As a radio professional who grew up aspiring to work at CBS News Radio, anchor Steve Kathan understood the weight of the words he wrote and recorded Friday on the final broadcast of “World News Roundup.”
“America’s longest running newscast signs off for the last time,” Kathan said in the small dimly lighted studio in the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side. “It all began on March 13, 1938,” he said, referring to the iconic news program.
Kathan played a recording of Edward R. Morrow, the legendary CBS News journalist who delivered his first report on the debut of the program, saying “the best in radio reporting is yet to be — good night and good luck.”
“And goodbye,” Kathan added, ending the run of around 23,000 editions of the 10-minute signature broadcast, delivered from CBS’ radio network . A final news update was scheduled to run later Friday night.
CBS News Radio and its 26 employees became a victim of budget cuts across parent-company Paramount’s news division announced in March.“A shift in radio station programming strategies, coupled with challenging economic realities, has made it impossible to continue the service,” the company said.
Privately, longtime insiders at CBS News say the division has struggled for years to find ways to financially turn around its radio business. The unit was operating at a loss with monthly revenues recently falling as low as $67,000, according to a network executive not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The service held on because it still had value in promoting CBS News and its journalism, reaching 20 million listeners a week.
Leadership over the years have put off the messy task of winding the radio business down due to its iconic status at the company. CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was reluctant to make the cuts as well, according to people inside the company familiar with her thinking. But with Paramount taking on substantial debt to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, considerations of the division’s legacy are likely to matter less in ongoing efforts to reduce costs.
Kathan had heard rumblings about CBS getting out of radio going all the way back to its first ownership change in the 1980s when Larry Tisch acquired the company. “Even though I’ve been here 39 years, the thought was someone’s going to decide to do it,” he said.
As television dominated the media landscape, CBS News Radio retained its role as what Kathan called “the background track of American history.”
As a child growing up in Connecticut, Kathan recalls watching Douglas Edwards, the “World News Roundup” evening anchor for two decades, doing TV news updates in between the soap operas his mother watched on CBS. After Kathan joined the network in 1987 as a writer and producer, he would see Edwards and other famous names from the division walking through the hallways of the broadcast center before doing his afternoon newscasts.
“Just the fact that you were working with them made you think and realize you had to up your game,” Kathan said. “You wanted the audience to trust you as much as it trusted them.”
“World News Roundup” rose to prominence during World War II, when Murrow and other CBS News correspondents delivered live reports from Europe.
Once TV supplanted radio as a source for scripted entertainment, news and information became the primary mission of CBS’ radio division that began in 1927. In 1967, the company converted its owned AM radio stations — including its Los Angeles outlet KNX — to an all-news format.
While the stations focused on local news, traffic, weather and sports, they also prominently featured CBS News Radio reports at the top of the hour and other features throughout the day.
Longtime listeners became familiar with Edwards, Dallas Townsend, Reid Collins, Richard C. Hottelet, Christopher Glenn and other CBS News veterans who brought national and world stories to listeners throughout the day, introduced by a five-note sounder that simulated a telegraph. Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite were heard daily with analysis.
The radio network developed a major star in Charles Osgood, who joined WCBS in New York as anchor. He went national in 1971 with a twice-daily segment called “The Osgood File.”
Osgood wrote two-minute reports in succinct prose delivered in his mellifluous tones. He occasionally offered commentary in verse, which earned him the title of poet-in-residence at CBS News.
Osgood’s popularity was rivaled only by ABC Radio personality Paul Harvey. CBS News even allowed him to read commercial copy to satisfy eager advertisers who wanted their product messages presented in his comforting voice. When Osgood became a host on the TV side in the 1990s on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” his sign-off remained “I’ll see you on the radio.” He filed his final “Osgood File” report in 2017.
CBS sold off its radio stations in 2017, but continued to produce and distribute its network programs as the business faced competition from digital media.
Dustin Gervais, technical operations manager for the network, said CBS News Radio struggled as more audio advertisers prefer digital content because of its effectiveness at targeting specific demographic groups. The shift is reflected in radio ad revenue, which dipped about 2% to $14.37 billion, according to media research firm Kagan. But the digital ad revenue portion of that pie continued to grow, topping $1.75 billion.
Charles Forelle, managing editor for CBS News, said the company plans to remain in the audio journalism business through podcasting and not straight newscasts. “We have a whole bunch of different things in development that are less news reading and more other things,” he told The Times.
Not all of radio’s problems are related to digital. Michael Socolow, a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine, notes that the industry troubles began in 1996 when deregulation loosened the limit on the number of stations a single entity can own. Buying sprees of outlets led to owners who became highly leveraged and less able to invest in programming, which put the squeeze on suppliers such as CBS News Radio.
“Radio was hollowed out by the corporations, before its utility to the American citizen ended,” Socolow said. “You can trace it to the Telecom Act of 1996.”
Some of the 26 employees at CBS News Radio who were severed from the company have found work at Worldwide News Network, a service launched by John Catsimatidis, the owner of New York’s top-rated talk station WABC. The company said the service, which begins Saturday, will deliver “hard news, breaking headlines, and fact-driven reporting to affiliates across the country.”
CBS News Radio’s biggest customer — the all-news stations owned by Audacy, including KNX— have already switched their network service to ABC News Audio.
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