alt Hacker NewsAn Aural Companion for Decades, CBS News Radio Crackles to a Close
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Very sad. Radio is still the medium that can bring news the fastest. I start and end the day with news radio, and listen to music radio in the middle.
They better start dancing and distill their news into 10” video chunks. This is how we consume news today.
> The inexorable rise of podcasts, and the expansion into audio journalism by formerly print-only news outlets like The New York Times, has chipped away at traditional radio’s presence in public life.
Reads almost like the NYT is bragging about itself contributing to the shutdown?
Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.
I remember one service, a weather service that many private fishermen used was ended last year I think. Now they go without or they may need to subscribe to an expensive satellite service that is probably worse than the one that ended.
> CBS News Radio itself had been whittled down to a handful of correspondents in recent years and is unprofitable
I know correlation isn't causation, but damn, that feels really on the nose.
> But because of “a shift in radio station programming strategies” and “challenging economic realities,”
From the inside, a complete failure to modernize off the terrestrial satellite network, weak investments in reporting technologies and equipment, and a completely mismanaged web strategy which sacrificed brand identity and invention for lame SEO gamesmanship and wacky wordpress plugins.
They decided somewhere in 2015 that they were done with radio and effectively just gave up. This has been the slowest shoe to drop but it has been inevitable for a while.
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My dad managed some key school district functions across the Mojave desert and we had a little place near US-395 from which we could go fishing, hiking, or travel to go skiing. CBS News radio on was our constant companion across long roadtrips across the entire west, even when casettes and CDs abounded.
News would keep us informed and Mystery Theater would keep us entertained on the drive back home, exhausted, on Sunday evenings.
He's old now, but drove to Wyoming to fish last year from southern California. He said the fishing wasn't any good when he got there, so he turned around and came home before the next day dawned. I wonder what he will listen to this Spring.