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

It transported Americans onto the rooftops of London in the Blitz and into the bleak embers of concentration camps in liberated Nazi Germany, an aural atlas to world events thousands of miles away.

In more recent years, it transmitted eyewitness dispatches from world capitals to hundreds of local stations in rural and sparsely populated parts of the country.

CBS News Radio was a pioneer and stalwart of the mass media century, the proving ground of star journalists like Edward R. Murrow, with a distinctive five-tone chime that became synonymous with breaking news — long before the rise of 24-hour cable and the internet.

Now, its venerable airwaves are crackling to a close. Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS, announced on Friday that the radio news network would sign off, after 99 years, near the end of May.

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. NBC licensed its news radio brand to iHeartMedia in 2016. That same year, the CBS Corporation moved to end its radio ownership business, announcing plans to sell 117 stations that once reached 70 million people a week. CBS News Radio itself had been whittled down to a handful of correspondents in recent years and is unprofitable, a person familiar with the company said.

Still, a Nielsen study found that radio today reaches 93 percent of American adults, particularly commuters who drive to and from work. And CBS said its radio network was providing reporting and short news segments to about 700 subscriber affiliates around the country, including major metro stations like 1010 WINS in New York. Those stations that wish to continue carrying national news reporting will need to look elsewhere.

In a staff memo on Friday, Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News, and Tom Cibrowski, the president, observed that the radio network had “served as the foundation for everything we have built since 1927.” But because of “a shift in radio station programming strategies” and “challenging economic realities,” the company concluded that it was “impossible to continue the service.”

Lowell Bergman, a prominent former “60 Minutes” producer now working on a documentary about the regulation of mass media, said in an interview that CBS News Radio represented a century-old pact that broadcasters made with the government to provide responsible journalism free of charge when radio was still an emerging technology.

Its imminent demise, he said, “is just one more step in the direction of abandoning a 100-year-old tradition.”

When it made its Jazz Age debut, in September 1927, CBS’s radio news report joined a crowded market of broadcasters seeking dominance over a powerful new communications medium. Millions tuned in to programs that eventually carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “fireside chats” to the nation.

It was Edward R. Murrow — “the right man in the right place in the right era,” as David Halberstam described him — and his CBS dispatches from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s that transformed the network into a leader in broadcast news.

Murrow’s accounting of Hitler’s rise, and then the first bombs hitting London in the Blitz, riveted Americans at a time when technology was making the world smaller and more connected.

(Later, Murrow relayed his harrowing visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. “It will not be pleasant listening,” he told CBS listeners. “If you are at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio.”)

In 1938, Scribner’s magazine declared that Murrow “has more influence upon America’s reaction to foreign news than a shipful of newspapermen,” noting that he “beats newspapers by hours” and “reaches millions who otherwise have to depend on provincial newspapers for their foreign news.” It was among the first times that a single broadcaster could outstrip legions of print reporters and reach millions and millions of listeners all at once.

The rise of television hampered radio’s dominance, and CBS’s radio network, like its peers at ABC and NBC, began a long decline in audience and attention. Nowadays, it’s TV news that is in trouble, fending off a surge of popular, lower-budget rivals and influencers who convey information on streaming platforms and social media.

Ms. Weiss has said she is seeking to modernize a news division that has yet to adapt to the habits of modern viewers. Like other newsroom leaders, she is also facing budget pressures. Since CBS was purchased last year by David Ellison, a billionaire technology heir, the news division has conducted two rounds of layoffs, and the vestigial radio network was seen within the industry as low-hanging fruit.

Defenders, however, argue that its end was not inevitable. Harvey Nagler, CBS’s top radio news executive for nearly two decades, said in an interview that ending CBS News Radio was “a blow to objective journalism because you’re losing another voice.” Mr. Nagler, who left his role in 2017, said CBS’s decision would benefit ABC, whose radio network is now the country’s largest, with nearly 1,500 affiliates. He added that CBS News Radio provided invaluable marketing for the news division’s brand.

“We are living in a media revolution, and CBS News Radio is unfortunately the latest casualty of that revolution,” Peter Maer, who retired from CBS News Radio in 2015 after serving as its White House correspondent, said in an interview.

“We know that, especially the younger demographic, is listening to podcasts and looking at TikTok and Instagram and so many other choices,” Mr. Maer said. But when people drive to work in the morning, he added, they “want their fill of the news at the top of the hour.”

Dan Rather, the former “CBS Evening News” anchor, wrote on Facebook on Friday that “the end of CBS News Radio breaks my heart.” He recalled listening to its broadcasts from his childhood home in Texas and feeling inspired to pursue a career in journalism.

Concluding his elegy, Mr. Rather noted his gratitude that many of the original CBS radio broadcasts, the ones that had mesmerized him as a child, were preserved for future generations to hear.

“They are available on YouTube,” he wrote.

Erik Wemple contributed reporting.