CBS News said Friday it is ending its radio news service after nearly 100 years, closing a network product that for decades supplied local stations with national reporting and top-of-the-hour newscasts. In announcing the shutdown, the network cited challenging economic conditions and the way audiences have moved toward digital sources and podcasts.
The service will end on May 22, CBS News said. The network’s statement frames the move as the latest shift in an industry where audio consumption has increasingly migrated to newer platforms rather than traditional radio news programming.
In remarks delivered to staff, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss said the company had worked to preserve the radio operation. “Radio is woven into the fabric of CBS News and that’s always going to be part of our history,” Weiss said, adding that she wanted staff to know that CBS News “did everything we could, including before I joined the company, to try and find a viable solution to sustain the radio operation.”
Longtime anchor Dan Rather, who succeeded Walter Cronkite on CBS News radio and television before anchoring for 25 years, said the shutdown marked the loss of something enduring in American media. Rather said, “It’s another piece of America that is gone,” and he recalled that during his years at CBS he filed reports for radio as frequently as a dozen times a day.
CBS News radio began when it went on the air in September 1927, described by the network as the precursor to the entire CBS network. The service became closely associated with Edward R. Murrow’s rooftop reports during the Nazi bombing of London in World War II, when Americans listened anxiously to updates from Europe, according to the report. CBS News radio also carried historic moments such as Murrow’s first broadcast on the air about Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938.
CBS News radio’s modern footprint reached an estimated 700 stations across the country, with its top-of-the-hour news roundups serving as one of its best-known products. But the report said the television era that began in the 1950s contributed to a long slide in the prominence of radio as an everyday source of news, and that in today’s environment people often seek audio via podcasts instead of radio.
The shutdown comes after CBS News already trimmed some of its radio programming late last year, including “Weekend Roundup” and “World News Roundup Late Edition,” in an attempt to keep the radio service going. CBS News also was cutting about 6% of its workforce—more than 60 people—on Friday, and the report said the radio closure is not the end of turmoil at the network as Paramount Global is likely to absorb CNN as part of its announced purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.
Rather, now 94, tied the radio service to an era when broadcasters considered radio news a responsibility equal to television. “Radio was considered an equal responsibility to television,” he said, describing how coverage moved quickly through radio and television during major national events, including reporting around the civil rights era and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The report also quoted Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade publication for radio talk shows, who called the change a loss for both the country and the industry. “This is another part of the landscape that has fallen off into the sea,” Harrison said.
CBS News’ staff announcement also reflected the network’s recent internal leadership priorities. The report noted that Weiss, who has been leading CBS News since three months into her tenure as boss, quickly became a headline-maker and polarizing figure in journalism, and it said that she had previously invoked Cronkite as a symbol of old thinking and warned that if CBS News continued with its strategy, “we’re toast.”