So, an honest question…what makes news not work on KRLD, but it seems to work okay on WBBM in Chicago? I know the markets are a bit different, but it seems we already have an incredible amount of conservative talk stations here. I work from home and no longer have a commute, but pre-pandemic, I used to listen to the news on KRLD quite often on my way to work.
Assuming that you meant, what makes all-news not work on KRLD, I gave quite a bit of thought to this question. I've wondered the same thing about Houston, but I can come up with a pat answer for that one: iHeart just didn't want to do all-news and forced KTRH into the same framework as many of its other talk stations. Certainly cheaper that way. But that doesn't apply to KRLD. For KRLD, every theory I came up with, I could find a counterexample or some other theory to invalidate it. Here are some of them:
1) The original CBS all-news stations developed in the late 1960s, when radio news was more of a place you went for the latest news, because local TV news still had relatively limited technological capabilities. It's hard to pin down when KRLD went to all-news; I could find that it had excised music from its daytime schedule in 1978 but still ran music of some sort from 8 pm into overnights. By 1985, it was all-news. (At KTRH, where Larry King was on overnights, we often thought, "thank goodness we're not doing all-news overnight like KRLD"; i.e., it allowed us to focus most of our resources on higher-listening hours.) All that said, though, someone who was, say, 30 years old in 1968, and who still had fairly fluid listening habits, is going to be older than 85 today. At some point, the listener base doesn't carry over any more; listening habits also harden.
2) Those CBS stations switched to all-news 24/7; KRLD did it more gradually. "All news some of the time" generally doesn't work. But KRLD eventually got there (with the exception of sports). I doubt that historical circumstances in 1968, or 1985, influence much listening today. Moreover, KCBS in San Francisco did try "all news some of the time" in the 1980s. Eventually it went back to all-news, with apparently little lasting damage. So scratch that theory.
3) The CBS stations were in more-established metropolitan areas which had longstanding broad areas of influence; Dallas (as well as Houston) was still growing, with business, cultural, and governmental institutions trying to catch up in sophistication and competence. "Chicagoland" is a concept; "Dallasland" really isn't. But at some point, those institutions do catch up.
4) KRLD wasn't owned by CBS, at least not at first. But Metromedia appeared to have a solid commitment to the station, even buying the Texas State Network, probably more of an aid to networking sports coverage, but, still. By the 1980s, it had a pretty strong news image in the state.
So much for all that. I suspect the real answer is simple: all-news stations can't get the quality of advertiser that they used to get (that's painfully obvious on KCBS these days; WTOP* is an exception due to its location), thus can't get the revenue, meaning costs have to be cut, and at some point that road leads to cheaper alternatives such as talk. It sucks, but one hopes that at least the news blocks can get back with minimized damage. That's not the case at KTRH in Houston, where even the newscasts are politically biased, and thus increasingly out of step with the Houston metro, instead appealing to dead-end demographics, but KRLD should still have enough time and reputation left to put in guardrails against that sort of thing. Right now, there could just also be local management that's making bad decisions - Audacy in San Francisco went through that a few years ago, though it didn't affect KCBS much at the time - when results aren't as predicted, changes could be reversed.
(* Yes, I know WTOP isn't a historically CBS O&O. But it shares many other attributes with those stations.)
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