Who cares about radio news?
Travel the country as I often do and you won’t find much local news on the radio. Consolidation has just about killed it. As a result, big city all-news radio stations and networks have lost their farm systems. “We don’t have the minor league teams to draw on that we used to,” says Harvey Nagler, vice president of CBS Radio News. But there’s one major exception: NPR.
In an effort to spread its brand, NPR recently decided to stop calling itself National Public Radio but radio is still its heart and soul. And with 780 member stations, NPR has an impressive farm system, and often calls up some of the best to the big leagues. Reporters like Tamara Keith and Jason Beaubien, for example, got their start at local public radio stations.
NPR’s long-form programs “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” feature radio storytelling at its best. The writing is crisp and evocative, and the stories make great use of natural sound, which NPR executive Robert Garcia calls “the currency of the realm.”
“It’s what brings people into a story,” Garcia says. “If somebody’s in a Pakistani village you’re going to be listening to [it]. You can practically taste the dust on the road.”
As a regular listener to NPR, it’s always seemed to me that the hourly newscasts just didn’t measure up to the same standards as the programs. The writing was flat, most correspondent reports were straight voicers, many of the sound bites were from phoners of marginal quality and there was almost no use of natural sound. Garcia’s been working to change that.
Now, some 50-second stories include multiple sound bites and nat sound. Instead of filing a report, a correspondents may discuss a story in a Q-and-A format with the anchor, which can run longer. The newscasts also are trying to respond faster to breaking news, something they were notoriously slow about in the past.
“We are getting much better at that out of necessity,” Garcia says, “and I think that’s because more people are turning to National Public Radio as their primary source of information. So it’s incumbent on us to move more quickly.”
About time, I’d say. Because the truth is, I care about radio news. I spent a lot of my early career in radio and it was a great place to start. CBS’s Nagler says it still is. A lot of the best writers in the business, he says, come out of radio, “because you need to think on your feet and write concisely.” There may not be as many places to learn that as there used to be but it’s good to know there are still a few.
In nearly all towns that Ive visited over the last couple of years, ( and I travel a lot!) …NPR was about the only local news program unless you count the local “all sports talk” on AM. Keep up the good work NPR!
Sorry Deborah, not buying “the end” story. True, radio doesn’t do news as it did 20, 15, 10 years ago — but “won’t find much local news on the radio” is just a tad bit lazy. When next in Ohio, give me a call and we’ll go for a drive through little towns that still do, medium cities that still do and big cities that still do — public and commercial. It isn’t easy, but “just about killed” is like saying the newspaper industry is dead.
Check out places like Mitchell, SD; Dover, OH; Marshfield, MA; even Akron, OH. Listen to Lorain, OH where the news director there still does a hell of job despite going part-time, or the folks in Youngstown who still talk, inform and squeeze out an occasional story on their own (sarcasm directed not at them); look at what Michigan Radio does in Ann Arbor, or have the traditional news flamethrowers in the big cities (WTOP, KYW, WCBS, WINS, WBBM, KCBS, KNX, KIRO, etc.) turning out the lights at 6? Even the ever-popular whipping boy for those singing the consolidation blues, Clear Channel, provide news for their communities — as well as places to talk about it.
That’s like says television news is dead because CNN just talks about it. “The Situation Room” still packs a hell of a lot of news in all that talk, don’t they? Last time I checked, changing times haven’t killed print — but it is forcing them to change. Same with TV. Same with radio. Same with the web. We spend way too much time bemoaning the way things aren’t the way they used to be.
Here’s what’s really changed: the public, our neighbors, our communities, our customers — have decided they want their news in different ways. It’s not just about what pops out of a speaker or a picture tube or leaps off a piece of paper anymore. The challenge for broadcasters and publishers and citizen journalists isn’t how to do reporting and journalism, it’s how to make money to afford doing so. The model of communities wanting to know what’s going on in their backyard hasn’t changed, the method of satisfying that need has evolved and we haven’t figured out yet the business model is what’s broken.
Would be nice to spend more time of fixing that and building new sales and marketing approaches rather than decrying the end of the world that isn’t really the end.
And a note to my friends at the network: want to really start rebuilding the farm system? Leave New York, Washington and Atlanta and take a drive with the radio on. Be prepared to listen, and you’d better have a good pitch on why the people working for us should consider changing their quality of life to meet your needs. Recruit the bench; that’s changed, too. They aren’t standing in line anymore begging for the “big” jobs because the new crop has figured out 24/7 is something they expect a convenience store to offer, not a career. That’s another model you need to change.
I’m pretty much with Ed. Not to mention, NPR kinda drives me nuts. Their obvious liberal slant (for the record, I’m not a Republican– that’s just how much their slant bothers me) , the slow pacing of their stories, the sort of pretentious way they speak. It’s news for snobs, not the average layperson. I know, kind of superficial reasons for me to not like it, but everytime I TRY to listen to it (my husband listens to it non-stop), I can’t get through it and end up turning the ol’ knob.
By the way, I’m a former TV anchor who now works at a small-market, all news commercial radio station.
Major oversight on my part not to have mentioned the big city all newsers. Inexcusable, really, since I spent time anchoring at KYW, and I’ve listened to WTOP every day for years. Those stations are alive and well and doing great work. There just aren’t that many of them.
I’ll grant Ed’s point that radio news still exists in smaller markets. NPR has the advantage of being easier for travelers to find because most of their stations are at the bottom end of the FM dial. From what I can tell, though, there’s precious little reporting going on at the smaller market commercial stations. Few stations have enough staff to let any of them leave the building. That’s not the fault of a part-time news director or a one-person news department, it’s just reality.
The point I was trying to make about NPR is that the newscasts are getting better with the addition of more sound and quicker pacing. The hourly summaries used to drive me nuts, too, Elisha. I think they’re improving.
Ed’s other comments about the business model and the career track at the networks are well taken. Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution to either one.
Thanks for the kudos Ed! KORN, Mitchell, South Dakota is a heritage radio station and proudly continues its tradition of providing comprehensive LOCAL news coverage. With basically a one-man news department, KORN manages to provide coverage of city and county government as well as school board, the courts, crime, natural disaster, and breaking news. But wait! There’s more! KORN is also part of an informal statewide “news sharing” network of other small market stations. By working with each other I sincerely believe that South Dakota has some the best local and state news coverage in the United States.
No doubt that consolidation has gutted once proud radio news outlets in larger markets but in my 24 years at KORN and in South Dakota, local news coverage has always thrived and improved through evolving technology and the dedication of small market stations to deliver the news that really matters to the communities served.
Stop by anytime! I’ll even give you a personally guided tour of the World’s Only Corn Palce.
Doing local/regional news is more difficult all the time with limited resources where I work.. My own shift was reassigned to overnights from days, as a host in addition to producing news clips, writing a bit , etc. No one covers news outside the building during the day, all PA interviews have to be done mid-evening before my air shift begins at 9:30p ET. Local sound has all but disappeared where I work in central Connecticut, along with all the sources I cultivated over a 26 year period. AP Hartford closes at 8pm most days so I work all night with no new content, just rewrites of the previous day. I obtain audio where I can, and need to qualify the source in scripting. News was always seen as desirable, though secondary to other chores. I graduated in 1977 from Iowa State University and would like, at least once, to actually work full time in radio news, not just do it as a side just to other things. By the way, I was at KORN in Mitchell, South Dakota myself in 1977-79 as board op/news director succeeding Vin Strichertz. I didn’t do that well early in my career, and lost my job in a shuffle to bring a full time engineer on board to take care of an AM/ new FM combo. I’ve never worked fulltime as just a news director since. And the industry I was educated for then has gone away in the meantime.