CBS News Radio goes dark on May 22. What fills that airtime at the hundreds of affiliates that relied on its top-of-the-hour newscasts is a question Red Apple Media started answering before most of the industry had processed the loss.
Red Apple Media President Chad Lopez and WABC and Red Apple VP of News Lee Harris spoke with Radio Ink about standing up a national news network against that deadline, the deliberate strategy behind its sound, and a longer-term vision that extends well past American borders.
Radio Ink: I know the network has been in Red Apple’s sights for some time now, but it must be an absolute sprint to the finish for a May 23 launch after hiring Lee just a few weeks ago. How has the process been?
Chad Lopez: What’s been really great is working with Lee again from WINS and CBS, knowing who Lee is and the professional that he is. His expertise, his knowledge, and what he knows and what he’s been able to accomplish and has done… I’m honored to be working side by side with him on this.
John will always say, “Chad’s the operations guy. I’m the big picture and the visionary.” And this is part of John’s vision: to take news across the country and then across the world. When he did that, there was no other name that we were going to be able to establish that credibility immediately than Lee Harris. You can’t get any bigger, in my opinion. And I’m not saying that because he’s sitting here with me.
We hired Lee two and a half weeks before CBS goes out. When he finally signed with us, we’ve been on the phone 24/7 since. Every single day, he’s been coming to the studios in the lead-up and — what he’s been able to accomplish already — he built a whole studio. A temporary studio so that we are going to be on air on the 23rd when CBS goes out on the 22nd. We were down in the studio yesterday, and it sounds better than any studio we have already built here at WABC. The clocks, the things, all that technical stuff that he envisioned to put in a temporary studio, it’s incredible. And not only that, he hired major names.
I was thinking about that this morning, getting ready to talk to you, saying to myself, how are we able to accomplish this? The truth is, number one, you’ve got to have the right person with knowledge, relationships, and credibility proving themselves. That’s like finding a unicorn in today’s world. We found him. That’s Lee Harris.
I believe in this world now, where you get all these corporate yahoos and their boards and their shareholders sitting in meetings making bad decisions for what is a great medium. That’s what has the radio industry where it is now. But when you work for somebody who gives you that autonomy, and you find the unicorn like Lee, who not only has all that knowledge but also has a great business mind — from the sales side and from programming — that makes the whole thing work. I consider ourselves very lucky to have Lee Harris join us.
Radio Ink: Lee, you left WINS in 2023. You went to the cable side at NewsNation. Now you’re officially back at radio. What was it that brought you back to news radio at a time like this?
Harris: This network idea has been floating around in my head for years. I went over to NewsNation initially with hopes of getting them to enter the space, but when they evaluated it, they decided there were better matches for what they’re doing. We see that now with the TEGNA acquisition.
That was fine. I was able to do other work in the audio space there, but I still felt there was a need for an alphabet network-quality network. I had a pretty good sense that CBS was going away after Skydance went in, because the radio network didn’t fit their model, which is heavily subscription-leaning. There’s no way to turn the radio network into a subscription product. In the Paramount/Viacom/CBS/soon-to-be Warner Discovery scheme of things, the radio network was a tiny, tiny piece.
I have my own company, in addition to my own air work. Our biggest client was the CBS Radio Network. My company built and operated their distribution system for the newsfeed for more than 20 years. So I also had some personal interest, but primarily, as Chad said, we felt it shouldn’t just go by the wayside.
Stations were abandoned — and these are big stations in many cases — where the audiences were used to hearing that top-of-the-hour national newscast delivered by best-in-class newscasters. When I thought about how to bring back that experience, I figured: let’s hire the people who provided the experience. And I got as many of them as I could, and it turned out to be quite a few.
Radio Ink: And how is it getting to build that with Red Apple?
Harris: This is the only broadcasting company in America that can move with this kind of speed, certainly at this scale. I suppose back in Wisconsin, where I had my kilowatt Class IV station, I could have made some snap decisions too. But this is 50 kilowatts plus a network where decisions can be made with this kind of speed. I don’t think that can be found anywhere else, and with this kind of vision.
A lot of these other publicly traded companies — soon to be not publicly traded — have problems that we don’t have here. We’re able to concentrate on building as opposed to wondering where our next proverbial meal is coming from.
Radio Ink: What’s your honest assessment of the state of radio news in the US, as someone starting a network and in charge of the news at WABC?
Harris: The stations that are going to affiliate with us are, by and large, news-talkers, and they have a few different needs. One of which is that they need the news to set up the talk shows. The talk shows, for the most part, are about the news. So if you can get that capsule professionally delivered — there are some other players in the field who I don’t think really rise to that level — you’re setting up the hour for your talk show, which as often as not is going to be a network talk show as well, some of them coming from our own Red Apple Network.
At a more practical level, especially during unattended hours — weekends, overnights, some stations all day — they need something for that first six minutes of the hour until the talk show kicks in from the network. There’s no reason that has to be a poor-quality product. That can be us.
Radio Ink: And what does that initial product sound like?
Harris: We are using the classic CBS structure where we do three minutes, and you can cut away at the three-minute mark. If you care to stay, you’ll get a spot. We’ll come back with a back minute to bring us to the five mark, and then depending on your quarter-hour, we might want you to run another spot. So it’s following the classic CBS model.
We will also have a one-minute update at the bottom of the hour. One thing we’re doing differently from CBS is that we’ll be running that at :30 straight up, whereas they used to run it at :31. I think that was to accommodate the formats of the CBS all-news stations back in the day. We talked to a few major potential affiliates and they all wanted that at :30.
We’re delivering on three different levels. We will be live via satellite. We will also deliver via Mr. Master — these will obviously be pre-fed newscasts. And for stations that so choose, the newscast will also be available via FTP.
When CBS provided this content, if you were taking their top-of-the-hour newscast on delay, it was almost delayed an hour. If you took the 9 o’clock news on delay and played it back at 10 o’clock, you might hear, “The Dow futures are up 28 points.” At that point, the market’s already open. We asked them not to do that, but it happened a lot anyway.
Our recorded FTP-delivered newscast will be much closer to air. There will be a pre-feed at ten to the hour, so that news is going to be pretty fresh if you play it out at the top of the hour. If you’ve got satellite capability, it will be live at the top of the hour.
Radio Ink: John Catsimatidis mentioned “fair, balanced, and real-time” several times in the launch press release. Is that what you mean by real-time reporting? Because there’s so much talk about on-demand audio and podcasting, is that talking about the delivery, or does that go beyond that?
Harris: When you hear somebody talking at the top of the hour and you’re one of our satellite affiliates, that person is here in New York talking at that moment. And if something happens in that moment, he can relate that in that moment. We will be providing crisis coverage when, God forbid, there’s a crisis. You can’t do that on delay. That has to be done live. We always knew we needed that capability from day one, and at substantial expense, we have it.
Radio Ink: The other half of what John mentioned: “fair and balanced.” Due to the work of another brand, that phrase carries some baggage at this point. What does that mean in the newsroom you’ve been building?
Harris: Because of that brand, we’re obviously not going to use that phraseology on-air — it sort of belongs to them. So I came up with a list of things that we want done from the editorial side. John Catsimatidis’s primary mission as regards news is that he wants the truth. That’s line one: we broadcast the truth, whether that benefits a party or is to the harm of a party, if it’s the truth.
We ask our newscasters and reporters to leave their politics at the newsroom door. One of the things I’ve noticed when you originate news from Manhattan, as the big networks traditionally have, you get the kind of people who live and work in Manhattan, and often they are of the same political stripe. This does not mean that they are incapable of delivering a fair newscast. But they may have to be reminded that we’re broadcasting to an entire country, not just the five boroughs of New York City.
We use the word “straight.” Given the people I’ve hired — I hired all of them myself personally, most of them were known to me beforehand, some I worked with in the past — we’ve had this discussion. They all understand it perfectly. It was also the rule of CBS, and still is, as far as I know, for the next week.
Radio Ink: CBS News Radio has a very specific sound, and so does Red Apple’s product with WABC. What is shaping how you build the sound of this network?
Harris: My process was to make it sound as much like CBS as possible, and the easiest way to accomplish that would be to hire the people who were the sound of CBS. It’s a very deliberate strategy. Wallace, Lawrence, Rehkopf, Pieper — that’s kind of the first wave. Monica Rix. I have offers out to others that I expect will be accepted. Our weekday lineup — even Brandon Ison, who’s coming in to do the overnight from WBBM — was a frequent voice from Chicago for the network.
It’s going to sound very much like CBS, not because we wish to imitate them in any way, but because it’s for the affiliates who are losing that service. They would have rather kept that service, so we can give them an equivalent — and not something like one of the second-tier networks. Not going to name names. They don’t pay what we pay, so they don’t get who we get, and neither does the affiliate as a result.
Radio Ink: You’re building the network here in the States, but growing overseas is a key objective. You’re no stranger to building a radio news network overseas. What did your time assisting with Kommersant FM teach you about what works and what doesn’t when you try to export an American all-news format?
Harris: They were looking to do a sort of 1010 WINS clone in Moscow. It’s still on the air, by the way — though it morphed, of course, to fit its market. What we’re looking at here is to expand and maybe even take over the job that used to be done by Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, where we can present America’s philosophy on its best footing.
50% of the people in the European Union speak English now, so we can do this product in English. That 50% that does speak English would be the audience that we do want, socioeconomically as well, to understand what goes on here in America. When I go to Europe and talk to well-educated friends there, I’m sometimes astonished by the thoughts they have of the United States. They all want to move here, but they have some very distorted views of what goes on here, particularly when it comes to politics.
What they’re getting from their state broadcasters and some of the U.S. product that’s gone international is sometimes not very flattering to the United States. Not that we wouldn’t tell the truth there either, or that we would try to gild the lily, as it were, but we do want them to know the truth.
I believe we will be able to extend into those markets one way or the other. You generally can’t buy radio stations if you’re an American in foreign lands, but I do know a bunch that are amenable to being LMA’d.
Radio Ink: So, in closing, what is your mandate for success in the near term and the long term?
Harris: We will execute network quality newscasts with network quality talent 24/7. It is what the industry needs and what it loses with the end of CBS.
The ultimate objective is to have affiliates say, “CBS was good, but this is even better!”
