CBS News Radio

» see cbsnewsfeed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The network went on the air on 18 September 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters. Columbia Records bought it within weeks and William Paley took it over the following year, by which point it was already carrying a newscast. The piece of it that became famous started on 13 March 1938, when a European crisis moved faster than any single correspondent could follow and CBS answered by switching between cities live. That program was the World News Roundup, and it was still running under the same name eighty-eight years later, the longest-lived newscast American broadcasting ever produced.

By 2026 CBS News Radio was a wholesale operation rather than a station. It owned no transmitters. CBS had sold its actual radio stations to Entercom in 2017, so what remained was a newsroom that cut newscasts and features and pushed them down a wire to roughly seven hundred affiliates, who put them on air under their own call letters. Most listeners never heard the brand name attached to the audio they were hearing.

On Friday 20 March 2026 a memo from Bari Weiss, the editor in chief, and Tom Cibrowski, the president, went out to that team and to those stations. The service would end on 22 May. Every position in it was eliminated, around sixty to seventy people out of a news division of about 1,100. The memo said that a shift in radio station programming strategies, together with challenging economic realities, had made it impossible to continue the service, and that new audiences were burgeoning in new places.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the last eleven minutes ~

They used the two months to build their own obituary. A retrospective called Good Night and Good Luck went out looking back across the ninety-nine years. On the final night, 22 May 2026, Christopher Cruise anchored a special report at the bottom of the eleven o'clock hour alongside Steve Kathan and other remaining anchors. The last words of CBS News Radio were spoken at around 11:31 p.m. Eastern: CBS News special report, I'm Christopher Cruise. Then the engineers rolled a tape of Murrow signing off, and the wire went quiet.

~ what seven hundred stations lost ~

The affiliates were not big-market operations. A station that can afford a national desk does not buy newscasts wholesale. Seven hundred of them woke up on 23 May with a hole at the top of every hour and no supplier, which is the part of this that is still working its way through small-town American radio.

Murrow reached me as a film, not as a voice. Turkey had no CBS affiliate and no reason at all to carry an American network newscast, so the only Murrow I ever had was the 2005 Clooney picture about him, watched on a laptop years after it came out. That is a thin inheritance for ninety-nine years of broadcasting, and it is still more than most of the world got.

Archive Team went after the audio before the deadline. CBS had distributed its newsfeed through a redirector it called eyecast, so the grab iterated those URLs fresh in May 2026 to capture both the redirect and the file it pointed at. About two terabytes across roughly three million URLs, carried up to and including the final distributed broadcast.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »