Every little bit helps: 
By 1958 Television had taken over America, and much of the world. Prior to the advent of TV people listened to their radios – those things with bright glowing tubes that were either parked in a large cabinet in the living room – conveniently tucked away in the kitchen or perched bedside in the average bedroom.
One by one, each room lost their radios and were replaced by TV’s – mostly black and white – mostly with strange protruding antennas and all offering that window to the world that Radio could only describe.
But radio wasn’t giving up without a fight. NBC, for example ran a weekend service called Monitor – 72 straight hours of music, from midnight Friday to midnight Monday, conversation and roving reporters who filed from any one of a number of exotic locales, who interviewed any number of candidates, newsmakers or personalities. It was radio for the curious and it was trying desperately to be hip for anyone who would still listen.
And during the week it was Nightline – an evening show much like the weekend show – staying curious. Adopting the slogan “Going places – Doing things” it took current stories and offered some background – interviewing the famous and the notorious; it promised to keep people glued to their radios and scaring the hell out of them in the process.
Like radio itself, programs like Nightline were coming fewer and farther in-between. And over the course of the next few decades, radio has all but vanished from our cultural landscape.
But for a glimpse of how radio was, who it was communicating to and what it was capable of, here is an episode of Nightline from NBC Radio as broadcast on January 7, 1958.
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