Do National Radio News Networks Matter Anymore?

So-called traditional media, of which radio is certainly a part, is obviously in decline. With the prevalence of cable TV, the web, free WiFi and portable devices like iPods and iPhones, I wonder who actually listens to radio for news and coverage of “special events” these days besides senior citizens, the sight-impaired and truck drivers?

I’ve been listening to much CBS and ABC radio coverage of the death of Michael Jackson these past few weeks—including live remote coverage of the memorial on July 7, 2009 and live newsroom coverage the day Jackson died (which I wrote about in an earlier post)—and it got me wondering if national radio news networks matter at all anymore.

Recent blog postings in the New York Times provide evidence that radio coverage of special events is all but written off. This Media Decoder posting documented TV viewership (30 million) while another somewhat confusing Bits posting provided web stats and attempted to put the Michael Jackson memorial into context with other recent events, such as the Obama inauguration (not quite sure how to add up these numbers). Radio numbers? There was nary a mention. If TV and the web are the Panavision and Cinemascope of today’s media, then radio is a one reel silent film. Radio has become the forgotten medium—news about which is, apparently, not even fit to post.

Media expert Jerry Del Colliano wrote a piece this week for his Inside Music Media blog called Radio, Music & Michael Jackson Died Together that ends with this observation: "Now, perhaps it's fitting that the Assistant Chief of the LAPD trying to avoid congestion at today's downtown public memorial for Michael Jackson told the public to watch it on TV and the Internet.

 He never mentioned radio."

Network radio coverage of news and special events matured in the run-up to World War II, and then hit its prime in the first half of the 1940s. Americans followed the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Europe and then the Pacific by radio; the news was coming too fast for the newspaper extra to keep up, and the radio networks had people in place to cover the stories where they were happening, as they were happening.

Broadcasters such as Edward R. Murrow, H.V. Kaltenborn, Fred Bate, Max Jordan, Elmer Davis, John MacVane, Cecil Brown and Eric Sevareid became household names, their radio stories reprinted by newspapers and their first-hand reports heard via crackly shortwave relays from war-torn foreign capitals. It was as if the medium of radio news was spontaneously invented and simultaneously achieving perfection while millions listened in. American radio news perhaps reached its pinnacle during the “pooled” coverage of the Allied landings on D-Day in June 1944 (more about that in a future posting), but it remained the primary medium for broadcast news and public affairs programming throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s. Other media critics have pointed to the coverage of the JFK assassination as the moment that TV coverage of news and special events displaced radio—when the torch was passed to a new medium.

Network radio drama, comedy and variety programming also had its heyday in the 1940s and early 1950s in terms of quality, quantity and, most important, advertising revenue. In fact, revenue from radio programming in this era subsidized network investment in the equipment and talent necessary to launch TV; radio funded its own demise. TV rapidly became the medium of choice during this time, and displaced the audio-only format as primary domestic broadcast entertainment. To put it simply, TV kicked radio out of the living room, and radio morphed into a portable source for music and news in the bedroom, kitchen, shirt pocket or dashboard.

However, while network radio drama, comedy and variety were officially dead by 1962 and network radio revenue was decimated, all three of the American combined TV & radio networks in business at that time continued to maintain radio news operations throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s that were probably successful enough to remain solvent if not generate modest profit, since even music radio stations retained regular newscasts in this period. (Editor’s note: NBC’s weekend Monitor program is, to put it mildly, an anomaly from this era that’s worth exploring in another post.)

To understand how radio became so marginalized, it’s also worth examining the rise and fall of network TV. Not surprisingly, it’s also about the money (public interest, convenience and necessity aside, broadcasting in the US is a business, after all, and there’s no sense pretending otherwise). Network television’s decline can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s when VCRs and cable channels gave viewers other options besides their local ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS affiliates, and rating points and those critical advertising dollars began to slip.

But, this wasn’t just the beginning of the end of 30+ years of network television dominance—it was the beginning of the end of a half-century of network broadcasting dominance. This is because the network TV broadcasting model predates television and actually emerged during the early network radio era of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then, NBC was comprised of two separate networks: the premium Red Network and the more public affairs-focused Blue Network. Found in violation of anti-trust laws, NBC was forced by court order to sell the Blue Network in 1943, and the Blue Network then became ABC.

NBC Red, NBC Blue and CBS built nationwide systems of local radio stations (the affiliates) beginning in the late 1920s to enable simultaneous national broadcasting of network programming—giving national advertisers the ability to reach a national audience via sponsorship of radio programs. The television networks of NBC, CBS and ABC employed the same strategy beginning in the late 1940s (in the case of NBC and CBS) and early 1950s (ABC).

Nowadays, among the original three combined radio & TV networks, just ABC and CBS have dedicated radio-only staff reporting radio news, and both leverage TV news staff and content to support their radio news operations and coverage of special events. While relative newcomer FOX Radio also has dedicated radio staff, NBC uses TV reporters and anchors from NBC and MSNBC for their radio newscasts.

National radio news networks are still a part of the radio industry and still are there on the dial of your terrestrial radio, HD radio, satellite radio and even your web browser (which I suppose doesn’t really have a dial). As far as I can tell, the following six news organizations continue to produce at least hourly radio newscasts, and have the ability (the infrastructure and the personnel) to provide their affiliates with live coverage of unscheduled special events when the need arises: ABC Radio News (via Citadel Media Networks); AP Radio News; CBS Radio News (via Westwood One); CNN Radio Network (via Westwood One); FOX NEWS Radio (via Premiere Radio); and NBC Radio News (via Westwood One).

Maybe their continued existence in the marketplace is proof enough that the national radio news networks do matter. But I still wonder if anybody is really listening.

FOOTNOTE: It’s worth mentioning NPR here, but I’ve found their ability to cover unscheduled special events highly variable depending on time of day and day of the week that the news breaks. In a future posting, I’ll document differences in how NPR and CBS covered the space shuttle Columbia disaster on Saturday, February 1, 2003 (short version: Scott Simon saved the day for NPR). In my experience, NPR seems best suited for post-event analysis and for coverage of scheduled special events, such as presidential debates and congressional hearings.

Suggested Further Reading

Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broadcasting by Laurence Bergreen

Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952 by Michele Hilmes

Say Goodnight, Gracie: The Last Years of Network Radio by Jim Cox

Another On The Media, Another Week Without Michael Jackson Analysis

When I last week lamented the lack of Michael Jackson coverage on WNYC's On The Media, I said near the end of my posting, "I guess I have next week's episode to look forward to for what will likely be insightful analysis of the Jackson coverage." Wrong! This week, OTM featured pieces from the archive about longstanding media myths and how they propagate, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rosa Parks and Kitty Genovese. It was great stuff, but not what I wanted to hear and nowhere near being topical at a time that cried out for topicality--and probably not something that would have happened were OTM a commercial production. I'm guessing the OTM folks were off for the Fourth of July holiday last week, but how long will the world have to wait for brilliant OTM treatment of the Michael Jackson coverage?

On The Media: Missed Opportunity and What's With "Edited . . . by Brooke"?

I've been listening pretty religiously to the weekly radio program On The Media for the past decade or so and I generally love it (though I'd, not surprisingly, love to hear more criticism of radio content). The show is produced by public radio station WNYC in New York and distributed by NPR to affiliates around the country. In the past year or so, I've been doing most of my listening via the weekly podcast (the program is heard Sunday evenings in Seattle, but is available by download on the preceding Friday).

This week, the show apparently had the unfortunate timing to have been produced before Thursday's death of Michael Jackson and the web vs. traditional media frenzy that followed. I just listened to this week's On The Media (midday Saturday, June 27) and was dismayed to find no mention of what's looking to be a defining moment in new media (and what was being characterized as such as early as late Thursday, when TMZ was credited with breaking the story of Jackson's death). Granted, On The Media doesn't bill itself as a to-the-minute topical show, but it seems to me that if there were ever a time to pull an already produced episode and start over, or at least re-edit to include a story about the unprecedented quantity and nature of media coverage of Jackson's death, this would have been the week to do so (particularly since topics in this week's show included what could have been complementary stories: an interview with bloggers hired by old school newspapers and a piece about ambush interviews). I guess I have next week's episode to look forward to for what will likely be insightful analysis of the Jackson coverage.

While I'm at it, as much as I like On The Media, the little "audio editing inside joke" near the end of each episode when co-host Bob Garfield says that the show is, "edited . . . by Brooke" is sometimes cute, sometimes irritating. Not to kill a joke by trying to analyze it, but I assume that the pause between "edited" and "by" is made by Mr. Garfield so that co-host and editor Brooke Gladstone will have to make a manual cut using ProTools or whatever audio editing software she uses (though she never does make such a cut). Am I wrong? Is it an oblique tribute to Ed Murrow's "This . . . is London"? Am I over sensitive? Is there a backstory to this that I'm not aware of? Please set me straight!

Network Radio and Michael Jackson's Death

Here on the West Coast it was late afternoon on Thursday, June 25, 2009 as the news spread of Michael Jackson's hospitalization and death. Our Seattle ABC and CBS radio affiliates are fairly similar in format (ABC affiliate KOMO is mostly news with a few hours of midday talk, and leverages KOMO's TV news operation for content; CBS affiliate KIRO has a morning news block and then is all personality-driven talk, recently moved from AM to FM, and has no in-house TV news operation), but each supplemented local coverage (local reactions, listener call-ins) with frequent network updates, and each reported the early speculation of Jackson's death (attributing the TMZ website as the source), at least in KIRO's case, just before 3:00 pm Pacific Time.

This was a classic contemporary radio news moment--the talking heads on cable TV (cardiologists, pop culture experts, cable news anchors) speculating while video loops of Jackson highlights/lowlights and LA hospital footage played added little to the facts of the story. Also, given that the story broke late in the traditional workday and/or during the commute home (depending on your time zone), it was a story that could be easily followed in the "dependable portable live audio" (read: terrestrial radio) format. Add to that the abundant and accessible back catalog of Jackson's music for handy use as pre- and post-commercial bumpers, and the radio-friendly equation is complete.

The best coverage of the day came at 5:30 PM Pacific Time, as CBS Radio presented a 20-minute audio special anchored by Dan Raviv, beating the network TV specials by a few hours on the West Coast and including archival audio as well as newly-recorded interviews and reports. I heard much of it, conveniently, in my car. A few hours later, I saw the opening moments of TV specials presented at 9 pm Pacific Time by ABC and NBC; each began with "live" reports from correspondents standing outdoors in Los Angeles that had, from the bright sunshine, obviously been taped a few hours earlier to be "live" for the Eastern Time Zone broadcast.

I looked on the CBS News website to try and find the Raviv radio broadcast to no avail. If you can find it, please let me know. Lastly, as with previous breaking news of this tawdry nature, I didn't even think of tuning in NPR until a few hours later. I wish that wasn't the case!