CBS News Radio's shutdown is already a business story; its afterlife is an archive story. Saturday's standard on CBS Radio's archive rescue problem treated the missing preservation plan as the load-bearing fact.

The May 8 predecessor said the shutdown clock still lacked an archive buyer or plan. ArchiveTeam now lists CBS News Radio as closing, with archiving status "Not saved yet," more than 3 million presumed-good URLs, and thousands of speculative URLs still to process before the May 22 shutdown. [1] The numbers are almost comic until the date is attached to them; then they become a triage list.

RadioInsight's closure account frames the loss through affiliates and the end of a network service. [2] Archive X frames it through survivability. Both are true, but only one has a deadline that can destroy evidence. Once the feed and its systems shut down, the culture story stops being about whether CBS owed listeners a farewell and becomes about whether anyone can still prove what the network sounded like.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin