WRKO

WRKO (680 AM) is a commercial news/talk radio station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, serving Greater Boston and much of surrounding New England. Owned by iHeartMedia, WRKO is a Class B AM station that provides secondary coverage to portions of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine during the day, but is highly directional at night to protect a number of clear-channel stations on adjacent frequencies. WRKO serves as the Boston affiliate for ABC News Radio, Coast to Coast AM and This Morning, America's First News with Gordon Deal; syndicated personalities Joe Pags, John Batchelor and Bill Cunningham; the flagship station of The Howie Carr Show, and the home of radio personality Jeff Kuhner. The WRKO studios are located in the Boston suburb of Medford, while the station transmitter resides in nearby Burlington. Besides its main analog transmission, WRKO simulcasts over the HD2 subchannel of sister station WZLX, and streams online via iHeartRadio.

WRKO is one of three AM stations owned by iHeartMedia in the Boston market that features a spoken word format; WBZ is all news during the day and overnight, with local talk in the evening, while WXKS carries a nationally syndicated conservative talk line up.

The 680 kHz facility went on the air from Lawrence in 1937 as WLAW, the radio station of the Lawrence Daily Eagle and Evening Tribune. The station moved its transmitter from Andover to Burlington in 1947, and began turning its focus to Boston. WLAW was acquired by General Teleradio in 1953 to serve as an upgraded facility for WNAC, replacing 1260 AM; it formally moved from Lawrence to Boston in 1957. The station became WRKO in 1967, in connection to a format change to top 40; after an evolution to adult contemporary music, it would move to a talk format in 1981. Following regulatory issues involving parent company Gencorp, in 1988 RKO General sold WRKO to Steve Dodge's Atlantic Ventures, which became American Radio Systems (ARS) in 1993. After ARS was purchased by the parent company of CBS Radio in 1998, WRKO was spun off to Entercom; when Entercom acquired CBS Radio in 2017, the station was sold to iHeartMedia.