All-news radio

Lore & Background

In 1960, KJBS in San Francisco became KFAX and trialed a 'newspaper of the air' format, but the experiment proved unsuccessful. Broadcasting pioneer Arthur W. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy, so those events did not drive its initial success. Radio programmer Gordon McLendon, a pioneer of top 40, all-sports, beautiful music, and telephone talk formats, is also acknowledged as a pioneer in all-news. Fred B.

Reader's Guide

All-news radio has been a top-rated format in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities, but as big-city traffic worsens and people work longer hours, the focus has increasingly turned to traffic and weather, updated every 10 minutes. The format typically starts each half-hour with world and national news from a national network, then switches to locally anchored area news, filling out the half-hour with updates on weather, sports, business, and features. Attempts at long-form commercial all-news stations, such as Washington Post Radio, have been largely unsuccessful.

Did You Know?

• Gordon McLendon, a pioneer of top 40 and all-sports formats, is also acknowledged as a pioneer in all-news radio.

Origins and the Road to 24-Hour News

The company's sales director, Nitoy Escano, reportedly doubted the audience was sufficiently news-conscious at the time. In the United States, the first serious trial came in 1960 when San Francisco's KJBS rebranded as KFAX and shifted from a mixed music-news-sports schedule to what it called a "newspaper of the air." That experiment failed. Arundel launched the first 24-hour all-news station on WAVA in Washington, D.C. The capital's audience, gripped by Vietnam War coverage and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. King, and Senator Kennedy, embraced the format. These stations established a half-hour structure: national headlines from wire services, followed by local news, weather, sports, and business updates, all cycled every fifteen minutes.

The Westinghouse Blueprint

While early all-news stations relied heavily on wire-service copy and a rigid fifteen-minute newscast loop, Westinghouse's Group W division developed a more flexible operational model that would become the industry standard. Its stations adopted a twenty-minute cycle that deliberately avoided network newscasts, allowing editors to freely intermingle local and non-local stories based on whatever seemed most newsworthy on any given day. Crucially, Group W deployed field reporters rather than depending solely on AP and UPI feeds. Fred B. Walters, who served as KYW's first executive editor, personally edited the station's inaugural all-news broadcast and played a central role in building its newsroom operations. Under his leadership, KYW achieved a distinction no other all-news station had: it became the first to top the ratings in a major American market. The Walters model at KYW was subsequently replicated at stations across the country, cementing the template that still defines the format today.

Network-Level Ambitions and the Fox Era

The all-news format has repeatedly drawn the attention of major networks seeking to build coast-to-coast radio news services. Despite strong ratings in some markets, NBC folded the operation just two years later in a cost-cutting decision. Sixty stations launched the service, and a partnership with Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) allowed many of its stations to carry Fox newscasts, prompting several to sever decades-long ties with ABC News Radio and CBS Radio News. Fox also produces Fox News Talk, featuring its on-air personalities on terrestrial stations and a dedicated satellite channel.

Beyond the Label: The Spectrum of News Radio

Not every station that carries the word "news" in its branding truly operates as an all-news outlet. Many stations call themselves "Newsradio" yet confine their news programming to morning and afternoon drive hours, while the rest of their schedule consists of talk shows punctuated by frequent news updates. These are more accurately classified as news/talk stations. Similarly, a number of National Public Radio affiliates identify as "News and Information" stations, meaning they air the network's flagship magazines such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered alongside a broader slate of public affairs and informational programming. True all-news radio, by contrast, is devoted entirely to news discussion and broadcast around the clock. The format spans a wide spectrum: some stations simply simulcast an all-news television channel like CNN, others operate as a "rip and read" headline service, and still others provide live coverage of breaking events combined with long-form public affairs programming. All-news radio is available in both local and syndicated configurations and is carried on both major U.S. satellite radio networks. The format also found temporary expression during newspaper strikes, as when WABC-FM in New York and WXYZ-FM in Detroit filled the void left by shuttered print outlets in the early 1960s, carrying ABC Radio Network programs, local newscasts, and wire-service stories before reverting to their regular formats once the strikes ended.