An Aural Companion for Decades, CBS News Radio Crackles to a Close

An Aural Companion for Decades, CBS News Radio Crackles to a Close
nytimes.com

I remember one service, a weather service that many private fishermen used was ended last year I think. Now they go without or they may need to subscribe to an expensive satellite service that is probably worse than the one that ended.

Broadcast radio and TV is (and newspaper, and telephone lines) are, ironically, a more resilient and distributed form of information distribution than the internet in many ways. The internet itself becomes the bottleneck; the power-law distributed control becomes the bottleneck; the devices (and all their security and psychological downsides) become terrible yet indispensable.

For every middle manager gung ho to replace paper with an iPad and an app, I say: find something else to do with your time. You're making the world actively worse.

I know correlation isn't causation, but damn, that feels really on the nose.

> But because of “a shift in radio station programming strategies” and “challenging economic realities,”

From the inside, a complete failure to modernize off the terrestrial satellite network, weak investments in reporting technologies and equipment, and a completely mismanaged web strategy which sacrificed brand identity and invention for lame SEO gamesmanship and wacky wordpress plugins.

They decided somewhere in 2015 that they were done with radio and effectively just gave up. This has been the slowest shoe to drop but it has been inevitable for a while.