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Best Network News for Radio?

N

NewsStud

Okay, Newsroom folks (and ND's and PD's... and you too, Holland)

Rate all the news networks' radio products.

On-air? Breaking News? Cut Feeds? Live avails with experts and reporters, etc?

What do you like or hate about your net? Whose got the best overall package?

And... anybody actually airing AP and/or CNN Radio?
 
Non-com WBWC-FM in the Cleveland, Ohio market airs AP News at the Top of the Hour. Their service used to be more comprehensive. About 5 years ago they stopped running a 2 minute sports update at :45. They also dropped all of their long-form programs which included 3 shows.
If my memory is serving me correctly, they did these things sometime after they dropped their 24 hour all-news format for radio stations.
 
I know of three affiliates of AP Radio News in Indiana. Don't know of any running CNN radio. ABC Radio and Fox News Radio seem to be the dominant radio news networks.

I think Fox News Radio is the best at live / breaking news coverage. CNN Radio is awful, ABC-E is awful, ABC-I is OK. AP sounds bland, but has good content.
 
WOR in NYC runs CNN top of the hour starting 8 pm (after Savage) till 4 am. (5 o'clock is local morning show)
 
Pittsburgh, in a nutshell:

KDKA-1020, CBS-owned news-talk with 3-6 p.m. news block, runs local on the hour and half hour weekdays, network overnight on the hour and updates on the half hour, weekends it only has CBS though it has local talk shows and Accuweather. Also runs AP and CNN material.

If you're going to throw the network switch, CBS is still a good choice.

KQV-1410, APR-affiliated all-news all-day, various overnight, runs network on the hour, also updates around the half hour, also WSJ, Radio Pennsylvania and overnight Bloomberg.

AP fills KQV's bill, but it doesn't sound quite as professional as when it was the CBS affiliate.

WPGB-104.7, Fox-affiliated, local (from Cleveland Clear Channel newsroom with WTAE-TV news audio) on hour, half hour 6 a.m.-6:05 p.m., also WSJ's morning news hour, Dow Jones Money reports.

Fox fills the bill on a station that gets ratings with national talk (and I include Quinn and Rose, Pittsburgh-based but clearly national-topic-prone).

WDUQ-90.5, NPR-affiliated, local news during long-form network news blocks also local news blog online.

NPR isn't exactly the anti-Fox, or vice versa, but it's good to hear the NPR perspective once in a while alongside the Fox "we report, you decide" philosophy.

WJAS-1320 and WMNY-1360, Renda-owned, CNN on the hour, WJAS also has local news mornings in drivetime, WMNY also runs simulcast of WTAE morning news from 5-7 and local bartered business news and talk block in afternoon drive.

Fits two stations that aren't exactly old-fashioned full-service.

WAVL-910 Apollo 5,000-watt day (68 night), only ABC carrier in market.

Essentially, it's a one-man operation, owned by an Assembly of God driven out of contemporary Christian music by a local K-Love, calling itself "Liberty 910 the People's Talk," with national talk and automated weather.

WMBS-590 Uniontown 1,000-watt round-the-clock, CBS hourly (also local and AP-wire-copy news at various times).

If "Remember WENN" was being done today by American Movie Classics, the producer could model it after WMBS.
 
It's been a few years since I've worked with the commercial networks but at the time AP was the only one that let you pull sound clips you wanted off their website. A big convenience. The others fed them on a pre-set schedule and emailed a run-down. You still had to record the particular satellite channel at the designated time and then go through all the stuff they sent to find and dub off what you wanted to use. Apparently, the network people figured that all stations were like their O&Os and had union engineers sitting around with nothing to do but record feeds and production assistants with nothing to do but dub them off for use. It was a time-consuming, inefficient pain in a small operation with too much to do. If it had been my decision, I'd have gone with AP just because of this.

Maybe it's (finally) changed. I hope so.

If I could, I wouldn't take any of the network news broadcasts but use their sound into local news broadcasts. Writing is poor. Sound clips are over-used and abused to make up for poor writing. Story selection is questionable. Important stories don't get enough time to keep within some arbitrary time limit. Too much fluff. And a package of local and national news important in a local area is a better use of the station's and the listener's time.
 
ABC has a very nice website for downloading sound clips, features, long-form programming. Fox has some type of website, too, but we don't use it so I'm not sure how it compares to ABC's.

We run ABC/E on one station, but only run a few newscasts. The affiliation is left over from Paul Harvey. ABC meets our needs for long-form coverage and elections, etc, but we're basically a music station.

We have the one-minute Fox news on the other station. That's all you get, one-minute per hour, but you only have to run 4 minutes of commercial inventory per day. It's good for a music station, but wouldn't be enough for a talk station. The Fox one-minutes sound better than ABC's. The Fox minutes are done by someone other than the 5:00 top of the hour anchor, so it sounds like they put more time and effort into them. ABC's are done by the top-of-the-hour anchor, and are typically a condensed version of the top story plus a headline or two.
 
Maybe it's because I'm really old and miss the olden days, but I still prefer hearing a good, local rip-n-read newscast.
 
Talk_Dude said:
Maybe it's because I'm really old and miss the olden days, but I still prefer hearing a good, local rip-n-read newscast.
Click to expand...
And It doesn't take much to do a local TOH newscast, I've heard FM country outlet in a town of 3,000 do a great TOH newscast and then run the end of Fox News Radio for World and National news. Also carrying Fox News Radio brings in Brand Power in some Conservative Towns. Here in San Francisco we have two stations that run ABC, KSFO, the Conservative News/Talker owned by Citadel, and the other Citadel News/Talker KGO, both have a local newscast to follow ABC. ABC News is also on KFRC, the True Oldies Affilate. Fox News is on KNEW, the local CC talk station, with CNN on CC's other station a left wing talker. CBS is on KCBS 740 and 106.9, an All-Newser, and we also have IRN-USA on the propane-at-night KTRB, any thoughts on IRN-USA Radio News? Or SRN for that matter? (Which we have on both the Salem stations KFAX and KDOW (KDOW runs CNBC Radio during the Day) I think NBC has a TOH newscast now
 
NewsStud said:
But how are the nets doing? Who has better anchors, better writing? What about their cut feeds?
Click to expand...

1. They all sound pretty much the same.
2. Writing is all pretty poor.
3. I don't care about cut feeds; post it on a web site and let me pick. And try putting up stuff I can actually use. Sometimes it seems like they take interviews (and even voicers) and run them through a Cuisinart so they become meaningless sound blurbs that communicate nothing other than "we got sound." Be selective. And don't post anything you wouldn't put on the network.

I say again, network TOH news is an anachronism. News is about what's important to listeners in the market - not whether the news is local or not. Often national stories have important local angles and radio sounds idiotic when it repeats a story a listener just heard two minutes earlier and then does some local angle. Newspapers haven't done that since they stopped running boiler plate.
 
MattParker said:
3. I don't care about cut feeds; post it on a web site and let me pick. And try putting up stuff I can actually use. Sometimes it seems like they take interviews (and even voicers) and run them through a Cuisinart so they become meaningless sound blurbs that communicate nothing other than "we got sound." Be selective. And don't post anything you wouldn't put on the network.
Click to expand...

When I say "cut feeds" I don't mean the old-fashioned, real-time, playing-out-down-the-line of cuts. I mean the content available. Even if available through a website where you can pick and choose.

Who has the better material available.
 
CoolRadioGuy said:
Big fan of Todd Starnes on Fox Radio. Great writer -- solid delivery. Also like Fox's Dave Anthony.
Click to expand...

FNR has really upgraded their anchor lineup from the early days, when it sounded like they grabbed anchors off the street while they were waiting in line for a movie.

I've heard a few ex-CBS/WW1/Mutual folks on FNR, too. Starnes is one of two anchors who came from West Coast news/talk powerhouse KFBK, along with Lori Lundin, and Fox News Talk hosts Tom Sullivan and Spencer Hughes, and FNC reporter Laura Ingle.
 
Vitka was one of the ex-CBS names I was thinking of. A solid, dependable anchor... though I still hear pips in my head after he signs off on FNR. :D
 
If you're talking about a news program to put on a talk format station, what real difference does it make? When you switch from music to news, most of your listeners are changing to a different station anyway. If listeners want music, they tune to a music station. When they want news, they switch to a news station. It's not the 1960's or 70's anymore, though you'd never know that from the experiences pros who learned all they needed to know when they were starting in radio back then, and haven't seen the need to learn anything new since then.
 
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