In the End, Silence
I don’t listen to the radio close to midnight these days. When you reach a certain age, you tend to treasure sleep more than you did when you were younger and closed down the bars after a long shift in the newsroom. However, the night of August 25th, 2024 qualified for an exception. That’s when I felt as if I were at the bedside of a terminally ill friend who was about to take a last breath at midnight.
WCBS News Radio 880 was an O&O (owned and operated) station of the CBS Radio Network serving the NYC area. I worked at the network from 1984 through 1999, when I left to help start a CBS News presence on the internet. I knew many of the anchors at WCBS Radio, and if I didn’t know them personally, I knew their voices better than some members of my family. Even after I moved 80 miles from Manhattan to northeast Pennsylvania, I found I was still able to listen to the news, traffic and weather—from home and in my car—and keep track of the network newscasts at the top of the hour. I still have a “heads up” visceral reaction when hearing the sounder that aired for top-of-the-hour network newscasts and special reports.
Before joining CBS, I worked at what is now the only all-news radio station in New York City, WINS 1010. I joined WINS, owned at the time by Westinghouse Broadcasting, after New York City’s budget crisis in the late 70s led to the loss of thousands of employees. I was one of them. It turned out to be a good career move. I learned a lot and I made lifelong friends there. Now I’m trying to shake the anticipatory grief for the possibility of another bedside wake.
Small town newspapers are struggling to stay alive also. It is a symptom of dollars going to online advertising and the result is disturbing; it creates news deserts, turning truth and accuracy into rare commodities. Especially for small rural communities, relying on social media for the news is at best sub-optimal and at worst, dangerous. Think about school board meetings, town councils, county commissioners, zoning boards and other important information for communities in these towns. If the local papers fail, I wonder how social media will fill in the void.
If you are a news junkie like me, you can hear the final twelve minutes as WCBS Radio signed off the air after 57 years. Wayne Cabot anchored with a tribute to all who worked so hard to bring reliable information to listeners. In the end, in the silence, my heart sank.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zXAKh33u6Q