What's happened to news on radio?

With the notable exception of public radio and a relatively small number of all-news commercial radio stations scattered around the country, there is very little news on American radio stations today.

Most of the 11,343 commercial AM and FM radio stations in the United States in 2014 broadcast no news or only a short two-to-five-minute news bulletin from ABC Radio or CBS Radio at the top of each hour of their music, sports, or talk programming. The several hundred stations that label themselves as "news/talk/i nformation," according to the Pew Research Center, are ''filled with more talk than news, much of it nationally syndicated" conservative personalities such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and Glen Beck.

Only in nineteen cities are "all-news" commercial radio stations broadcasting news throughout the daylight hours or around the clock, mostly sandwiched between frequent traffic, weather and sports reports, and commercials. On some of those stations and their websites, much of the news is repurposed from broadcast networks, news services, and local newspapers, although each of the stations also has a few reporters on the street.

By contrast, the most ambitious all-news stations—nearly all of them owned and operated by CBS Radio in large cities— including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—have relatively large reporting staffs and sometimes cover more local news than commercial television stations in the same cities. On their websites, the CBS all-news stations combine their own news stories and multimedia with audio and video from CBS News.

The largest amount of national news on the radio is broadcast by nonprofit National Public Radio (NPR) through its estimated 900-member public radio stations across the country. In addition to news bulletins on the hour, NPR broadcasts two-hour-1 ong morning and evening news programs every day, with local news produced by the local member stations inserted into each hour. The audiences for Morning Edition on weekday mornings (nearly seven million listeners each day) and All Things Considered in the afternoons (more than five million) are the largest for radio news, competitive with the audience for each broadcast television network news program and much bigger than the total cable television news audience. NPR newscasts include news stories from NPR's own staff of several hundred located in its Washington, DC newsroom, seventeen bureaus in the United States, and seventeen other bureaus around the world—and from NPR member stations. Only a relative handful of news organizations, such as the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and CNN, have more national and foreign news bureaus. Local news coverage varies widely among public radio stations, which mix news with public affairs, cultural, entertainment, and music programs. The majority of public radio stations have only a few, if any, local news reporters. Only the largest public radio stations and groups of stations—i ncluding WNYC in New York and New Jersey, Chicago Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Southern California Public Radio, and Oregon Public Broadcasting in the Pacific Northwest—maintain sizeable newsrooms and cover their communities meaningfully on the radio. Some public radio stations are collaborating with each other and with start-up nonprofit digital news organizations to increase local news coverage.