CBS News Radio Is Shuttering After Nearly 100 Years

After nearly 100 years of operation, CBS News Radio will air its final broadcast this May. The shuttering of CBS’s terrestrial radio division comes as part of a new round of layoffs at CBS News under its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss. Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski announced in a memo on Friday that 60 employees — 6 percent of the entire news team — will be laid off in the coming months, the New York Times reports. This round of layoffs comes months after 100 jobs were eliminated at CBS News in October, following CEO David Ellison’s acquisition of CBS’s parent company, Paramount. In the memo, Weiss and Cibrowski wrote, “It’s no secret that the news business is changing radically, and that we need to change along with it.”

CBS Radio has played a major role in American mass-media history ever since it was founded in 1927 (and renamed Columbia Broadcasting System the following year). It’s the network where Orson Welles performed his infamous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast and where Edward R. Murrow reported on World War II, before spinning off into television in the 1940s. Today, CBS News Radio still provides content to an estimated 700 stations nationwide. CBS will end its news-radio service on May 22.