I wish we had an all-news station in Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the country with the 10th largest metropolitan area. Every city ahead of it has some sort of all news station save for Houston, Texas. It’s times like these where I wish I had an all-news station in Phoenix to get the latest facts and figures about the Coronavirus. KTAR-FM is the closest thing, but even they have deficiencies with two hours of Dave Ramsey in the middle of the day and no coverage on the weekends. I find myself listening to KNX 1070 or KFI AM 640 at night from Los Angeles via sky wave. Only way to get late breaking news around here and that’s sad.
Media does not care about city size; it only cares about market size.
Phoenix is the nation's 13th largest radio metro.
Miami, Atlanta, Houston are three larger markets with no all news stations. Boston has a hybrid, as does Dallas.
Houston and Atlanta both tried all news recently and could not make it work. The rapid and recent growth markets seem unable to sustain a news station; it may be that tradition is a big part of this format's success.
The big growth markets also tend to be much younger... as much as 10 years difference in the median age. So there is much less available audience for a new format with very limited appeal in the sales demos.
One US market that once had, up to about 15 years ago, 4 all news station and which was at the time bigger than Phoenix, is Puerto Rico. Today, due to the very limited sales-demo audience of the format, there are zero all news stations.
In fact, the largest radio market in our hemisphere tried all news, and no longer has a station in the format despite 21,000,000 people in the metro area.
I mention two Latin American markets because the world's first All News station was founded in Cuba 72 years ago! And that is more than a decade before the format was tried in the US (using, interestingly, a Mexican border stations).
