Radio Content Analysis

It was in the headline summaries at the top of the hour that the local radio we monitored offered the bulk of what people might traditionally consider the news. All the stations offered headline summaries, and all the summaries were brief. Segments were usually under a minute and often less than 30 seconds, too brief to include much in the way of context or connection to listeners.

When it came to the level of reporting and sourcing, especially for national news, there was some variation. The national stories provided by network feeds (including public radio feeds) offered listeners slightly longer reports. They also tended to have either correspondents reporting or soundbites from at least one source, but they did not often feature both.

KBND’s 5 p.m. hour, for example, kicked off with national news from CBS, covering nine stories in four minutes. Three of the nine were reports from network correspondents, but only one included any soundbites or sound actualities from newsmakers themselves. Two of the stories read by the network anchor also included at least one soundbite from a newsmaker.

There does appear to be a trade-off. Stations that handled news summaries locally rather than getting them from a national network news operation tended to be more local in focus. But they also tended to be even more cursory.

In Houston , for instance, KSEV’s morning show covered both the national and local headlines in its minute-and-a-half news roundup, but none of the reports featured a correspondent or any soundbites at all. The news summary amounted to a local anchor reading wires.

KSEV Morning News: Top Headlines

The station that stood out for offering listeners the richest local news reporting at the top of the hour was the public radio station in Kenosha , Wis. , WGTD. Following NPR headlines at the top of the 8:00 a.m. hour, the station covered six local stories, each over a minute long and with multiple sources. And three of them were reported by a correspondent on the scene. A report on the discovery of uncounted ballots, for instance, featured a local correspondent and quoted reaction from both a Republican and a Democratic state representative. The entire piece was under a minute and half. Among the stories monitored on May 11, that one was unusual.

Another effect of the reliance on headline summaries was that most stories made almost no attempt to offer listeners much context, explore different elements or try to make any sense of how stories might affect them. Looking at stories that were less than 45 seconds (a subset that includes most headline coverage but removes the longer talk segments), more than 80% offered none of the contextual elements for which we measured.