CNN Reports On Radio's Bad News Week

For more than a century, Americans have been turning to a trusted and reliable source for local news: the radio. Now, reports CNN, the terrestrial broadcasts are facing an existential threat as listeners and advertising dollars rapidly shift, forcing stations to slash staff and even sign off the air for good.

This week, one of the nation’s biggest local news radio outlets, New York City’s WCBS 880 AM, announced it would sign off by the end of the month, ending a nearly six-decade run as a local news source for the five boroughs and beyond. The station’s parent company, Audacy, blamed the challenges facing the news business for the decision, saying it plans to replace WCBS’s current all-news format with ESPN sports talk programming.

“New York has always been proudly unique in supporting two all-news radio brands, but the news business has gone through significant changes,” Chris Oliviero, Audacy’s New York Market president, said in a statement. “The headwinds facing local journalism nationwide made it essential to strategically reimagine how we deliver the news for the most impact.”

Across the dial in New York, staffers at WNYC news radio learned Wednesday that the station will cut its staff by at least 8% next month — its second such reduction in a year — as it scrambles to contend with a free fall in advertising dollars.

“Despite our best efforts to contain costs and grow our revenue, we continue to face severe financial headwinds,” LaFontaine Oliver, president and chief executive of New York Public Radio, WNYC’s parent company, said in a memo to staff. “Our deficit has continued to mount and it has become painfully clear that without swift action, we will soon face significant questions about our ability to continue to serve New York.”

Over the border near Toronto, 900 CHML, a 50,000-watt news-talk station on the air for nearly a century, announced Wednesday it would shutter following “years of financial loss.”

“The shift of advertising revenues to unregulated foreign platforms, combined with the difficult regulatory and competitive landscape, has forced us to make the difficult decision to close,” the Corus Entertainment-owned station announced.

The decision came just one month after Corus, Canada’s largest independent media company, announced it would slash 25% of its workforce and close two other news and traffic radio stations in Edmonton and Vancouver.

“This is a tremendous loss to our community,” Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath said of CHML’s closure. “This station has connected us in unquantifiable ways, with each other and with the rest of the province, the country, and the world for almost a century.”

The announcements are merely the latest in a long series of cut-backs and closures decimating local news outlets this year. From Boston to Los Angeles, commercial and public radio outlets have been forced to slash staff and scale back their coverage in recent years amid steep declines in advertising and membership revenue.

In June, San Francisco-based KQED, one of the nation’s largest public media organizations, closed offices and laid off 34 staffers amid belt-tightening. The following month, Los Angeles-based Southern California Public Radio reported it had slashed 17% of its staff amid a seven-figure budget shortfall.

“The traditional financial models just don’t work anymore,” Southern California Public Radio chief content officer Kristen Muller wrote in an email to listeners. “Most advertising dollars that once supported us are now heading to giant tech platforms like Facebook and Google, resulting in a significant drop in sponsorship revenue — a tough pill to swallow.”

The existential threat to the radio business model comes as listeners abandon terrestrial broadcasts in favor of on-demand podcasts and streaming services, part of a larger digital reckoning that has forced widespread layoffs across some of the nation’s largest media companies.

The Pew Research Center, in a report published last year, showed that eight out of 10 Americans over the age of 12 listen to terrestrial radio in a given week, while one-fifth of US adults said they get their local news from radio stations. But the average revenue for all-news format stations had fallen to $17.8 million in 2022, well below pre-pandemic levels.

“Radio is a vital source of trusted news, information and entertainment that communities rely on every day. With hundreds of millions of Americans tuning in to radio every month, radio’s reach and impact are undeniable,” Alex Siciliano, the senior vice president of communications at the National Association of Broadcasters, told CNN. “However, as the digital marketplace evolves, local radio stations are increasingly threatened by Big Tech companies that exploit their market power and undermine the economic foundations of local journalism. Despite these challenges, local radio remains a cornerstone of community engagement.”

One such Big Tech rival is Spotify, which has peeled listeners and advertising dollars away from radio with a vast library of on-demand music and podcasts. While traditional stations hemorrhage revenue, Spotify reported record profit and growth from its ad-supported tier as its paying subscriber base reached 246 million users.