Final Broadcast Airs May 22; City Pauses Briefly Then Gets Back on Its Phone
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW YORK, NY — CBS News Radio, which has been broadcasting news to the United States since the early days of radio when the concept of a voice coming out of a box seemed miraculous rather than irritating, aired its final reports on Friday, May 22, after nearly a century on the air, marking the end of an era in American broadcast journalism and the continuation of a trend that has been visible long enough that nobody should be surprised and yet somehow still is.
A Century of Radio News: The Highlights Reel
CBS News Radio covered the New Deal, World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11th, the financial crisis, a global pandemic, and whatever is happening right now. This is the inventory of a news organization that was present for the defining events of American life across the most consequential century in human history.
Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London during the Blitz. Walter Cronkite reached Americans through the CBS broadcast family when he told them that the president had been shot and later that they had landed on the moon. The radio news tradition that became CBS News Radio was the ancestor of every podcast, every digital audio briefing, every news notification on every phone, in the same way that the original internet browser was the ancestor of the current digital experience — the same impulse, unrecognizably evolved.
What ended on May 22 was not the concept of radio news but the specific institutional form of CBS News Radio: the call letters, the staff, the heritage, the particular sound of a newscast formatted for broadcast radio in an era when people listened to broadcast radio. The concept itself has migrated into formats that the original broadcasters would not have recognized as radio but that serve the same human need: the desire to hear someone tell you what happened while you’re doing something else.
Why Radio Ended: A Brief Economics Lesson
Radio’s audience has been declining for two decades, not because the product got worse but because alternative products arrived. The podcast, which is radio by another name with better distribution and worse advertising rates, has captured the talk and news audio audience that AM radio used to own. Streaming services have captured the music audience. Digital platforms have captured the attention that was previously structurally directed at broadcast media by the simple fact that broadcast media was the only option.
CBS News Radio’s closure is a business decision driven by the economics of reaching an audience that has alternatives, through a medium whose advertising market has been under pressure, through an infrastructure that costs money to maintain. The journalism itself — the reporting, the sourcing, the institutional knowledge — has presumably migrated to other CBS platforms. The specific radio format has been retired.
The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcast media and which has watched the decline of broadcast radio with the mix of regulatory concern and structural inability to address market forces that characterizes most FCC interactions with evolving media, did not mark the occasion with a statement. The market made its case. The case was accepted.
New York’s Radio Legacy
New York City was the center of American broadcast media for most of the 20th century, home to the network headquarters, the flagship stations, and the talent pipelines that produced the journalists, broadcasters, and media figures who defined American news culture. WCBS 880, the flagship CBS News Radio affiliate in New York, was for decades the station that New Yorkers in traffic listened to for traffic — a service that is now delivered by apps with more accuracy and less institutional weight.
The transition from broadcast radio to digital audio in New York has been faster than in most markets, because New York produces media workers who understand the transition, uses public transit where audio consumption is natural, and has a media economy that rewards new formats faster than established ones. What is lost in this transition is the shared public experience: the broadcast that everyone in range receives simultaneously, the news that arrives at the same moment for everyone listening, the civic simultaneity that broadcast represented before fragmentation made everyone their own programmer.
The nostalgia for that simultaneity is real and not irrational. The market’s judgment about its commercial value is also real and not irrational. Both things are true. CBS News Radio is off the air. The news continues.
NYC media satire, broadcast journalism history, and radio end humor: Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
More: Waterford Whispers News and NewsThump.
What Radio Did That Podcasts Don’t
The medium that CBS News Radio represented — broadcast radio news — had qualities that its successors have not fully replicated. The broadcast was simultaneous: everyone in range heard the same thing at the same moment, which created a shared civic experience across economic classes and geographic locations that the algorithm-sorted world of digital audio does not produce. The car radio was one of the last venues of the shared media experience: people driving different cars in different circumstances hearing the same news at the same time, the same traffic report, the same emergency announcement. This simultaneity was not merely sentimental. It was structurally important for the transmission of urgent information during emergencies, when the reach of broadcast media extended to people who were not actively seeking news and whose alternative information sources might not have reached them. Digital audio serves people who are seeking. Broadcast served people who were present. The population of people who are present but not seeking — in a car, in a kitchen, in a waiting room — is still large. What will reach them now that WCBS has shifted and CBS News Radio has signed off is a question that the FCC and emergency management officials think about more than the consumer media market does.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/