CBS News Radio now has a farewell segment. It still does not have a public archive answer. The paper's May 11 brief on the sign-off countdown said preservation was the open question. CBS has changed the first half of that sentence, not the second.

CBS posted Mo Rocca's tribute to the radio service, calling it a beacon of broadcast journalism founded nearly a century ago and naming Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout and Charles Osgood as part of the lineage. The segment says CBS will end the radio service on May 22. [1]

Newsweek's March account of the shutdown said Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski told staff the service had become impossible to continue because of shifting station programming strategies and economic realities. It also reported that roughly 6 percent of CBS News staff were laid off and that the network affected about 700 stations. [2]

The numbers make the tribute insufficient on its own. A network that began in 1927 and fed hundreds of affiliates is not only a set of jobs or a nostalgic brand. It is a record of how broadcast journalism sounded before streaming made audio feel disposable. [2]

The divergence is sentimental versus institutional. The tribute supplies memory. The unanswered issue is custody: who preserves the recordings, rights and affiliate history after the microphone goes dark.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York