An Aural Companion for Decades, CBS News Radio Crackles to a Close | Hacker News Reader

An Aural Companion for Decades, CBS News Radio Crackles to a Close

nytimes.com

78 pointstintinnabula21 comments

Very sad. Radio is still the medium that can bring news the fastest. I start and end the day with news radio, and listen to music radio in the middle.

Radio is very useful during natural disasters. When you're sitting for hours (days) without power, internet, etc, listening to the radio can be the only connection to the outside world.

My dad managed some key school district functions across the Mojave desert and we had a little place near US-395 from which we could go fishing, hiking, or travel to go skiing. CBS News radio on was our constant companion across long roadtrips across the entire west, even when casettes and CDs abounded.

News would keep us informed and Mystery Theater would keep us entertained on the drive back home, exhausted, on Sunday evenings.

He's old now, but drove to Wyoming to fish last year from southern California. He said the fishing wasn't any good when he got there, so he turned around and came home before the next day dawned. I wonder what he will listen to this Spring.

They better start dancing and distill their news into 10” video chunks. This is how we consume news today.

Maybe split screen viewing where 1/2 is an ai cat pineapple hybrid with large anime eyes, and the other half is an AI instagram baddie that is tugging on her thong while telling me about Iran?

the thong baddie is a no go because your audience has people of different genders as well as kids in a country with majority of extreme religious people

replace it with realtime betting by the viewers (on news or on some game video)

and cat hybrid can be telling the news.

I really do hope this is sarcasm!

Nothing like saving couch change to remove a service some people relied upon. I tend to think this will harm rural areas instead of urban areas. This is not the first time a service like this was ended. I believe these "low tech" services will be missed at some point.

I remember one service, a weather service that many private fishermen used was ended last year I think. Now they go without or they may need to subscribe to an expensive satellite service that is probably worse than the one that ended.

I thought you meant the British Shipping Forecast, which for some reason I thought stopped a few years back, but apparently it’s still a thing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_Forecast

There is a larger pattern here worth noting: old tech atrophies in the presence of new tech. For example, stores that stop taking cash. Books that stop publishing on paper. Music that has no physical media distribution. The problem is that the conditions of the new tech are almost always far more fragile and centralized (!) than the old tech.

Broadcast radio and TV is (and newspaper, and telephone lines) are, ironically, a more resilient and distributed form of information distribution than the internet in many ways. The internet itself becomes the bottleneck; the power-law distributed control becomes the bottleneck; the devices (and all their security and psychological downsides) become terrible yet indispensable.

For every middle manager gung ho to replace paper with an iPad and an app, I say: find something else to do with your time. You're making the world actively worse.