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Canada Now Has Five All-News Stations

One local station was a (regular) CNN Radio affiliate, back in the late 1980s, but CNN Radio offered CNN Headline News' 2 minute sportscasts (complete with music background) to radio stations.

I'll never forget when Van Earl Wright did these, and he always used to say about scampering running backs..."LOOK! AT HIM GO!!!". That went over real well on radio. ;)

(rest deleted due to misremembering on my part)
 
In addition to AP All News Radio and NBC News and Information Service, as I recall CNN did provide an all-news feed distinct from Headline News audio (although it did use Headline News audio for some elements). Maybe Canada's different but it seems in the US nobody wants to do all news (except for those who have been doing it for 40 years or more and some of them do talk in the off-hours). Not that many so-called "news/talk" do news blocks in morning or afternoon drive any more. And the cable "news channels" keep cutting back on the amount of the schedule devoted to news (as opposed to talk). Except for NPR, sounds like news is dead.
 
MattParker said:
Except for NPR, sounds like news is dead.

And, of course, except for WNYX 585 AM in New York City. :)

(Obscure reference to the short-lived sitcom NewsRadio ... yes, with an impossible AM frequency.)
 
Matt, you're close.

The problem is that you really can only do straight ahead "all-news" in the largest markets, where there is enough financial reward to do it 24/7 (NYC, LA, Chicago, SF).

When you get to the smaller/medium markets, the fill you need to do outside of drive-time hours is pretty dull, even back when AP News Radio was 24 hours (or the refitted audio of TV's CNN Headline News).
 
w9wi said:
Add three in the Maritimes. CHNI-FM 88.9 Saint John, CJNI-FM 95.7 Halifax, and CKNI-FM 91.9 Moncton. I would imagine they share a LOT of programming. (and they're co-owned with CFTR and CKWX -- which IIRC are co-owned with one or more of the other stations you cited above)

How they make it work in markets that small I don't know. Probably a LOT of programming comes from Toronto. I did hear the Moncton station on E-skip last summer & heard a few minutes of local Moncton news, but on skip it didn't stick around for long.

The three in the Maritimes are a little different, unlike the formats used here in Ontario. Strictly speaking, they are not 'all news', as they have morning and afternoon talk shows, which they indeed share amongst them selves. In the evenings they carry "Bob McCown's Prime Time Sports".

How big is Ottawa...what's a comparable size U.S. market? I suspect Ottawa's status as the capital is a big reason they're able to do 24/7 news.

The sign on the north bound 416 currently reads 900,000.

~BG
 
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