CBS Radio News lasted nearly a century. This Friday, the very last top-of-the-hour broadcast airs on its some 700 stations around the country. And apparently, nobody in the legacy media boardrooms saw it coming. At least, they didn't see it back when some preventive action could have been taken.
The clue, at least for me, that it was circling the drain came when WCBS 880 in New York — once a news institution of itself and the exclusive outlet in that city for the network — sold its soul and became just what we needed: another mind-numbing sports outlet. I suppose some will lay the blame on Bari Weiss now running the place. I have my problems with her, but let's be honest: That’s mostly unfair. The place was bleeding long before she showed up.
The truth is, CBS News Radio died of self-importance — a chronic condition in that industry with no known cure, as I described in my piece this morning on the New York Times. Weiss, in an address to her staff some time prior to the decision to axe the division, suggested they needed to do stories that would surprise and provoke, including inside their own newsroom.
Certainly, that will sell pages and newscasts for a while.
(In fact, come to think, that goal may be what the Sulzberger clan has in mind for people like Kristoff at the New York Times, though that particular effort seems more than a little ham-handed).
Thing is, I think it misses an important point. Matt Drudge, of all people, understood something when he launched his page that he, CBS, and virtually every other legacy media operation has since worked hard to forget: Journalism must sell pages. That was the key to his initial success. His forgetting that (and his tilting left) is how that success ended. Places like Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit have never forgotten it. They're still here.
Whatever you print those pages on — paper, pixels, photons, audio waves — the business model doesn't change. Attract ears and eyeballs. Sell those consumers to advertisers. Keep the lights on. That's the entire operation.
The truth is that every Peabody Award speech, every solemn declaration about democracy dying in darkness, every keynote at a journalism school — it’s all performance art, every word of it. "Journalistic ethics" remains one of the English language's more ambitious oxymorons.
Related: The New York Times: What 'Journalistic Standards?'
The industry's collapse gets eulogized as the death of journalism. It isn't. It's the death of an industry that forgot where its money comes from.
Railroad owners pulled this same stunt. They convinced themselves that they ran train companies rather than transportation companies. Government regulators helpfully carved that delusion into law, and passenger rail in America obligingly died. Legacy media executives studied this playbook and have executed it flawlessly. Decades of thinking they were in the news business instead of the audience business, and here we are, at the grave site of what has been historically among the biggest news nets in the country.
What troubles me about the railroad analogy is that the government’s response to Passenger Railroads dying was to establish Amtrak, which has questionable service anywhere outside the Northeast Corridor, and which hasn’t made dime one since day one. Does that mean the government will eventually do the same with news? Clearly, its establishment of NPR/PBS moved us collectively (note the use of that word) in that direction.
Yes, businesses change. Living things change. That's the price of staying alive.
We have a specific word for things that refuse to change: dead.
CBS Radio News just became the latest example.
