Once a mainstay of the radio dial, local news is signing off as stations struggle to survive in the digital age
Originally Published: 16 AUG 24 11:41 ET
By Liam Reilly, CNN
New York (CNN) — For more than a century, Americans have been turning to a trusted and reliable source for local news: the radio. Now, 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 an 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.
But communities that lose their local news outlets seldom see them replaced, resulting in news deserts, areas with little to no reliable local information. A report from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University found that at the current rate, the US is set to lose one-third of its newspapers since 2005 by the end of this year. The report also found that residents in more than half of US counties have access to very limited or no reliable sources of local news.
“Paradoxically, one of the largest local news deserts in America is New York. That’s why The City was started,” Jeff Jarvis, the Leonard Tow Professor of Journalism Innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, told CNN. “The New York Times is not a local newspaper anymore, The [New York] Post is [Rupert] Murdoch’s pulpit, The [New York Daily] News tries to be the Daily Mail.”
But the recent casualties in local media have been “a long time coming,” Jarvis said. “I think that the age of mass media was fairly prescribed by time. Consider that broadcast radio is about a century old right now and it is broadcast radio that led us to mass media, followed by television, followed by cable.”
NPR is the proverbial canary in the coal mine where local radio is concerned. In recent years, the public broadcaster has been forced to trim its budget following declines in projected revenue, sharing it would cut $10 million in costs by curbing hiring in 2022 after a sharp sponsorship decline. Though NPR avoided layoffs at the time, it eventually axed 10% of its workforce, or 100 people, in 2023 and canceled four podcasts.
“Listening to terrestrial broadcast radio, that is FM and AM, is down and it’s declining,” Michael Socolow, a University of Maine communications and journalism professor and media historian, told CNN. “You see this with NPR’s ratings, as well as commercial stations.”
“But actual listening to commercial audio is up because of podcasting,” Socolow added. “So, the problem you’re having is the budgets that were set up for commercial radio stations were based on a larger number of listeners, and with all the competition, they’re really having a difficult time.”
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.
“Our business continued to perform well in Q2, led by healthy subscriber gains, improved monetization and record profitability,” Spotify told investors last month.
Still, it’s not all grim news for local outlets. Last year, a coalition of 22 donors — including the MacArthur and Knight foundations — formed Press Forward, a nationwide initiative seeking to revitalize local news through a $500 million philanthropic injection.
And local radio outlets are increasingly experimenting with their formats and platforms as audiences shift, with some stations moving news programming from the AM band to FM, launching podcasts and expanding their online news presence. Public and commercial stations have also launched smartphone apps, allowing users to tune in to FM and AM broadcasts from anywhere without the use of a radio.
“Our efforts to reach and engage people on digital channels are succeeding,” Muller of Southern California Public Radio wrote in May. “But the revenue is not following pace. This does not mean we are retreating from our cross-platform ambitions, or our desire to be a daily digital habit for Southern Californians seeking trustworthy news and information. In fact, our work has never been more vital, and we are committed to its growth.”
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