Chicago may be one of America’s great jazz cities, but WBEZ, the National Public Radio member station there, will drop its scheduled music programming, most of it nightly jazz, and adopt a 24-hour news and public affairs format next year, Reuters reported. With competition for music fans from downloadable music and streaming Webcasts, and in the face of consolidation in the commercial news media, many independent radio stations say their programming has not kept pace with a changing population. Ken Stern, the executive vice president of National Public Radio, said: “Local news has simply been abandoned by the commercial broadcasters and sometimes even the commercial newspapers. What you see as a trend is stations like WBEZ investing heavily in local news and information.” (reposted from the New York Times)
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