Multiple sources agree that Cumulus media has decided to drop ABC News at the top of the hour on their stations at the end of the year. This is significant because Cumulus bought the former ABC radio stations when they bought Citadel.
ABC-TV is still owned by Disney. ABC radio news is being produced by ABC-TV, not the radio side of Cumulus or Westwood One.
So, if you’re dropping ABC News to save money, who would you replace them with? CNM, of course!
You may have heard recently that if FOXNews’s Rupert Murdoch buys Time Warner, he intends to sell CNN.
Now to make your head spin even more, I have been tracking which radio stations use which top of the hour news. Mostly I’ve paid attention to the news talk stations. I don’t know of a single news/talk radio station that currently carries CNM top of the hour news – however the distributor of CNN news turns out to be Westwood One, which is now owned by Cumulus media.
Other than NPR, there are two main competitors in the top of the hour news business – CBS and Fox radio news, owned by Rupert Murdoch. NBC radio news was launched last year and the syndicated by Westwood One, now owned by Cumulus. It got very little traction. I think my head is about to explode.
Ratings basement – here we come! Not to worry – Sweetjack will fill the revenue void.
I’m probably the only person around silly enough to track which radio station carries which news. It’s quite hard to gather that information as you only have a few minutes each hour.
Here is the status quo – I haven’t updated the data regularly, but stale date is better than no data. “NULL” is radio stations not owned by one of the big guys.
The NY Post offers a different description than the radio industry sources
http://nypost.com/2014/07/30/cumulus-buys-cnn-news-content-for-radio/
They mention what I thought I remembered, but couldn’t confirm – that CNN had dropped their top of the hour news, which is why no stations are carrying it!
What Cumulus bought was access to CNN news. Cumulus/Westwood One distributes NBC radio news – like ABC and CBS radio news, it’s a byproduct of the TV network.
There is a fascinating story about the early days of radio, when Newspapers sued radio stations (and won) for broadcasting newspaper news information. Copyright protection is very fuzzy on that subject. In general, you cannot copyright news events – if a radio station becomes aware that a warehouse burned down, the newspaper cannot claim that they own the copyright to the fact that a warehouse burned down – but if a newspaper did an undercover investigation host some corruption and city government, radio stations can use that information without risking being sued for copyright violations.
In response to losing the lawsuits to the Associated Press, radio stations form their own radio news network to independently gather national news. Remember what TV did not exist yet. The AP only caved when it became apparent that the radio news network was viable and risked putting them out of business. If radio could break in with breaking news they learned from AP, there was still a chance that people might go to the newsstand and buy the “extra” addition to find pictures and more details.
Baseball made the same mistake in the same timeframe – trying to prevent radio from carrying live accounts of baseball games, freaking that if baseball games were available on the radio, people would stop going to the stadium and buying hotdogs and popcorn
Confirmation
Cumulus to drop ABC News distribution – Disney will set up its own distribution for ABC Radio news
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-abc-news-radio-cumulus-20140807-story.html
According to the story, Cumulus was paying ABC-TV $17 million a year