"Bang, Bang, Bang"   

Whether it's on your favorite top-40 station or NPR, radio news is a much faster-paced affair than it was in the past.

Radio news sure doesn't sound like it used to.

Twenty-five years ago, every station did news. Every station had to, if it wanted its FCC license renewed. Listeners knew when the news came on, because the regular programming stopped, and the sound of the voice changed. News delivery was formal, serious. Just like the stories. You didn't have to go looking for the news by switching away from your favorite music station. The news came to you, for three to five minutes at the top and bottom of the hour in morning and afternoon drive, and at noon, on small- and medium-market stations especially, for a good 10 to 15 minutes.

Those days are gone. These days, what's considered news on a music station could be a country star's visit to Moscow or the latest in the life of a sports hero, information delivered by a disc jockey speaking in chatty bullet points. Even if an anchor delivers what sounds like a local newscast, she could be hundreds or thousands of miles away, and her newscast no longer than a brisk 60 seconds. Only on an all-news or news/talk station are you likely to find a network newscast, and they sound different, too. Faster. Shorter stories. Lots of actualities, or sound bites, of only a few words each.

Of course, it all sounds a lot better. In the old days, a network feed sounded sort of hollow, since, after all, it came over copper telephone wires. And you could tell overseas correspondents were really, really far away. Now, the voices in a newscast are clear, thanks to digital technology. You no longer have to strain to understand what they're saying.

Ask the survivors, the guys who run the big network and local news operations (and most of them are guys), to name the most significant changes that have affected radio news over the last quarter century, and they generally cite three: the evolution of computers and satellite technology; the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which got rid of the cap on how many stations a company could own nationwide and raised the number one could own in a single market; and deregulation by the Federal Communications Commission, which in the early 1980s scrapped the requirement that stations had to air a certain amount of news and public affairs programming.

The news requirement disappeared when the FM dial was burgeoning with music stations. Spurred by the success of what had begun as "underground" rock stations in the late '60s and early '70s, the radio marketplace became increasingly competitive. To attract specific audiences, stations began to narrow their playlists, giving birth to niche programming. To save money, many station owners trimmed their news staffs; others got rid of them completely.

"It was at that time [in the late '70s] where we tried to focus on how to get news on these kinds of radio stations, because in fact program directors, and many to this day, do not believe that there should be news on their music radio stations," says Harvey Nagler, vice president, CBS News, Radio, who was then managing editor at RKO Radio Networks.

"We tried--very successfully, with over 500 radio stations--to convince them that news did deserve a place on their stations," Nagler says. "We tried to keep the news to a format, to a style that fit in with the presentation on their music radio station. And the delivery, even on all-news and news/talk, was more conversational. Twenty-five years ago and before, it was this booming radio voice that you heard coming out of the radio."

Nagler credits RKO with leading the way on another enormous change. In the late '70s, "the definition of news was more, 'What did the New York Times print?' and, 'What's going on in Washington?' " It became, he says, " 'What are people talking about, what's of interest to people, and what affects them?' "

So to stay in the radio business, the networks expanded their offerings under a broadened definition of news. Today, organizations such as CBS, ABC and the Associated Press all offer extensive menus of "information programming" for every type of format. Chris Berry, vice president, radio, ABC News, likens it to the varieties of Coke. "You may not actually hear [an] ABC News [broadcast] on the radio station," he says. Instead, the station will use snippets of ABC information but without attribution. "We provide them with national and international content." That often includes plenty of entertainment, sports and consumer-related items.

The AP, which 25 years ago offered radio stations one standard news report, now gives stations the ability to tailor the type of news they receive, says Brad Kalbfeld, deputy director and managing editor of AP Broadcast.

"The total amount of information on the radio has not changed. The form in which it is delivered has," says Kalbfeld. "If they don't do a formal newscast, the perception is they don't do news," he continues. But traffic, weather, even an ad for a sale at the local grocery store, "is local information to me, the listener."

In the late '70s, FM began scooping up radio listeners, increasing its share from about 50 percent in 1978 to about 80 percent today, according to Tony Sanders, senior analyst for Inside Radio, which covers the commercial radio industry. (Inside Radio is a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, owner of more radio stations than any other company. Until recently, Sanders held the same job with Duncan's American Radio.)

So AM had to find a way to keep an audience. The result, Sanders says, "was an absolute explosion in talk-based programming on AM radio."

Citing statistics from the Broadcasting & Cable Yearbooks, Sanders says there were 316 commercial news or talk stations in 1977, at a time when news/talk had not yet emerged as a format. By 2000, he says, 1,056 commercial stations offered news/talk programming, and 658 aired talk, nearly all of them on AM. Surprisingly, all-news is now more commonly found on FM than AM and more likely to be on a noncommercial than commercial station. Concurrent with that shift is a nearly four-fold increase in the number of NPR member stations since 1977.

Radio news has become a lucrative business. Atlanta's WSB, Chicago's WGN and WBBM, New York's WINS and WCBS, and Los Angeles' KNX are in Duncan's list of the country's 30 highest-billing stations, those that take in the most money from advertising. The stations in that class, news powerhouses, are almost the only ones, besides public radio stations, that send reporters out to gather local news anymore.

And even they aren't doing what they used to. Because of technology, which makes it possible to do the job with fewer people, and economic pressures on stations to be more profitable, the staff at WGN is half the size it was 25 years ago, says News Director Tom Petersen. "Our primary mission is to cover the news of the day," says Petersen, who has been with the Tribune Co.-owned station for two decades. "But if there was something I wish we could do, that would be spending more time on serious investigations and series," like the station used to. The reduction is "probably a result of having fewer people."

Other newscasts that sound like they're being delivered locally may not be anymore. Computer technology allows station groups to use a skeleton staff to deliver news to a large number of stations. And satellite technology has helped spawn a competitor to the AP. Metro Networks, a company that began by offering traffic reports more than 20 years ago, provides a wire service, newscasts and sound bites to about 1,200 stations. (AP serves about 4,500 stations.)

Metro has more than 70 bureaus covering primarily what it calls breaking news, which is often something like a press conference at a hospital, says Bill Yeager, senior vice president of the news division. In New York City, it might be a story about the mayor, because Metro has a City Hall bureau there. Reporters feed everything to the main operation in Phoenix, where it gets edited and distributed, with the intent that it sound to the listener as if the newscaster works at their local station.

With Metro, a station has no need for its own news department. Of the 650 or so journalists Metro has hired in the last five-and-a-half years, Yeager says, a number have come from radio stations that decided to get rid of their news people and "outsource" to Metro.

Some blame it on MTV editing, others on the need to keep people listening. Whatever the cause, the fact is that even traditional newscasts on commercial radio have been tightened to the point where you can sometimes hear the anchor step on the last word of a correspondent's report. "Bang, bang, bang," is how Susan Stamberg of NPR, where the delivery is somnolent by comparison, describes the overall effect.

Network newscasts on news-intensive stations can still run as long as five minutes, but three minutes is more common. Music stations that run Metro's newscasts usually choose what Yeager calls the "one breath" stories--five to seven stories delivered rapid-fire in one minute. "If it takes more than one breath to deliver the story," he says, "it's too long."

Shrinking story length is something veteran reporters lament. "If there's one thing that's markedly different, it's the increasing brevity of items and actualities and reporters' spots, or reports," says ABC News' Sam Donaldson, who worked for WTOP radio and television when he arrived in Washington, D.C., more than 40 years ago and now hosts a daily radio talk show.

His network colleague White House correspondent Ann Compton recalls her stories being limited to 42 seconds in the early '70s. "Now, it is rare that I file a complete voice report longer than 30 seconds," she says.

"You get some sense but you get no detail," says Donaldson. "We are properly accused of lack of depth." On the other hand, he says, back in the day, "stories would go on and on. Sometimes it would be almost no actualities.... It was dull compared to today."

Though actualities have shrunk in the last 25 years--from an average of about 25 seconds to 12 seconds--there are more of them per story now. "I think that does enhance some understanding," Donaldson says.

And everyone mentions another positive--the increased use of "nat sound," the natural background noise that can bring a story to life.

Nowhere on radio is nat sound used more creatively than on NPR. Stamberg and Bob Edwards were among the many hosts and correspondents there who in the '70s helped invent its trademark long-form storytelling. One of its foundations is what Stamberg, now a special correspondent, describes as a "rich use of ambient sound, so you feel you're standing there, with the sounds of the people. The sound should be as good as getting you to smell it." Another is depth. When she hosted "All Things Considered" from 1972 to 1986, Stamberg says, the goal was to produce a news program so comprehensive that "if you missed your newspaper that day, we'd tell you what you needed to know. And the paper was the New York Times."

In the minds of some listeners, apparently, they succeeded. According to NPR's surveys, Stamberg says, the network that used to be a broadcast alternative is now a primary source of news for a significant portion of the 17 million listeners who tune in weekly to its newsmagazine shows.

Bob Edwards, who has hosted "Morning Edition" since it launched 23 years ago this month, links NPR's growth in news audience directly to the changes in commercial radio news. "They're doing top-of-the-hour headlines," he says. "Commercial broadcasting has kind of abandoned news and left it to us, and we've filled the vacuum." He acknowledges the "real good job" on local coverage done by the few major-market all-news and news/talk stations.

But NPR news sounds different, too. Stamberg, after a break of 16 years from hosting "All Things Considered," filled in for two weeks this past summer. She says she was struck by how much more breaking news the show covers. "CNN has really driven the agenda," she says.

What's endured most is the idealism. Says Jay Kernis, NPR's senior vice president for programming, "We suffer the delusion that if people listen to this stuff on public radio, they will be better citizens, they will ask better questions, vote more, participate more."

It's that connection to listeners that enables radio to endure. And it's what keeps a dedicated corps of radio journalists in the business, whether they are still on the air or have left the microphone for the executive suite. Despite shorter stories, lighter topics, fewer newscasts, smaller news departments (and fewer of them), the ever-shrinking amount of locally produced news--radio is still radio, a voice coming out of a portable box. News delivered on the radio is immediate. And it's intimate. That's why the idealists stick around.

"There is a bond between the listener and the station nobody can break," says AP's Brad Kalbfeld. The magic of radio? He nods. "It's a cliché, but it's true."