> The inexorable rise of podcasts, and the expansion into audio journalism by formerly print-only news outlets like The New York Times, has chipped away at traditional radio’s presence in public life.
Reads almost like the NYT is bragging about itself contributing to the shutdown?
Maybe split screen viewing where 1/2 is an ai cat pineapple hybrid with large anime eyes, and the other half is an AI instagram baddie that is tugging on her thong while telling me about Iran?
> CBS News Radio itself had been whittled down to a handful of correspondents in recent years and is unprofitable
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.
Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.
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.
There is a larger pattern here worth noting: old tech atrophies in the presence of new tech. For example, stores that stop taking cash. Books that stop publishing on paper. Music that has no physical media distribution. The problem is that the conditions of the new tech are almost always far more fragile and centralized (!) than the old tech.
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.
Very sad. Radio is still the medium that can bring news the fastest. I start and end the day with news radio, and listen to music radio in the middle.
> The inexorable rise of podcasts, and the expansion into audio journalism by formerly print-only news outlets like The New York Times, has chipped away at traditional radio’s presence in public life.
Reads almost like the NYT is bragging about itself contributing to the shutdown?
They better start dancing and distill their news into 10” video chunks. This is how we consume news today.
I really do hope this is sarcasm!
Maybe split screen viewing where 1/2 is an ai cat pineapple hybrid with large anime eyes, and the other half is an AI instagram baddie that is tugging on her thong while telling me about Iran?
https://archive.ph/rLyXv
> CBS News Radio itself had been whittled down to a handful of correspondents in recent years and is unprofitable
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.
Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.
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.
There is a larger pattern here worth noting: old tech atrophies in the presence of new tech. For example, stores that stop taking cash. Books that stop publishing on paper. Music that has no physical media distribution. The problem is that the conditions of the new tech are almost always far more fragile and centralized (!) than the old tech.
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 thought you meant the British Shipping Forecast, which for some reason I thought stopped a few years back, but apparently it’s still a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast
See also:
Canada to Shut Down Its VHF Weather Radio Service
https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/headlines/canad...