A VAST WASTELAND
Local news increasingly hard to find on commercial radio
by Deborah Potter

Ann Hollifield will never forget it. There she was, in a hotel room in Yankton, SD, alone in the midst of a vicious thunderstorm. She quickly turned on the radio and dialed around, searching for information. But for half an hour, all she heard was music and chatter. Not a single local radio station, it seemed, was covering the storm.

On television, she found continuous coverage complete with tornado warnings, but the TV stations were in bigger communities about 60 miles away and little Yankton was not their concern. "I literally spent the evening at the window, staring into a raging storm," Hollifield says, "hoping that if something was coming my way I would hear it before it hit."

Radio news ain't what it used to be, thanks to deregulation. There are more radio stations than ever but fewer owners, and those owners are in it for the profit. The biggest behemoth, Clear Channel, just got bigger, completing its buyout of AMFM, Inc. The company now owns more than 900 stations nationwide, and in many markets it controls as many as eight stations, the maximum number allowed.

To cut costs and raise profits, those stations share not only sales and promotion but also programming-and that means news. The same technology that allows one DJ to program dozens of stations at the same time also allows a centralized staff to feed newscasts to different markets. So stations in Toledo and Lima, Ohio, now get their newscasts from a Clear Channel station in Columbus, in keeping with the company's credo: "Create it once, use it often."

Metro Networks, part of the Westwood One empire that also includes Shadow Broadcast Services, has made its mark by persuading stations to "outsource" their news. "We go to a radio station and say, 'We'll hire your people," says John Tomlinson, Metro's senior vice president for news. Those people then work for Metro, feeding news back to their former station-and many more. In the New York City market, for example, Metro serves 43 stations. The company now has 1600 news employees, producing wire copy as well as "custom newscasts" for more than 800 stations.

One of those stations used to be WRKO in Boston, but a year ago it left the fold and reestablished its own news staff. News director Rod Fritz says management wanted to recapture what it felt had been lost: "A huge local connection and journalists who knew who the listeners were and broadcast to that audience."

Listeners are the losers when stations outsource their news, says Chris Allen, who teaches broadcast journalism at the University of Nebraska. "You can customize the newscast, but one person covered the story," he says, "and all the stations are getting the same story." Clear Channel would argue that listeners win-at least some listeners. The company's 1999 annual report says that its "state news network concept…provides high quality, professional newscasts to all stations on the network, including many small market stations that could not normally afford live news."

But elsewhere, it's fairly clear that consolidation has meant less truly local radio news. Just thumb through the latest Broadcasting & Cable Yearbook. In Asheville, NC, only one station lists a full-time news staff of more than one person. In Charleston, SC, only one station lists any news staff. And while seven of the 16 radio stations in Omaha, NE, say they have someone on staff doing news, at least three of those stations are sharing the same person. Under those conditions, there's not much competition for local news.

But all is not gloomy in radio news. On public radio, news is booming. Bill Buzenberg, news director of Minnesota Public Radio, says the annual conference of public radio news directors drew 125 news directors this year, compared with only 60 just three years ago. "It's a topsy-turvy world," he says. While he's hiring new staff, and adding an investigative unit, "I see our commercial brethren doing less and cutting back on staff."

That trend seems likely to continue, at least for a while, as radio companies keep merging and buying each other out. PaineWebber broadcasting analyst Lee Westerfield predicts a lot more consolidation. "There will be four or five companies standing in a few years," he told MediaWeek. The consequence for listeners will likely be more of the same-less local news on the radio dial.

It happened in Chicago just this summer, when all news giant WMAQ went off the air-a victim of the CBS/Viacom merger-leaving listeners with one less source for local news. Its historic call letters are gone now, but anyone who cares about the future of radio news should remember what they stood for: We Must Ask Questions.

(This article was originally published in the American Journalism Review, November 2000)