Talk and News Radio

Richard Landesberg

Talk radio and news radio are two once-distinct program formats that have morphed into a single format at many stations. Yet leading industry publications do not measure the two formats separately. As a combined entity, news/talk is measured by Inside Radio as the second most popular radio genre, with more than 2,000 stations identified as programming news/talk out of the nation's almost 14,000 radio stations. The radio rating service, Arbitron, breaks the category down into all news, sports talk, news talk, and personality talk. When all of those are combined, news/talk/information stations enjoy more listeners than any other format. So-called news/talk stations generally have a far heavier emphasis on talk. On the other hand, an all-news station, as its name suggests, is often exclusively news. A modern news/talk radio station might have a good deal of news and weather, as well as a heavy emphasis on traffic reports during the ...

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