men's basketball teams. Those games are now heard on Classic rock stations WTKW and WTKV, both on FM.