Comment by dredmorbius
4 months ago
The flagship big-city / large-state stations will very likely continue to function. The real hit for this action will be in rural regions where alternatives to the local NPR translator station are typically religious stations, right-wing talk, and increasingly Spanish-language programming.
If you've access to streaming media, podcasts, or shortwave, you still do have options.
There are several excellent national broadcasters, with the CBC, BBC, and ABC (Australia) operating in English, or a reasonable facsimile. There are often English-language broadcasts from non-anglophone countries, including France (France-24) and Germany (Deutsche-Welle English service), off the top of my head.
Of course, these will get you international news (and occasionally national stories from the broadcaster's home state), but you're straight outta luck for journalism local to your area. OTOH, NPR and PBS have struggled to deliver that (as has commercial news media) for the past decade or two.
If you've always wanted to learn a foreign language but never quite had the inspiration to do so, a further option is to start listening to non-anglophone country's native programming, whether broadcast (shortwave or Internet streaming) or podcast. There are many excellent options. I'm particularly fond of German radio's programming (Deutschlandfunk and its variants, the federated public broadcasting model might offer some lessons and learnings to PBS and NPR going forward), though there are others on top of that.
I round things out with text-based news, typically major newspapers (e.g., NYTimes, Guardian), or newswires (Reuters is pretty good).
But yes, the state of streaming / OTA / linear-programmed news media in the US is absolutely abysmal.
That's nice, but I'm not looking for news - I already get that from better sources than NPR. I'm looking for good, thoughtful, engaging content.
Much of what I'm describing is in fact non-news content, which I find far more durable information than expiring-on-contact news.
Philosophy, history, issues and ideas, language instruction, narrative, amongst others.
Again, podcasts and streaming expand your universe markedly.
That said, terrestrial radio still has its place, which is depicted well in WNYC's "Divided Dial" series:
<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>
Also, to clarify, my point about non-native sources affording very limited news coverage local to you is salient in that the death of local news services (public, non-profit, or commercial) inevitably leads to opaqueness particularly as to local government, business, and other matters. It's a real loss, and deserves pointing out, however obvious it may be.