Radio Content Analysis

Instead, what we found in local radio news was a medium heavily “formatted,” where everything was fit into a predictable and highly promotable pattern that was easy for listeners to remember. Yet that format tended to shallow-out the reporting on radio, and emphasize what cost less for stations to produce.

Across all the stations we studied in all three cities, the format on local radio was dominated by four elements: headlines, traffic, weather, and talk.

Only one station studied, KBND in Oregon , had a program we monitored that did not feature talk. Both its 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. hours cycled through national headlines from the CBS news desk, local headlines, sports, weather and traffic and business news — and then repeated.

The amount of talk versus news varied with the time of day. On Houston ’s KTRH, the 6 a.m. drive time “Lana Hughes and J.P. Pritchard Show” was almost all headlines, traffic and weather. The one longer news segment was a one-minute, 38-second read on a Texas tax bill, with one sound “actualities” from a senator but no reporter at a news scene. The hosts were reading wires. No other story item during the hour ran even a minute long.

In the afternoon on KTRH, however, the “Deborah Duncan Show” was all about talk. After a brief headline summary, Duncan spent most of her time taking listener call-ins. The topic was divorce — everything from being surprised by emotions to what no-fault divorce means in court to protecting children from negative effects.