CBS World News Roundup turns 75: Column
As the nation's longest-running network news program, the CBS World News Roundup both defies and embraces the digital age. Born as a special radio broadcast on March 13, 1938, to report on Germany's invasion of Austria, the program went on to regularly chronicle the tumult of the 20th Century. It's still competing for attention today but in a radically different media landscape from 1938 when radio was the hot new medium – the Internet of its time.
What is today's younger generation supposed to make of appointment listening (8 a.m. Eastern, 7 a.m. Central; updated for the West Coast at 7 a.m.) when it expects on-demand streaming and downloadable podcasts? What use do they have for a sonorous anchor weaving together diverse stories and correspondents in an age when radio deejays, providing the same sort of glue-between-the-parts, have been supplanted by do-it-yourself play lists and customizable music-only streams? Even CBS Radio News now offers its own anchor-free Internet stream that analog-loving old-timers find jarring as it jumps from one unconnected story or commentary to another but younger listeners find perfectly natural in an era of digital sampling and short attention spans.
Even in the context of over-the-air broadcasting, the Roundup competes against its own newsroom. As anchor Steve Kathan opens with three teasers interspersed with sound bites, colleague Frank Settipani in an adjacent booth plunges right into the first story. The network's 500 affiliates can choose to take the 10-minute Roundup or the truncated CBS News on the Hour. Only 20% (about 100 stations) choose the Roundup. Even when they do, most break away before it's over. Until early this year, WBBM in Chicago was the last big city holdout to broadcast the Roundup in its entirety. Then, it joined WCBS, New York; KNX, Los Angeles; KCBS, San Francisco and WCCO, Minneapolis, in pulling the plug at the 8-minute mark to return to local announcers.
As one executive at CBS News quipped, "I guess we're talking to ourselves."
The irony is not lost on those who work in the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street. The radio network newsroom is situated on the exact spot where Walter Cronkite broadcast the CBS Evening News -- you can still see the Southeast Asian portion of the world map that hung behind him. (Scott Pelley's set is located elsewhere in the building.) It's as if the network brass decided to supplant the voice of God with a medium more ancient than television itself in digital times that deem radio an afterthought -- at least until the power goes out and the only mass medium of immediacy that works is a battery-operated radio.
Over-the-air radio today is a far cry from the days when John Foster Dulles, secretary of state during the Eisenhower Administration, is said to have listened every day when he had a vacation home with no phone service on Duck Island in Lake Ontario. If the State Department needed to reach him, they'd call CBS and anchor Dallas Townsend would announce during the broadcast: "This news would be of particular interest to Secretary of State Dulles." That was his cue to take a boat to the mainland and call DC.
Today, if a station's format is all-news, the Roundup continues to be a good fit. But if the format is talk, music or sports, the New York-based program gets in the way. Even in the case of all news, listeners are promised -- and expect -- traffic and weather every 10 minutes. Can any report from abroad really supplant the gravitas of a backup on the Bay Bridge? The economics of conventional radio are irrefutable. Listeners in cars are radio's prime audience because they're a captive audience. They can't readily turn on Good Morning America or log onto the Huffington Post. Commercial stations don't call it drive time for nothing.
With radio signals bouncing off the ionosphere, radio crossed oceans decades ahead of satellite-assist. While shortwave helped pull correspondents into the Roundup, the program itself has been almost exclusively heard on AM radio, a technology that hasn't changed much in almost a century except that some stations now simulcast with improved audio quality on an FM band or on HD Radio. Except for shorter segments and a faster pace, the program has pretty much maintained the same format over the years.
So, where does the digital age leave the World News Roundup? Thanks to the serendipity of the Internet in which any station can stream globally, the program has become far more accessible. Early risers in San Francisco can stream the Roundup from a more easterly city. For the rebroadcast office workers in the East or Midwest can stream the show from a station in California. Meanwhile, anybody can set a cloud recorder like DAR.fm to archive the program so it can be played or paused at will. Listeners can skip the BMW and Kars4Kids ads with two clicks of a mouse.
Then, there's the program's Washington-based spinoff, the 40-minute CBS Weekend Roundup that iTunes subscribers, among others, can freely download and take with them to the treadmill or the park. Joggers like me have turned the nearly commercial-free podcast into a weekly ritual, referring to it as the CBS Weekend Workout. While I listen to reports about Congress running away from its responsibilities, I run three miles. It's a level of unshackled portability that listeners in 1938 could only have dreamt about.
The Roundup established the basic format of an anchor calling upon correspondents in the field to report and analyze the news. Its legacy is felt during every news program today in which the broadcaster is committed to a journalistic enterprise that extends well beyond the four walls of a studio. Maybe that's why the World News Roundup won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in 2010 and 2011. Murrow, an early correspondent on the program, would be proud.
New York-based writer/editor Michael Antonoff covers technology and the media.
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