After nearly 100 years, CBS News Radio is being shut down

I’ve been grappling with the reality that CBS News Radio will be shutting down on May 22. Even though I haven’t worked for the network in more than two decades, the announcement Friday — nonchalantly noting it was part of a 6% reduction in the news division’s workforce — was heartbreaking.

I spent 10 years reporting for CBS, first while working for radio affiliates when local stories were big enough to warrant national coverage, then about four years of reporting directly for the network while based in Miami. I learned so much while reporting for CBS and appreciated a level of professionalism like nothing I had experienced before. Looking at recent social media by former colleagues has been difficult.

The 99-year legacy included Edward R. Murrow during World War II essentially creating modern broadcast journalism as it still exists today through the way he and the reporters he hired provided first-hand storytelling with the sound and voices of the events they covered. Before then, radio news was primarily summaries of news headlines read by men with booming voices.

While working in the 1990s for CBS radio affiliates KARN in Little Rock and WRVA Richmond, Virginia, I reported for the network every chance I got. There were tornadoes, the Whitewater-related convictions of former associates of President Clinton — including the forced resignation of Gov. Jim Guy Tucker — and many executions which I reported from inside Cummins Prison. The first time one of my reports was the lead story on a CBS newscast was May 14, 1994 with Correspondent Dav Raviv anchoring.

AUDIO: My first report to lead a CBS News Radio newscast, May 14, 1994, on Arkansas executing two inmates on the same night.

AUDIO: A June 8, 1995 report on the sentencing of Webster Hubbell as part of Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation.

The editors in New York who would record my reports didn’t hesitate to sometimes rip apart my scripts and help me reword them in the most succinct and impactful way possible. That’s what a young reporter needs to get better.

In Miami, I worked for WIOD, which was an ABC affiliate, but continued filing for CBS because I felt a sense of loyalty and appreciation for CBS, which at that time didn’t have a radio affiliate in the market. I kept expecting my bosses at the Clear Channel station would tell me I should be reporting for ABC, but I guess they didn’t give it much thought. CBS also paid better than ABC because in addition to taking a report, they would pay for several additional soundbites.

AUDIO: My report for CBS on the trial of a company charged in connection with the 1996 Valujet crash that killed 110 people.

I would be rewarded for maintaining that relationship when an international custody fight over six-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was brewing in 2000 and CBS News Radio Executive Producer Charlie Kaye essentially assured me I could get enough freelance work to more than cover what I was making at WIOD. I ended up tripling my salary that year, thanks to the Elian saga stretching out for six months, then the 2000 presidential election being decided by Florida after five weeks of legal challenges and recounts in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

When news would break elsewhere in the region, I would get calls at all hours telling me flight arrangements were being made, get my stuff together and head to the airport. Correspondent Peter King in Orlando was the other person CBS News Radio had in the state. He told me the importance of always having a to-go packed and ready with a few days worth of clothes and supplies. If I got these calls during regular hours, desk assistants would often hand the call over to Kaye who would be so amazingly calm amid major breaking news as he instructed me on what to do.

Among the stories I covered was a plane crash on Abaco Island in the Bahamas that killed R&B singer/actress Aaliyah, a shark attack in Pensacola that killed an eight-year-old boy, an anthrax attack that killed a photo editor at a tabloid publisher based in Boca Raton and South Florida’s connections to the men who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

AUDIO: A montage of my reports for CBS on the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida.

AUDIO: Reporting from Abaco Island in the Bahamas on the August 2001 plane crash that killed R&B singer Aaliyah for CBS News Radio and the Westwood One program America in the Morning.

I know it’s advised that people put up boundaries between their professional and personal lives, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I considered being a reporter a lifestyle, maybe to a fault.

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary in 2001, my wife Susan and I decided to spend the weekend at a beachfront hotel in Fort Lauderdale. We had checked in, were having dinner and on our second round of drinks when my phone rang. It was CBS, with a desk assistant telling me NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt had just died at Daytona International Speedway. He asked if I could start heading that way and I explained it was our anniversary and the person apologized for interrupting us. I knew nothing about racing, but knew who Earnhardt was and that this was a huge story. After having this bouncing around in my head for a few minutes and talking with my wife, she reluctantly agreed that I could leave to drive up to cover the story. I arrived at the track around midnight and immediately started reporting for the network’s hourly newscasts. Susan spent the rest of the weekend in the hotel by herself. Not very thoughtful on my part, I know, but I felt CBS needed to have a reporter there.

About three times a year I would take a train up to New York and spend a few days at the CBS Broadcast Center alongside people I otherwise only knew by phone, emails and messages. It was fascinating to see how the radio network operated and to meet the news anchors I only knew as voices. They included legendary broadcasters Christopher Glenn, Nick Young, Bill Whitney, Bill Vitka and Steve Kathan, among others. Working remotely, the desk assistants were often my first line of contact, and it was also great getting to know them.

One was Joshua Cook, who by chance married a woman from Arkansas and today lives in Little Rock. We got together for lunch about a month ago and spent much of that visit sharing memories and discussing the evolution in recent years of CBS News Radio. There’s no longer a radio affiliate in Little Rock, so lately I’ve been listening to the top-of-the-hour newscasts on SiriusXM’s POTUS channel. And when driving at night in Arkansas, I still tune in to the amazing AM signal of WBBM in Chicago.

It has been apparent from hearing recent CBS newscasts that it’s a much more lean operation with fewer reporters while also not airing as many reports from affiliates. But of course there are fewer commercial stations these days that are doing original reporting. The three stations I worked at while reporting for CBS no longer have active newsrooms. KARN, WRVA and WIOD, like their broadcasting peers, once had a regulatory obligation as well as a sense of civic pride from local owners to provide strong local news coverage. Ted Snider, who owned KARN and the Arkansas Radio Network for decades, knew that necessitated hiring a full staff of anchors, reporters, editors, producers and talk show hosts.

Don’t get me started about what deregulation and distant corporate owners have done to the radio industry. And with a merger approved last Thursday by the Federal Communications Commission, the same thing is now happening to television. Public broadcasters definitely stepped up to fill the void and that’s the direction I took my career.

In 2003, as the build up to the war with Iraq was dominating national news coverage, I was getting less work from CBS. So when the Miami Herald was creating a radio news team as part of a new partnership with NPR station WLRN, I was hired there, starting a wonderful 22-year run in public broadcasting, which eventually included a return home to Little Rock, where I led the news department at KUAR, before three years at Arkansas PBS where I was Director of Public Affiars. But public broadcasting is retrenching after last year’s elimination of federal funding and the simple truth is that fewer people are watching or listening to over-the-air broadcasts.

Some partisans are cheering the demise of legacy media, but the evolving landscape will have fewer fact checkers and less accountability. It’ll be harder for people to know what is true. But at the same time, podcasting is exciting in that it allows anyone with an idea to reach an audience without the need for a broadcast signal.

The demise of CBS News Radio is disappointing in so many ways. The network was started in 1927. Couldn’t the current management at least let it live one more year to celebrate its 100th birthday rather than having the date for its death be planned for May 22? I guess not.