Everyone knows that many legacy media outlets are under fire these days. Perhaps we at Railway Age are more aware of the situation than most observers, because our 170-year legacy on our specialized reporting beat is one of the longest anywhere. Yet media we have known for our entire lives, and which touched those lives in so many ways, is dying. Today (May 22) marks the end of radio news on CBS.
At 8:00 Eastern time this morning, Steve Kathan sat in front of a CBS Radio microphone and reported the CBS World News Roundup for the final time. It was not only the last time for him, but for a newscast that kept Americans and people elsewhere who had access to short wave radios informed since the scary days of the buildup toward World War II. Throughout the day, the hourly newscasts will toll the death watch until Christopher Cruz (scheduled at this writing) will deliver the final newscast tonight and effectively sign the network off the air and into memory. The five-note sounder, followed by the network’s newscast into: “This is CBS News on the Hour, your home for original reporting” will be heard for the last time, as the voices of what had been a journalistic and broadcasting institution will fall silent.
The final edition of the “Roundup” was classic CBS Radio News content. The ten-minute newscast contained six reports, the last one recapping the end of another era at CBS: the final Late Show on television with Stephen Colbert. Kathan then pivoted into the history of the Roundup with a clip of Robert Trout introducing the first broadcast in 1938, followed by Edward R. Murrow, Douglas Edwards and Dallas Townsend, who anchored the Roundup for nearly 30 years. Kathan said: “Our history has always been important to us, and as CBS News Radio signs off today, too, we all leave with a sense of proud accomplishment and gratitude for our listeners and the great radio stations who’ve been part of our family. They will carry on.” The penultimate word came from Murrow, spoken roughly seven decades ago: “The best radio reporting is yet to be. Good night and good luck.” The ultimate word came from Kathan himself: “and Good-bye.”
Nothing Else Like CBS Radio News
Until relatively recently, news was always important at CBS. When he founded the fledgling Columbia Broadcasting System in 1927, William S. Paley (who had been in the cigar business) developed the network’s news capabilities over the years to distinguish it from the one-year-older National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Paley and News Director Paul White built up the network’s news department, and on March 13, 1938, the fateful day when Hitler’s army was prepared to march into Austria and absorb that nation into the Nazi realm, CBS used shortwave radio to get the stories from Europe. Edward R. Murrow, a young scholarly man, reported the events, the first report of his illustrious career. William L. Shirer, who wrote the definitive history of Germany during the Nazi era, reported for CBS, too. That broadcast was the first CBS World News Roundup, and it ran for 35 minutes. Today’s broadcast, after 88 years, two months and nine days, will run for ten minutes. Then there will be no more.
The other radio networks of the day reported the news, too, and they did it well. Still, the radio reporters at CBS created “word pictures” that told the entire story, from the grimmest to the occasionally lighthearted. Our imaginations worked overtime when we listed to those reports, and we came out better-informed for it. There was no TV-style visual distraction, because it wasn’t necessary.
Personal Memories
I was born almost exactly ten years after the CBS World News Roundup first went on the air. I never took journalism classes. In a way, it was the great reporters at CBS Radio who mentored and somehow trained me to report the news, even though I never thought I would be a reporter when I was a teenager listening to the old WCBS in New York City, which ran wonderful entertainment programs along with the superbly written, produced and delivered newscasts and programs. I developed an interest in news during my undergrad days and learned the craft of writing and reporting on broken-down typewriters in the newsrooms of community radio stations. The great CBS Radio reporters, who were still going strong at the time, were my role-models. I am also not the only person here at Railway Age who began by reporting on radio. Our Editor-in-Chief, William C. Vantuono, started in radio news, too.
Broadcast radio can be a fickle medium, one day you’re doing it, and the next day you’re not, as the final group of great reporters at CBS News Radio are about to experience. I never reported on radio again after 1982, as my life went in other directions, mainly my law practice.
Still, I came back to reporting more than two decades after that. I had become involved with the rail scene through advocacy activities in the interests of the riders on Amtrak and rail transit. From 2004 until its demise in 2017, I reported every week for an online rail news site called Destination: Freedom at a now-defunct website. Finally, in 2018, I was invited on board here at Railway Age. There is little that I have done that I have found as rewarding and as necessary as reporting to you on passenger trains and rail transit, the most specialized, narrow and possibly arcane reporting beat imaginable. For the sake of the mobility of millions of Americans and Canadians who probably never even heard of Railway Age, this reporting beat might be instrumental in allowing them to continue to go places, even though they don’t know it.
Radio news isn’t completely dead. The roughly 700 stations that carried news from CBS Radio will either give up regular newscasts, upgrade their own news departments or get news from elsewhere. Early indications seem to favor ABC Radio, the only legacy radio network that will still offer news (Mutual and NBC Radio as entities are long gone). Noncommercial stations will still have news from NPR, despite that network’s ongoing political trials and tribulations. But CBS Radio News, which did not quite make the century mark, will no longer be with us to set the standard for reporting excellence.
On Monday, May 18, as I stood at New York Penn Station on the then-empty side of the facility that the Long Island Rail Road uses, I thought of the imminent demise of CBS News Radio and did the best I could to create a brief “word picture” of the scene. It did not have the urgency or perhaps the polish of a report by Edward R. Murrow or one of his colleagues, but it was, at least somewhat, inspired by them.
Our legacy at Railway Age now exceeds that of CBS Radio News by 71 years. I like to think that the great general reporting there influenced our own reporting on the railroad industry which will continue.
Editor’s Comment: CBS News has indeed influenced our reporting, at least for me personally. I studied broadcast journalism in college and learned about legends like Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. I reported news on my college radio station. When I started my career at Railway Age in 1992, we were print-only, but years later we expanded into podcasts (Rail Group On Air) and videos. I’ve also had the good fortune to have appeared on CNN, NBC, NPR and other broadcast outlets. So, in a sense, as I approach age 67, my journalism career has come full-circle. – William C. Vantuono
