NorthEast Radio Watch 3/23/2026: Two More Seismic Shifts

In this week’s issue… TEGNA deal consolidates Hartford, Scranton, Buffalo stations – CBS to close radio newsroom – Buffalo’s Snyder to retire – New FM cancels amidst allegations – Erie’s Stehlin retires – New LPTVs on the way

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*In 32 years of writing this column, there are sentences I never expected to type. When NERW launched way back in 1994, the very concept that “CBS News Radio will be closing permanently” was completely unthinkable. While NBC had already exited the radio business by then, influenced by corporate owner GE’s cost-cutting and an inability to find a successful direction amidst industry changes, CBS Radio was thriving, feeding hourly news and updates to hundreds of stations and anchoring the operations of some of the most successful owned-and-operated all-news stations from WCBS in New York to KNX and KCBS in California.

(Within a year, in fact, your editor would be living out a childhood dream of working for CBS, as the CBS name and identity replaced “Group W” at Boston’s WBZ following Westinghouse’s acquisition of the network.)

Yet here were are in 2026, and “CBS Radio News will be closing permanently” is a thing that will really be happening on May 22, just shy of 100 years into CBS’ history.

“History,” of course, isn’t something that seems to mean much to the new owners of the network, as David Ellison’s Skydance and editor-in-chief Bari Weiss upend so many of the traditions of the network news operation in their attempt to reinvent the operation.

“Certain parts of this newsroom need to get smaller in order for us to make room for the things that we need to build to remain competitive in the future,” Weiss reportedly told CBS staff in a Friday conference call, and as usual these days, that means job cuts – about 60 of them, or six percent of news staffing, which includes both a number of domestic TV bureau reporters and everything that was left of CBS News Radio.

It’s been a challenging few years for the radio operation, of course. The vaunted O&O radio station division was sold off back in 2017 to Entercom (now Audacy), and there hasn’t been a WCBS on the New York AM airwaves since 2024. The combination of a generally tough market for national radio advertising and several shifts in business partners and distribution meant that the hourly CBS newscasts, once a solid money maker for the company, haven’t even been fully sold of late. Several New York papers reported over the weekend that January revenues for the division had fallen to just $67,000, a number that would appear to make a full-fledged radio news operation unsustainable.

It’s true, of course, that the entire world of radio has changed around CBS in recent years. There aren’t many stations right now that still take advantage of everything a major radio network once offered, whether it’s hourly newscall audio feeds or correspondent Q&As, and even the hourly newscasts aren’t heard in as many places as they once were. (In New York, for instance, they moved to Bloomberg’s WBBR after WCBS shut down, and only at night and on weekends.)

To many these days, including the likes of Ellison and Weiss, all of that seems to have made CBS News Radio entirely expendable. It’s the oldest of “old tech” in a world where they’re focused on shiny and new and digital. It’s the hardest of just-the-facts hard news in a world where Weiss, especially, seems more interested in opinions and viewpoints.

And that, it seems to us, is at the heart of why Ellison and Weiss are so unsentimental about ending the long tradition of radio news from CBS. Under other management teams over many years, it’s been understood that the expense of hourly radio news with its union air talent and editors should be covered not only directly from radio revenue but also as a sort of billboard for the overall heritage and image of the CBS newsroom, a reminder that when your local station tells you “but first, CBS News covers the world. It’s 8:00” and you hear the “bong” leading into World News Roundup, what you’re hearing is part of a continuum going back to the days of Murrow and Trout and an era when that “Roundup” might have been the only way you could get that hour’s latest news.

There are many such ways to get that news nowadays, of course, including the very solid hourly offering from NPR News on public media and very competent offerings on commercial radio that still exist from slimmed-down versions of ABC, Fox News Radio and the AP. When the CBS hourly tone is heard for the last time in a couple of months, it won’t create an unfillable void in news for listeners, though big companies like Audacy and smaller affiliates like Vermont’s heritage WDEV will have to scramble to try to replace some of what CBS brought them.

Where there will be a void, in a way the Ellisons and Weisses of the world can’t understand, is in the ears and hearts of longtime listeners (and former employees, however minor some of our tenures with CBS might have been) who understood and still understand the way that the hourly drumbeat of that concise hard newscast informs and connects with the rest of a huge international news operation. If CBS Radio News, as we’ve known it, was a reflection of the heritage and image of CBS News as a whole, what’s that “heritage and image” as CBS enters its second century?

*Remarkably, the news of CBS Radio News’ demise wasn’t even our automatic lead story this week. Just hours before the axe fell on West 57th Street Friday morning, the FCC – or at least its majority Republican commissioners – issued an astonishing after-hours ruling Thursday evening granting Nexstar’s $3.5 billion acquisition of TEGNA Inc. and its 64 TV stations around the country.

As the Democratic minority on the FCC pointed out, the decision (and, in tandem, the approval of the DOJ’s antitrust division) came without the sort of hearings and studies that would usually accompany a ruling that overturns decades of existing FCC policy on station ownership caps, especially when state attorneys general around the country were launching their own inquiries and lawsuits into how the deal will reduce the number of competitive local newsrooms and give Nexstar more leverage in retransmission consent disputes with cable and satellite providers.

There’s a reason the AGs in several NERW-land states are among those trying to challenge the deal, which closed very swiftly Thursday night as soon as the FCC and DOJ had issued their rulings. In Connecticut, Nexstar’s ABC affiliate WTNH (Channel 8) will absorb TEGNA’s Fox affiliate WTIC-TV (Channel 61), reducing the state’s count of local TV newsrooms from four to three. The FCC did tell Nexstar it will have to sell WTNH’s sister station, MyNetwork outlet WCTX (Channel 59), within two years, though it will also be allowed to buy WTIC’s CW sister station, WCCT-TV (Channel 20).

It’s even worse in several other markets affected by the merger. In Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, TEGNA’s top-rated ABC affiliate, WNEP (Channel 16), will now be in the same hands as the NBC affiliate, Nexstar’s WBRE (Channel 28), which in turn simulcasts its news on CBS affiliate WYOU (Channel 22), which is nominally owned by Mission Broadcasting, though it’s operated in tandem with WBRE. Where else can Scrantonites get TV news? There’s one late-night newscast on Sinclair’s Fox affiliate, WOLF-TV (Channel 56), but that’s it.

Down the road in the Harrisburg/York/Lancaster market, TEGNA’s Fox affiliate, WPMT (Channel 43), is now under the same ownership as Nexstar’s ABC affiliate, WHTM (Channel 27), leaving just two other newsrooms operating in the market.

In Buffalo, the deal combines the two biggest affiliate stations in town, TEGNA’s NBC WGRZ (Channel 2) and Nexstar’s CBS WIVB (Channel 4) and CW WNLO (Channel 23), and with no local news on Sinclair’s Fox station, that leaves only third-place ABC station WKBW (Channel 7) standing alone with news.

(The deal also brings Nexstar into Maine, where it gets the NBC affiliates in Portland and Bangor, WCSH and WLBZ, from TEGNA, with no change to the overall competitive balance in those markets.)

In its ruling, the FCC majority justifies the approval of the deal by citing a handful of “public interest” benefits, which seem to amount to giving the TEGNA stations access to Nexstar’s Washington newsroom and its digital platforms. Notably missing from its ruling is any consideration at all of the actual effect of bringing those once-competing newsrooms together – and so far, Nexstar hasn’t made any immediate moves to combine those newsrooms, presumably waiting at least a little bit to see if the lawsuits at the state level have any teeth.

We could dig further into the FCC’s logic, especially the utter inanity of the “39% market cap,” which in the real world allows a company like Nexstar to own stations covering 78% of US population because most of its stations operate on UHF RF channels that somehow still get treated as second-class facilities that are discounted against the cap even though it’s actually signals on VHF that are more difficult to receive these days.

But the reality in 2026 appears to be this: when a powerful company like Nexstar with deep ties to the current leadership in Washington wants to push through a deal like this, there’s very little in the way of actual antitrust or public-interest regulation that’s going to stop it – and so the real question was never going to be whether a deal like this was going to be approved, but rather which companies are next in line to try to test the current limits and craft even bigger TV (or radio) combinations.