NEW YORK — CBS News said Friday it is shutting down its storied radio news service after nearly 100 years of operation as part of a round of layoffs, blaming a shift in radio station programming strategies and challenging economic times.
When it went on the air in September 1927, CBS News Radio was the precursor to the entire network, giving a youthful William S. Paley a start in the business. Famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow delivered reports from London during World War II as part of the service.
Today CBS News Radio provides material to an estimated 700 stations across the country, and is known best for its top-of-the-hour news roundups. The service will end on May 22, the network said Friday.
“While this was a necessary decision, it was not an easy one,” CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski said in a memo to staff on Friday.
Along with newspapers, radio was the dominant force in how Americans got their news from the 1920s through the 1940s, with Americans listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” during the Depression, before the format was largely supplanted by television in the 1950s. Radio is even less a force in modern society, with the world online and on phones. Those seeking audio often turn to podcasts before radio.
The front page of CBS News’ website did not immediately carry news of the demise.
Weiss is not a stranger to CBS’ storied history. Addressing her staff in January, three months into her job as CBS News boss, she invoked the network’s legendary newsman Walter Cronkite as a symbol of old thinking and said that if the network continues with its current strategy, “we’re toast.”
Weiss announced the hiring of 18 new contributors and said CBS News needs to do stories that will “surprise and provoke — including inside our own newsroom.”
Weiss, founder of the Free Press website and without broadcast news experience before being hired by CBS parent Paramount’s new management, has quickly become a headline-maker and polarizing figure in journalism. She held a “60 Minutes” story critical of President Donald Trump’s deportation policy from being broadcast for a month and has critics watching to see if she’s moving the network in a Trump-friendly direction.
