As Streamline Publishing‘s Radio Ink was first to report on Friday, CBS News Radio is ceasing operations on May 22, and a reduction-in-force effort that will impact nearly 70 individuals is already underway.
Three radio station licensees each reached out to Radio Ink to offer their thoughts on the decision by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and president Tom Cibrowski. To say they are less than pleased may be an understatement.
“The decision to shut down CBS News Radio is both baffling and deeply
troubling,” said John Ostlund, an owner and day-to-day leader of One Putt Broadcasting, which operates stations in the Fresno market.
Ostlund noted how CBS Radio is not only a century-old institution rooted in tradition but also a remarkable success story by the numbers, as it reaches 23 million listeners
each week across a network of 700 affiliate stations.
With “just” 60 full-time employees, “it surpasses typical industry standards for
efficiency and reach,” Ostlund said. In fact, he argues that the weekly reach of CBS News Radio is 400% greater than the popular reality competition TV show The Voice, which has 6 million weekly viewers. “It’s clear that CBS Radio’s main challenge is revenue, not reach,” Ostlund said.
For him, money is being left on the table. “Leadership has argued that radio audiences are passive and that national advertisers are now prioritizing attribution—specifically, the ability of digital media to provide data on audience engagement and purchases,” he said. “Instead of demonstrating the value of ‘passive’ reach, CBS Radio is shifting to opt-in subscriber models, foregoing the opportunity to monetize a broad audience in favor of targeting a niche segment … By attributing shortcomings to the radio business model, executives avoid acknowledging their failure to develop a sales strategy for monetizing one
of the nation’s largest news audiences. Rather than taking responsibility, they present themselves as visionaries focused on the future. This management bias favors predetermined strategies over objective analysis.”
Ostlund concluded that the coming end to CBS Radio News :serves as a stark reminder that short-term thinking and leadership failures can dismantle even the most venerable institutions, erasing legacies built over generations in pursuit of fleeting digital trends.”
A ‘WAKE-UP CALL FOR MAIN STREET RADIO
The recent shutdown of CBS Radio News isn’t just another media headline, as John Caracciolo, owner of JVC Broadcasting, sees it. For him, it’s a wake-up call.
Caracciolo calls the decision by Weiss and Cibrowski to end the audio service is one made in a corporate boardroom in which the C-Suite is “disconnected from real life.” And, like Ostlund, Caracciolo believes it was simply an accounting decision— “made by people who don’t live in the communities radio serves, don’t rely on it, and don’t understand its true value. And that’s exactly why they got it wrong.”
Yet, Caracciolo believes this moment isn’t just a loss — it’s an opening and “a rare and powerful opportunity to rebuild something better, because what’s missing right now isn’t demand: it’s leadership.”
As such, he argues that this is the moment to create a new kind of radio network—one built not for Wall Street, but for Main Street. Caracciolo adds, “We need smart, strategic growth that invests in journalism, expands local reporting, and gives stations the tools to thrive—not survive. We need leadership that understands scale should support localism, not suffocate it. That’s where the opportunity is right now. The future is a network that works differently—a network that partners with local stations to amplify their voices, not drown them out. [It is] one that provides national scale where it matters— news gathering, distribution, sales infrastructure—while keeping content authentic and rooted in the community. Local radio doesn’t need to be replaced—it needs to be reinforced.”
A TALENT REDISTRIBUTION PLAN
For Schwab Multimedia‘s Don Elliot, who has attempted to build an AM radio in Los Angeles for the last several years, discussion has arisen about trying to organize a corral of organized stringers. However, he sees that as “reinventing the whale.”
That got him thinking. Finally, he asked himself this question:
What network already exists in other formats that could be hiring some of this talent and flip it more into a news organization?”
The answer jumped out at me: Air traffic,” he said. If one could expand this idea, there could be a legitimate business for the right operator. “It seems like a real opportunity,” Elliot said.
