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Overall in the survey, 81.7% of local radio groups report that at least one station in the group runs local news. That's 3 points up from last year – which had been down 2 points from the year before.
Most stations in our survey that run local news are not primarily news or talk stations; they’re music stations. Of the 433 stations that run local news – and told us what their programming was – just 18.5% included all news (2.3%), news and information (1.8%), news/talk (14.1%) and business news (0.2%).
Weekdays dropped in average amount of news while weekends went up. But medians (or typical numbers) tend to tell more accurate stories. Median weekday times went up for major market stations (usually the influence of all news stations) while all other market sizes went down. Medians for almost all groups (and overall) for the weekend remained at zero local news. The overall amount of local news dropped by about 12 minutes per weekday. That’s about how much it went up in major markets, but large markets slipped by about 2, and medium markets dropped by 20 with small markets dropping by 18.
Generally, the bigger the staff, the more news a station runs, although the real dividing line was two versus three or more news staffers. Overall, stations with 3 or more full time news staffers ran about 50% more news than stations with one or two full-timers. Geography made no difference.
Historically, commercial stations run more local news than non-commercial stations. Last year, the numbers were identical, but this year we’re back to a big edge for commercial stations, with the median amount of local news 50% higher at commercial stations compared to non-commercial ones.
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