Radio news traces its origins to KDKA's broadcast of the 1920 presidential election returns. The station announcer requested that listeners mail postcards to the station confirming that they had heard the broadcast. By 1930 NBC and CBS were simultaneously broadcasting Lowell Thomas and the News, sponsored by Literary Digest. The unusual simulcast, in which NBC broadcast the "program to the eastern half of the country and CBS to the western half, became solely the property of NBC within a year. Americans grew accustomed to turning on their radios for the latest news during the late 1930s. By the end of the decade, as social unrest increased in Europe, the voices of radio correspondents William L. Shirer, George Hicks, and Edward R. Murrow became as familiar as those of friends and neighbors. Radio was establishing itself as the leader in reporting events as they were occurring. In 1940 Americans told pollsters for the first time that they preferred radio to newspapers as their primary news source. Coverage of World War II cemented the relationship between radio and its audience across the United States as listeners followed the progress of American troops in Europe and the Pacific.

     With the end of World War II and the development of television, radio's role once again shifted. During the 1950s, radio's entertainment programming, including dramas and soap operas, moved steadily to television. Music gradually became the dominant form of programming on radio; at many stations, news was shifted to five minutes at the top of the hour.

     In the 1960s radio management took another look at news programming. The trade magazine Sponsor described radio at that time as the "new king of the news beat" and attributed its change in status to improvements in technology, increased numbers of experienced news reporters, and recognition that newsmakers were more important than newscasters. Four radio networks were providing regular newscasts to their affiliates: ABC, NBC, and Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) produced two newscasts hourly, and CBS, with 20 news bureaus worldwide, had nearly 50 correspondents contributing to their news programs.

     The first all-news radio format in the United States was used at KFAX in San Francisco on 16 May 1960. General manager J.G. Paltridge and sales manager Ray Rhodes called the new format "news radio." As was common at the time, KFAX (owned by Argonaut Broadcasting) sold advertisers announcements but no sponsorships of shows. Compared to today's heavy commercial schedule, spots were few, with one commercial per five minutes of news and also at station breaks. The first 25 minutes of an hour consisted of hard news followed by business news, sports, and special features. "Newsradio" died after four months due to its lack of advertisers.

     In 1961 Gordon Mclendon started the first commercially successful all-news radio station, X-TRA. Located in Tijuana, Mexico, it beamed its powerful signal across the border to southern California. A station promotional announcement trumpeted, "no waiting for hourly newscasts or skimpy headlines on X-TRA NEWS, the world's first and only all-news radio station. In the air everywhere over Los Angeles."

     Los Angeles broadcasters were critical of the Mexican stations identification with their city, as the only address announcers mentioned was that of the sales office in Los Angeles. The station's official on-air identification, required by law, was made in Spanish and followed by Mexican music and a description of Mexican tourist attractions. The Southern California Broadcasters Association called this an unethical attempt to camouflage a Mexican station as one located in Los Angeles.

     In the early days, X-TRA used "rip and read" reports (stories torn straight from wire service machines and read live on the air). The station was served by the Los Angeles City Wire Service, the Associated Press (AP), and United Press International (UPI). X-TRA also subscribed to a clipping service that provided stories from newspapers in all major U.S. cities and international capitals around the world. No one rewrote the wire copy, and there were no station reporters gathering news or conducting interviews. Newscasters alternated as anchors every 15 minutes, with a half hour in between to prepare for the next news stint. The content was somewhat repetitive, as programmers assumed that the audience would switch to a music station after hearing the most recent news. All newscasters read their copy with the sound (often recorded) of wire service teletype machines in the background, as a report in Sponsor magazine described it, "to suggest a newsroom setting."

     Mclendon brought the all-news format to WNUS (pro­nounced "W-news") in Chicago in 1964. He advised radio programmers considering the format not to attempt to enliven it with features and "actualities" (sound bites), suggesting that listeners wanted nothing but news. WINS, New York's first all­ news radio station, ignored that advice when it switched to round-the-clock news in 196 5. Owned by Westinghouse, WINS expanded the Mclendon design, emphasizing on-the­ scene reports and actualities. Fourteen newscasters, rotating in 30-minute shifts, anchored the newscasts. Mobile units provided live and taped reports from the five boroughs and the outskirts of the metropolitan area. A staff of more than 40 produced the news summaries, sports reports, financial news, and weather reports, plus time and traffic reports. They relied on wire service from AP and UPI and the resources of Westinghouse stations and news bureaus across the country and overseas. Despite the personnel-intensive expense of the operation, WINS started turning a profit six months into its all-news operation.

     In 1966 Broadcasting reported that all news was a viable, profitable choice for a programming format. There were then four U.S. stations concentrating on news: WINS (New York), KYW (Philadelphia), WNUS (Chicago), and WAVA (Arlington, Virginia), and the Mexican station X-TRA in Tijuana, which also had an audience in the United States. Despite reaching the profit-making point after nine months, WNUS never gained a dominant share of the market, so management changed its program format back to music in 1968. Westinghouse, however, went on to program all news in its stations in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

     CBS's flagship station in New York, WCBS, shifted to all news in 1967, but with its own innovations and significant financial support. WCBS used helicopters for traffic reports and its own weather forecasters. It had more reporters and produced more features than other all-news stations of the period, and it had access to the resources of the respected CBS network news. Among its reporters were Ed Bradley and Charles Osgood, who would make national names for themselves and eventually shift to television news. CBS brass liked the results, and all-news formats were put into place at other CBS owned-and-operated stations in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

     NBC broke into all-news radio in 1975, introducing News and Information Service (NIS), the first national all-news service. Subscribers paid as little as $750 or as much as $15,000, depending on their market size. Stations would pay for world and national news plus sports and features, all provided by NBC anchors in New York. They broadcast for 47 minutes out of every hour with the format constructed so that subscribers could take the whole 47 minutes or as little as 23 minutes of the hourly format. Unlike traditional affiliations in which a network paid its affiliates or traded commercial availability, NIS had to be purchased from NBC. With the network producing the majority of the programming, the all-news format looked financially feasible for medium and small markets for the first time.

     Despite the positive appearances, the all-news concept was not successful for NBC. After 18 months NBC had only 62 subscribers, significantly fewer than the projected 150 stations. Industry insiders suggested that the NBC network's unwillingness to commit its owned-and-operated stations contributed to the demise of NIS (only one adopted the all-news format). Audience numbers never reached expectations, resulting in disappointing advertising sales. All news was expensive to produce and simply was not bringing in the necessary income, so NIS went off the air two years after it began. Although it had cost $20 million, its impact on the future of all-news radio had been significant during its short life. After its demise, a number of other all-news stations continued, affiliating with other networks, including CBS. So NBC contributed to the all-news format's expansion from the top ten markets to the medium-sized markets, despite the failure of NIS.

     From NBC, CBS, and Westinghouse, three basic models developed for the all-news format, all based on the "format clock." A circle divided into pie-shaped slices indicates specific times during the hour on an analog clock. News, weather, traffic reports, and features are designated on the pie slices. Today's "weather on the fours" or "traffic on the eights" are segments that appear every four and eight minutes within each hour span, based on the traditional format clock.

     The Westinghouse model is based on a 20- to 22-minute cycle with short, crisp stories and repetition. This is generally a hard-news approach with headlines, weather, time checks, and traffic reports. For instance, Philadelphia's KYW is famous for announcing, "Give us 22 minutes and we'll give you the world." The CBS model tends to be more informal, with hard news, features, and commentary, having initially used dual anchors and less repetition to establish its format. NBC created a more impersonal sound with the NIS model because it was producing news for all areas of the country rather than tailored for a specific market.

    All news was one of the fastest growing formats in the 1970s, but the number of all-news stations started dropping in the r98os as the news format was combined with a less expensive format that was growing in popularity: talk. The number of news-talk stations increased as all news declined. By 1990 there were only 28 all-new stations in the United States.

     In 1994 the Associated Press started a 24-hour all-news radio network to serve news and news-talk stations. AP was already providing a newswire service to 5,000 radio stations and 750 TV stations. It also provided an audio network, AP Radio, that offered stations four brief news segments per hour. Industry insiders looked back 15 years to NBC's NIS and said that new technology and changes in the radio business made AP's network likely to succeed, predicting that it would reinvigorate local radio news.

     By 1995 the ubiquity of the all-news radio format was evident with the introduction of a new television sitcom, NBC's NewsRadio, set in an all-news radio station in Manhattan. Like previous sitcoms that had used the broadcast news business as a framework (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Murphy Brown), NewsRadio had little to do with news and much to do with workplace relationships. It was canceled after five seasons.

     The number of genuine news-radio operations in the United States grew dramatically to 836 all-news stations in 1999: 387 AM stations and 449 FM. Of these, 451 were commercial stations and 385 were noncommercial. In Canada there were 32 all-news stations: 15 AM, 17 FM (29 commercial, and three noncommercial).

     All-news formats are carefully designed for specific markets-what works in Atlanta may not be successful in Los Angeles or Minneapolis. Listening patterns, including how long a listener will stay with the station and how often, vary from market to market. The larger the population in a station's market, the more the station can afford to have frequent turnover in its audience. Small-market stations try to keep listeners for longer periods.

     Four decades after the introduction of all-news radio, it is a stable and profitable format. Advertisers are willing to pay all­ news stations top rates to reach the population segment that is attracted to news. In the United States, all-news listeners tend to be older (35-plus), better educated, and have more money than the average consumer. Because of the repetitive nature of the format, they stay with the station only a short time. But while they listen, they tend to give much closer attention to the broadcast than they give to music programming, and all-news stations tend to carry more commercials than music stations.

     Despite the increased attention to news overall-international, national, business and sports-some critics and listeners in the United States have expressed concern about the reduction in local news on radio. A number of stations, recognizing that local news continues to be a labor-intensive, expensive process, are finding it economically viable to reduce their local news content and increase reliance on news services that provide more lifestyle, sports, and entertainment news. As a result, some stations that identify themselves as news-radio stations depend on syndicated services and employ few, if any, reporters to gather news. Some even label talk-show programs featuring hosts such as Don Imus, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and Howard Stern as newscasts. Other types of non­ news broadcasts may also be mislabeled; for example, the magazine Smart Money warned its readers about "investment pros" who buy radio time to promote stocks and investment services but masquerade as business news.

    At the beginning of the 21st century there were more news resources available to U.S. radio stations than ever before. AP provides audio and text to almost 4,000 stations with a variety of program formats. National syndicator Westwood One distributes CBS Radio News, Fox News Radio, and NBC Radio Network; it also owns Shadow Broadcast Services and Metro Networks, which offer a variety of news options and traffic reports. ABC provides radio service to some 3,200 affiliates. Business news has become a hot commodity with Bloomberg Business News Network and CNBC Business Radio, among others. Sports news is provided by ESPN, which has 650 affiliates in its radio network. One historical news organization dropped out of the broadcast news business in 1999, however, when UPI (which started its newswire service for broadcast stations in 1958) sold its remaining radio and TV accounts to the Associated Press. The venerable news service announced that its future plans were to focus on internet-delivered news.

     By 2000 the popularity of all-news radio was spreading around the globe. Canada's largest cable company, Rogers Communications, switched its country music station in Vancouver to all news in early 1996. A spokesman described the company as "fully committed" to the format. Scandinavia's first all-news operation started in Norway in 1997. Alltid Nyheter (Always News) was begun by a Norwegian public service station, NRK. In addition to news gathered by its own staff, Alltid Nyheter uses material from CNN, Swedish Radio, Danish Radio, and BBC World Service. In France, the main all-news radio station is France-Info. After ten years without an all-news station, Montreal's 940 News (English language) and Info690 (French) went on the air in December 1999. Que­bec's Metromedia radio chain plans to invest $40 million in the first five years of these stations' operation. In England, listeners can tune in news from NewsDirect, London's all-news radio station.

     Despite the variety of news sources available (newspapers, the internet, all-news cable networks, and local television), all­ news radio continues to build a loyal following of listeners in the United States and abroad. Working people once got their news from television at home in the evening, but today's professionals often work longer hours. They listen to the news when it's most convenient-on the radio as they drive to and from work.