CBS News Radio to End After 99 Years

CBS News Radio, which informed millions before YouTube, podcasts and even nightly television newscasts, will go silent later this month after 99 years.

CBS executives blame the shift to social media for news consumption and challenging economic realities.

Steve Kathan, the current and final anchor of the CBS World News Roundup, first discovered CBS News Radio in the 1960s on a transistor radio. "And that's where I heard some of the great CBS News broadcasters," he said. "You were hearing something live. It was a live broadcast."

"Everyone knows the legacy of CBS; everybody knows the power and respect that that name engenders," said program host and correspondent Allison Keyes. Over more than 25 years in radio, she covered many stories, but none like her live report on September 11, 2001: "I can hardly breathe. It looks like a nuclear war happened here. You can't see the sky at all. It's all grey smoke."

"People needed to know what was going on that day," Keyes said, "in real time, no filter, no politics. Here's what's happening."

Craig Swagler worked at CBS News Radio for 23 years. "Getting the opportunity to come and work at that place as an entry-level desk assistant was a very starry-eyed dream to fulfill, to sit in that room with giants," he said. Now running Baltimore Public Media, he served as the network's top radio executive.

CBS started as a radio network in 1927. Swagler said it transformed news reporting the year before World War II with one broadcast on March 13, 1938. "What was invented that day was the start of broadcast journalism," he said.

The day before, Hitler and his army had marched into Austria in the Anschluss annexation. Robert Trout reported: "Right at this moment, Austria is no longer a nation, but is now officially a part of the German empire. The Nazis have taken over the radio, and they are out to control everything."

A 29-year-old Edward R. Murrow, sent to Europe by CBS chief William S. Paley to recruit voices, reported from Vienna during a live program with remote reports from five European cities, anchored by Trout in New York. "This is Edward Murrow speaking from Vienna," he said. "It's now nearly 2:30 in the morning, and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived. No one seems to know just when he will get here. But most people expect him sometime after 10 o'clock tomorrow morning."

That broadcast created the CBS World News Roundup, America's longest-running news program. It covered the war and its aftermath, including Murrow's April 15, 1945, report from Buchenwald concentration camp: "Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday … It will not be pleasant listening. … At another part of the camp, they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeves, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. An elderly man standing beside me said, 'The children – enemies of the state.'"

As a child in Texas, Dan Rather listened to CBS News Radio. "My father and mother were very interested in what was happening in Germany," he said. "He and my mother viewed radio as the kind of magic carpet [that] would take you there."

Confined to bed with rheumatic fever at age 10, Rather stayed glued to the radio. He later anchored and managed The CBS Evening News and began his career there, reporting after President John F. Kennedy's assassination: "The mood in Dallas is still one of very deep shock. There are many people in Dallas who sincerely and literally still have a very difficult time believing what happened here today."

Murrow had left CBS the year before Rather joined, but the standard set by him and his colleagues, known as Murrow's Boys, endured. "All of them could write well," Rather said. "You didn't work for Murrow if you couldn't write well. And this put him in conflict sometimes with the people who ran the network. They didn't think that some of the correspondents had voices for radio. I'd read, say, Charles Kuralt or a Collingwood script, I would say to myself, 'Dan, you've got to make yourself a better writer and you better do it in a hurry or you're not going to be around here.'"

Before joining CBS in 1977, Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner learned from CBS News Radio at affiliate WJEF in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After hours, she transcribed and read scripts over recordings. "I would read the transcriptions to Eric Sevareid or Walter Cronkite or Douglas Edwards," she said. "And that taught me how they wrote, and it taught me how they breathed in a sentence. Like karaoke, almost. I really was learning from the best."

Those voices were her earliest mentors: "Absolutely," she said. "All male. There weren't any women."

Charles Osgood, who died two years ago, joined CBS Radio in 1967. On his daily Osgood File, he poeticized news, including a piece on POSSLQ, a U.S. Census Bureau term for person of opposite sex sharing living quarters:

"There's nothing that I wouldn't do

If you would be my POSSLQ.

You live with me, and I with you

and you would be my POSSLQ…"

Dustin Gervais, a CBS Radio News manager, coordinated global reporting from places like Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Beijing, Seoul and Sydney for more than 40 years. "We covered the whole world," he said.

Dan Rather said CBS News Radio should be remembered as a national institution that helped hold the country together for many years.