Then one by one the newsies came aboard. NPR's ongoing dedication to news sets it apart from most of modern American radio. Commercial radio, which used to do a lot of news, doesn't any more. They were largely deregulated and they're no longer required to do public service programming, so they don't. They fired their news staffs.
News is very labor intensive.
It's expensive to do. They got rid of all those people and now they either take a syndicated service or they don't do anything at all. Most of them don't even give you headlines on the hour. It's bad for radio, but it's great for NPR because more people searching for news on the radio find us. Our audience has grown.