I’ve been grappling with the reality that CBS News Radio will be shutting down in May. Even though I haven’t worked for the network in 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 from 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.

It was a time before corporate radio companies had dismantled local station newsrooms and the broadcast schedules of most stations still had local talk shows and news blocks.

I learned so much while reporting for CBS and experienced a level of professionalism like nothing I had experienced before. Looking at social media posts this past weekend from former colleagues has been difficult, to say the least.

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.

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 station 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 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 what to plan on doing.

Among the stories I covered was a plane crash on Abaco Island in the Bahamas that killed R&B singer and 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 for me. I considered being a reporter a lifestyle, maybe to a fault.

To celebrate our first 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 and it was CBS. I answered and was told NASCAR racer Dale Earnhardt had just died at Daytona International Speedway and could I start heading that way. I explained it was our anniversary and the desk assistant 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 I could leave to drive up to cover the story, where I arrived around midnight and immediately started reporting for the hourly newscasts. She spent the rest of the weekend in the hotel by herself. Needless to say that was not good on my part.

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 legendary anchors I only knew as voices, most of whom had been on the air there for decades. People like Christopher Glenn, Nick Young, Bill Whitney 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 clearly apparent that the CBS radio operation has been much more lean in recent years and isn’t getting as much from its affiliates. Or maybe it doesn’t have the same kind of money to pay for reports.

It is telling that the three commercial radio news stations I worked for 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 obligation 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 and producers.

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. 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.