CBS News Radio to Shut Down After Nearly a Century

CBS is turning off the nation’s oldest surviving radio news service, ending a pipeline that still feeds about 700 affiliated stations and once helped set the standard for American journalism in real time. The company said CBS News Radio will shut down on May 22, with all positions in the radio team eliminated, as the division faces “challenging economic realities” and a shift in radio programming strategies.

The decision reaches far beyond one corporate cut. It is part of a broader CBS News restructuring tied to a 6% staff reduction, or roughly 66 jobs, under new management at Paramount Skydance. CBS said the news business is changing radically and that the company must change with it. For local stations that have long relied on CBS for hourly national updates, the end of the service means finding replacement feeds, with ABC News Audio among the most likely options for some affiliates.

The shutdown closes a chapter that began in 1927, when William S. Paley bought the fledgling United Independent Broadcasters and built CBS into a national force. CBS News Radio traces its history to Sept. 27, 1927, and its signature World News Roundup first aired on March 13, 1938, with Robert Trout hosting and Edward R. Murrow making his radio debut. CBS has long described the program as the longest-running newscast in the country, a symbol of an era when a single broadcast could reach listeners from New York to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington.

Murrow’s wartime reports from London, especially his rooftop dispatches during the Nazi bombing, helped define modern broadcast journalism and gave CBS a reputation for urgency, authority and moral weight. Charles Osgood later carried that legacy forward for a new generation of listeners. The network’s withdrawal is especially striking because CBS was the last of the original three U.S. radio networks still operating after NBC Radio Network and the Mutual Broadcasting System ended in 1999.

Several affiliates, including WINS, KNX, WBBM, KCBS and WTOP, have used CBS News Radio programming and have moved to reassure listeners that their local stations are not disappearing. Still, the loss of the national service underscores a larger market reality: the old mass-audience model that sustained broadcast news for decades is giving way to a fragmented audio landscape of podcasts, streaming services and weakened local radio newsrooms. What once sounded like the nation speaking at once is now being split into smaller, more competitive pieces.