From Newsgroup: alt.online-service.comcas
On 3/22/2026 11:56 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
David Samuel Barr <dsbarr@mindspring.com> wrote:
https://www.audacy.com/wccoradio/news/local/cbs-radio-news-will-close
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/business/media/cbs-news-radio-appraisal.html
This one's a personal hit as well as a
national and historic one, since my
near-lifelong BFF has been one of their
top reporters/anchors for 30 years.
I don't believe that this was a loss leader. It's not like it wasn't
sharing news reporting with television. It mainly aggregated and rewrote
news stories for the very limited time it had to broadcast, 5 minutes at
the top of the hour with commercials.
CBS hasn't owned the radio licenses themselves in years.
The explanation makes zero sense.
Actually there is very little interaction
between the radio and the television units,
and the radio reporters aren't just doing
short hourly rip-and-reads as you imply,
they're out there doing hands-on reporting
everywhere. My friend not only has his own
major beat which TV has largely abdicated
but has been routinely sent on assignment
all over the U.S., the Caribbean, Central
America and even sometimes Europe. The
network feeds stories to its affiliates
on a continuous basis so one never knows
when a station affiliate will pick up a
story from the network and insert it into
its regular news flow, especially for
out-of-area stories on which they don't have
their own reporters there, whether or not
they choose to carry the network hourly
roundups live. It's also not a question
of whether or not CBS owns the affiliate
stations, the last of which it did were
sold off in 2017, just as ABC's were in
2007 and NBC's back in the 1980s. What
makes zero sense is the claim in the NY
Times that with some 700 affiliates the
network was grossing only $67,000/year,
or less than $100 annually from each one.
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