Audio: Digital Drives Listener Experience

As far back as 2004, the first year of the State of the NewsMedia Report, Pew Research Center wrote that local news on the radio “appears to have seriously eroded in recent years” with a growing number of stations that  “are not local at all.”

Then in 2006 Pew wrote, “Technology is turning what we once thought of as radio into something broader – listening,” and raised the question of what that would mean for radio news. Now, heading into 2013, those two shifts have come together to create a very different audio landscape—one in which news is relegated to a smaller corner of the listening landscape.

In general, listening to content seems to be as popular as ever and accessible in more formats than ever. But, aside from a scattering of stations around the country devoted to all-news programming, commercial radio news is mostly relegated to top-of-the-hour news headlines produced by an outside network.

News/talk/information (and the recent addition of talk personality) is still a popular category for radio, behind only country music, but Pew’s research has found that this genre is filled with more talk than news, much of it nationally syndicated. In the newer forms of listening—satellite and online-only—news is a rare component. Only 26 of the more than 1,000 satellite radio channels are categorized as news.

Financially, the picture does not bode well for traditional radio. AM/FM on-air election advertising brought in $124 million in 2012, but most other areas saw steep declines, resulting in a flat year over all.  Online-only and satellite radio, on the other hand, had better years than in the past, with more positive long-term forecasts.  And new legislation under consideration by Congress could be an added windfall to many online-only stations. Pandora alone could as much as double in value.

National Public Radio may have positioned itself for the digital age better than other news radio, at least in terms of finding its audience. While its radio listenership declined somewhat in 2012, new audience to the network’s mobile apps seems to be more than making up for that loss.

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